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I couldn't but help think of the first time I laid eyes on my son. I remembered my reaction to his distorted little face and how I made him cry. I would have given anything to take back that look. That face seemed so adorable now. My first look and my last look at Emmett would be forever fused in my mind.
-Mamie Till-Mobley, Death of Innocence
A 1981 poem by the African American writer and activist Audre Lorde begins by evoking the persistent presence of a forceful and depriving vision:
However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyes rockstrewn caves
where dragonfish evolve
wild for life relentless and acquisitive
learning to survive
where there is no food
my eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains.
(Undersong 186)
Entitled "Afterimages," Lorde's poem charts the intrusive and insistent impact of this nameless, painful image. It is by putting this visually experienced force into words that Lorde comes to understand the source of her hunger and her pain. Two scenes emerge: "A white woman stands bereftand empty / a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson." This latter image, Lorde writes, is "recalled in me forever / a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep / etched into my vision." The boy whose image is engraved upon the writer's psyche is Emmett Till, who was lynched by white men when he was fourteen years old. His is one of the "fused images beneath my pain" (186). Lorde goes on to recall that in 1955 she saw images of Till's body on "each corner's photography" and averted her eyes (188). In the years following she did not see the images distinctly but rather felt their impact in the form of inexplicable psychic pain.
Lorde talks about carrying the painful visual traces of Till's body silently inside her for twenty-four years, until she saw another seemingly unrelated scene that spurred her to write. Watching a television news report on the flooding of the Pearl River in Mississippi in 1979, Lorde sees a white woman survivor of the flood surrounded by her frightened children, talking to a reporter about the losses she and her family had just experienced. The woman's husband...