PRESENCE//Gifted
On Poetry, Antiracism, and Epistemic Violence in Health Promotion
Health Promotion Practice (2023)
“If we keep wearing
these masks
you might not make it.
Entendeu?
We cannot speak beneath
this burden and be heard –
awaiting the sting of elastic
dreams snapping
behind our ears,
biased blades of triage
upon our throats.”
Abstract
Through poetry, I offer a critical reflection on the racialized contexts, consequences, and (mis)representations of overlapping pandemics—COVID-19 and structural racism—crafted as counternarrative to public health’s and medicine’s ahistorical, apolitical, and racist proclivities in times of crises (e.g., plague, 1918 flu, HIV/AIDS, addiction, racialized police violence). I weave public health and medical concepts together with Black music, poetry, scholarship, and history to (re)frame/analyze interconnections between COVID-19 and structural racism—centering love, resistance, and solidarity to counter Black erasure within the public health knowledge canon. I contextualize the poem/use of poetry as praxis in public health antiracism discourse through a brief essay, drawing from critical, critical race, and Black feminist theory to position poetry as a space of health equity testimony, and a mode of antiracist praxis to reclaim/center the margin as site of knowing and resistance. Specifically, I discuss testimonial quieting, testimonial smothering, and testimonial incompetence as critical concepts for health promotion scholars, practitioners, and students to engage as germane to interrogating our present knowledge production norms in regards to epistemic violence and its implications for prospects of antiracist public health futures. In doing so, I suggest that poetry can play a critical role in challenging, opening up, and reimagining discourse of antiracism for advancing health equity knowledge and action.
PRESENCE// Gifted
Quem é você?
O que você quer de nos?
Nosso sonhos?
Nossa magia e alegria?
If we keep wearing
these masks
you might not make it.
Entendeu?
We cannot speak beneath
this burden and be heard –
awaiting the sting of elastic
dreams snapping
behind our ears,
biased blades of triage
upon our throats.
Our words
are much too sharp
for sympathy, much too weathered
to be paired with platitudes
and promises
moving
ear to ear
panning
to the rhythm
of our respiration
cutting out
apologies, sewing them
into makeshift scarves
to wrap around
the necks of models
predicting our demise –
you can bury them
with the others.
Você lembra?
When Onesimus shared our knowledge;
when DuBois charted our resistance and created hot joints of illustration;
when Ida recovered our fruit;
when Langston called your shit
and Nina sang his blues…
I saw you there –
thumb prints pressing
the edges of history, shaking
Polaroids to her vibrato.
You knew then
what the world
knows now:
we make futures.
Então, o que você quer? A salvação?
We've been here
for hours, waiting
to be seen.
De nada.