It won’t be a bullet

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

Danez Smith’s poetry often deals with issues surrounding race, identity, and being gay. In an interview with The Guardian, Smith says their use of they/them pronouns is appropriate because they are speaking up not only for themself but for members of their community. “They” is both gender-neutral and signifies plurality.

They came to prominence during a time of political and social turmoil in America—a crumbling economy, increased gun violence, and greater recognition of police violence toward African Americans, specifically men. America was debating issues of gender fluidity, and gay and transgender people continued to battle for civil rights. On August 9, 2014, police in Ferguson, Missouri fatally shot Michael Brown, Jr., bringing national attention to how police often execute unarmed Black people and walk away. Over the years, more police murders continued to spark awareness of injustice, calls for police reform, and protests against police violence. Many in the African American community spoke out about the brutality they routinely face.

Camera phones and sometimes police body-cam footage played a large part in exposing the reality behind the large number of fatal police incidents in the US against racial minorities. While the Ferguson shooting was notable, it was part of an ongoing continuum of racial inequity at the hands of police (police shootings are by no means the only way Black men can fall victim to America’s high level of gun violence, and Smith’s poem addresses this to some extent). By the time of Don’t Call Us Dead’s 2017 publication, the Trump Administration’s Justice Department had begun to shut down efforts to reform precincts in cities with the most egregious patterns of racial targeting.

Another issue increasingly coming to the forefront, among younger people in particular, was that of gender fluidity. American culture had evolved considerably in its acceptance of gay people following the landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision legalizing the right to marry. Efforts to legally discriminate against gay people were losing favor, so many of those spearheading these projects turned their attention to transsexual people, spreading fears of bathroom molestations and unfair sports competition by gender switching. At the same time, schools throughout the US were adapting to the younger generation’s growing consciousness for non-binary recognition and against the targeted bullying this consciousness can elicit. Television shows like Transparent and Orange Is the New Black openly addressed the lives of transgender individuals.

Artists were vocal in response to these incidents, in solidarity to the protest movements, and in addressing historical inequities, and also by creating more opportunities for historically underrepresented poets to speak up. While society struggled with many upheavals, social and political, poetry came to greater prominence. The 2000s began a “Golden Age” of poetry.

Advances in technology and social media democratized artists’ means to create and share art and ideas. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter allow artists to write and self-publish and share poetry in a way that they could not have done before. Poetry specifically saw increasing attention because, unlike a novel or a full-length movie, poetry can react to current events in real time and be easily shared in a post or tweet. Leah Asmelash, in an article posted on CNN: Champions for Change, notes that poetry is also particularly useful for interrogating complicated issues of identity that do not have strict “answers.”

Another advantage of using social media to publish or share poetry is that it allows anyone the opportunity to post their writing and showcase it to a wider audience. Poets no longer need to have the approval or patronage of a publishing house in order to produce and distribute their writing. This has led to a greater variety of opportunities for people to become famous as poets, even without getting the approval of institutions. This has subsequently allowed poets who may not “fit” into institutions to publish their work and gain popularity on their own. A good example of this phenomena is Rupi Kaur, a young woman from Canada who first published her poetry on Instagram and then later collected her short poems and drawings into a book published in 2017. Kaur is now a well-known poet with a large following.

With the advent of the new wave of self-published poets came backlash from the established literary community. Some considered the work of self-published poets to be too simple and superficial, lacking the grounding in craft that many more “academic” poets had achieved in generations past.

Authorial Context

Not all poets who came to prominence during the early 2000s did so without institutional backing or without getting a grounding in academic studies. Smith said in an interview that for a few years in their early career they avoided studying in an institution because they felt a negative attitude toward performance poets and non-academic poets. They were content to be a “performance” poet, until a mentor asked, “Do you want your poems to be good after you’re dead?” That shook them, and Smith proceeded to study more craft and shift their attention to poetry that could hold its own on the page.

Smith became a poet who earned critical acclaim and received the backing of established and burgeoning poetry institutions, while continuing to write poems that speak to the concerns of everyday people, specifically young, urban populations. Many of their poems dwell on issues of social justice and injustice. Smith uses humor and pop culture references to explore issues, making their poems often funny and biting at turns. If their poems don’t directly critique the injustice that Smith witnesses, they often postulate alternatives that the speaker of the poems would wish to see, envisioning a better world.

Some have labeled Smith a “slam poet” because so much of their work is rooted in theater, and they perform their writing for an audience. Others have termed their work Afrofuturist, a genre of writing that combines African American history with science fiction and speculative fiction. A good example of Afrofuturism is Smith’s poem “dear white america,” in which the speaker postulates a planet where African Americans can escape to in order to find a place free of the complications of racism and oppression. One of their most famous poems, “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” which was published in their chapbook “Black Movie,” describes a hypothetical film in which a young Black boy plays with a dinosaur in their urban neighborhood.

Smith also plays with tropes about the way Black people are portrayed in movies. Smith writes, “No bullets in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy” (“Dinosaurs in the Hood” [Line 32])—a direct contradiction to the movie cliché that “Black people die first.” Smith postulates a different reality they would like to see and shows their reader the changes they want to enact in the world. Looking at the expanse of Smith’s work, it is safe to say that it defies easy categorization, but it does tend to dwell on issues of identity, ethnicity and community, challenging stereotypes, and calling for a better world. Other Afrofuturist poets include Tracy K. Smith, Ishmael Reed, and Krista Franklin.

Smith wrote Don’t Call Us Dead shortly after receiving their HIV diagnosis. This book deals specifically with issues of mortality and the danger they faced from being both an African American man and a gay man living with an incurable disease. Although the protease inhibitor drug cocktail released in 1995 allows HIV positive individuals to live relatively healthy lives, the diagnosis still made Smith experience their mortality in a new way, which they affirmed in an interview (Chicago Humanities). The book was personal, as the speaker dealt with their own feelings about death, but it was also political in that it dealt with issues that affected so many in Smith’s community. In their interview with The Guardian, they said that only cisgender white men really get to explore individuality. Everyone else gains strength by being part of a community. They say they were influenced by poets Jericho Brown, D. A. Powell, both gay-identifying African American poets, and Timothy Liu’s book Don’t Go Back to Sleep.