A Ligature for Black Bodies

A Ligature for Black Bodies attempts to re-humanize black bodies into black people by
holding the power structures and people accountable who have reified a dominant and
destructive discourse. The collection explores the meanings of seeing police officers killing
black and brown people through their dash cams and body cams as they shoot them and
everyday citizens standing witness and documentarian through their cellphones. A Ligature
for Black Bodies highlights how these videos mirror pictures that lynching attendees took
and/or sent as postcards across the country in the early to mid twentieth century. Our
view of dying and dead bodies today, of African Americans made lifeless while surrounded
by spectators, drives the manuscript. The found poems and persona poems read as police,
prosecutor, and journalist's 'confessions' to the deaths of the Black people recorded on
today's visual media. A Ligature for Black Bodies roots these confessions in the truths of
contemporary news articles, autopsy reports, court testimonies, verdicts, and sentences
to illustrate how a white power structure seeks to make bodies out of black people. This
conversation reveals a racially rooted power structure that creates and perpetuates racism
and how black people have, much too often, had to reclaim these bodies systematically
stripped of breath. The poems are evidence of Black people's continued American striving
to convince that same power structure that black lives matter. The final poem, written in
the voice of Sandra Bland and written to LaQuan McDonald and Tamir Rice, seeks to
do just that. The poems refuse the narrative of black people as bodies only. Instead, their
discourse creates a space where the poems re-member black people's dismemberment at the
hands of white people through a journey of truth-telling.