Maafa

by Harmony Holiday

Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust. It echoes and transambulates the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress, without a system of naming our history, we become addicted to its ghosts of familiarity. Names are angels of mercy. That’s part of the reason for the title of this work, to help unleash this word and its healing components from obscurity. In the process the word came to life, I realized on a visceral level that it was gendered for me, that the erasure of trauma and the erasure of black femininity were happening simultaneously, even or especially within myself. This book seeks to unknot that through the writing of a black female epic hero, because as I started writing about the black feminine I couldn’t think of one explicit black female epic hero in the western canon, my Maafa had no relatives. We have characters, lots of tragic ones, lively ones, beautiful transcendent ones with heroic tendencies, but I don’t know of our black female hero in poetics who is as deliberately cast as Odysseus. It’s a large undertaking but this book sets out to write her, whose name is Maafa. She killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero’s journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting something that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. The book begins in Duat, or what the egyptian Book of the Dead calls ‘the boat the carries the sun’ and moves toward ‘A Paradise of Ruins’ which is the last section, where our tragicomedic black female hero dances a series of poems as gestures, everything from the cut pitch of a single drum lick to the frenzied but detached look on memed faces to the way a dancer waves while walking backwards. Through the existential absurdity of the accumulation of these images she exorcises her own haunts, and Maafa is healed into complete being. It’s a book of poems about a kind of rebirth of feminine consciousness and cultural consciousness that was trapped in patriacracy and erasure.

Genres: Poetry

107 pages, Paperback

First published January 19, 2021

Reviews

[Andre(Read-A-Lot) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beguiling. Inventive. Lovesong to Black femininity. A Black female epic, heroic in its construction. Unlike anything I’ve read in the poetry lane. Prose poetry poetically captures the brain and freezes it, letting your mental unthaw slowly as you luxuriate in the beauty of the language. Why only 3⭐️ you say? Although it is beautiful in its creation, for me there is a lack of concrete coherence.

[Renee Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

My goodness.

Very rarely do I feel like a book has overwhelmed me, possessed me. But Jesus Christ. I am overwhelmed.

In the opening to this reading of Holiday’s from 2015 (University of California), she is described as a “creature”, and I truly can’t think of another way to place the voice in Maafa. Guys no seriously this book is ridiculously incredible. I don’t even know where I’d start on a review so I’m going to forgive myself and not even attempt it.

The ending of this book quite literally implodes. For so long I’ve been saying I want to approach my own poetry interdisciplinarily, but Holiday is living it. Meme works in such interesting, disconcerting, scary way here. You have a holocaust and you have Keke Palmer, you get slavery and you get Prince.

“What about a bath of light on the letting / What about the way we ruin everything is peaceful & generous”

“just cause / I don’t eat it, doesn’t mean I won’t kill it if it steps to me rough and wilting”

“You are my tar baby / Shut up stop mixing it with light”

“I know possession works both ways”

“Her survival is as dissolved into these isolations of a lie by joy divisions / absurd amputations of context for love / As in nobody recovers that love of being unnamed once called Maafa with no shame and no rehabilitation”

She is literally born again. We end on life. And yet. And yet!!!!

Incredible apocalypse of Black femininity. Holiday is unrelenting.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holiday's work continues to enthrall me. How she addresses issues of generational trauma, genocidal policies of the United States government, the current cultural stance towards black women, their esteemed position and how culture is guilty of parasitically attaching itself to that status. Holiday fashions this complex, ongoing, and persistent investigation. She brings her reader into the investigation by including her own personal reflections on this complicated situation. It is like a mythos of Maafa, like the sentiment Alice Walker registered in "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens." Take that, then, and build into an architecture of appreciation, retaliation, and personal pilgrimage.

It is hard to write about Holiday without getting caught up in the complexity of her diction, the logic implicit to her elisions, and the overwhelming probity of argument. Her book is both construction of Maafa and monument.

[Emma Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

genuinely if this doesn’t win the pulitzer i will scream my head off

[Claire Abs]

to-read

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Sun Ra said 'god is more than / love can ever be'"

Maafa by Harmony Holiday pieces together the complicated narratives of Black violence beyond and in the body through experimental poetry that wishes to be unraveled. There are so many great lines in this collection and I think Holiday shows a lot of power in their choices of language and form, but I felt that this work wanted so much, then became lost in its desires.

"What about a bath of light on the letting / What about the way we ruin everything is peaceful & generous"

An interesting part of this collection was returning to the term "Maafa" both as noun, action, and place. While I enjoyed how the work kept molding the word into something new, its overcrafting caused this admirable point to fall flat.

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is a power that only silence chases in a language of pure gesture between dance and birth / and no nation can claim it & have you been the unmothered skin of early sky / in bondage bound to a land as you torched it"