Power in the Darkness

Owólabi Aboyade

Dark Days
By Roger Reeves
Graywolf Press, 2023, 240 pages, $26 hardcover.

IT IS QUITE possible that between the writing of this essay and your reading it, the United States will have entered a dark age. At the least, this darkness refers to our sudden plunge into a state of not knowing what’s happening, who is being harmed, and how to prepare.

This uncertainty, being kept in the dark, evokes all the fears: What are Musk and Trump doing? What are they slashing now? Who are they firing? Who are they courting or hailing? Disrespecting, eliminating or degrading?

The darkness also refers to the dimming of the light of education, the capability of scientific solutions to public problems, and free discourse.

We are under no impression that the United States was a model for a commitment to educating all of its citizens. Hell, I’m from Detroit where students are too often compulsorily warehoused in public education and had to sue for the right to quality education.

I’m from Detroit where we know that mainstream media lies about Black communities stokes feelings of mistrust, and often cheerleads for the devastating gentrification of our communities.

I’m a chronically-ill writer from Detroit where we know that American health disparities have long meant that going to an emergency room or a maternal delivery unit means we and our loved ones run extra risk of not making it home. We converted an entire public island park, the “jewel of Detroit” to a monument for those who passed from the Co-Vid virus under Trump’s first run as American President.

Trump didn’t invent the darkness, only harnessed it. Nor did he create the Western imagination that associates darkness with ignorance, brutality and incivility.

This overwhelming public discourse, while important, cannot be the only way that we talk about this moment, the darkness of these days. That would give the impression that the significant actions to be taken are by elected officials and billionaires with titles.

Social media and journalism offer a barrage of frantic energy, “What will the Democrats do in response?” “We need a national leader like Kamala to say something!” “Hurry and contact your elected officials!” We have become less conversant in imagining that there can be any power in our own responses.

Dark Days is a new collection of essays by poet Roger Reeves that inspires us to feel power in another imperative: to sing and to create while surviving together “the ongoing catastrophe of trauma.”

Partially written during the first Trump administration when the President was merely encouraging American militias and vigilante violence and testing the boundaries of the American political system like a stubborn teenager, this collection of “fugitive essays” connects to this imperative towards justice by drawing upon lineage as a primary orientation.

In drawing careful attention to literature, language and Black cultural work throughout the book, Reeves challenges the unspoken assumptions that the move towards “light”and visibility is the only thing called for in dangerous times.

Reeves looks to lineage to connect to the survival strategies practiced by folk who survived enslavement, citizens who snuck encouragement to each other while appearing to comply with dictatorial mandates, parents who prepare their children for life in a nation that would broadcast their killings before preventing them.

This survival work is more than just rebellion against dominant institutions (as if collective survival were ever a small accomplishment). Reeves calls for creative work based upon practices of metaphorical thinking, keen attention to social position, and collectivized criticism or “readings.” These other ways of being and communicating help create new spaces of possibility.

Moving through Dark Days

The book moves the reader poetically and stealthily through three parts. In the first, Reeves considers the transcendent, the funky joyous, the unstoppably creative in the midst of the United States’ threats of violence.

“Inhabiting ecstasy in the middle and muddle of abjection is not only an aesthetic act but also a political one. Ecstasy as protest. Ecstasy as a type of protest aesthetic. Insisting upon itself in the middle of the wound, the ecstatic subverts and opposes the disciplining and oppressive act.”

He connects legacies of Black writing, expression and art to the lyric poetry of T.S. Eliot and others, such as a woman defiantly singing in dictatorial Chile. Transcendent art, he offers, “promises another possibility.”

A single essay “Peace Be Still” makes up the second section. Here Reeves makes personal the legacy of the hush harbors, a nature-based practice where enslaved Africans snuck away to pray by streams or under the darkness of wild groves, placing them in the context of his daughter’s fear of being targeted whenever she heard police sirens.

“Where is there to go when our deaths feel so imminent, as if waiting for us in front of the case of oranges in the produce aisle at the grocery store, when they’re in my daughter’s every question, in her face when a siren comes blaring past the car? How did our people build peace during slavery when they were spied on and speculated flesh?”

Let’s consider the irony of being forced to convert to Christianity while being forbidden to read the Bible or to pray. More than irony, consider the deception, the hypocrisy involved. If we aren’t attentive, even that which is most sacred can be reduced to a system of control. We all can be commodified, posting our business with the visibility of social media, which the tech industry uses to teach advertisers how to best exploit our attention.

The need for a hush harbor continues to the present. We need a place to sneak away to escape surveillance, to unburden each other from the lies we are surrounded by, especially the lies that denigrate and disempower us.

Thus the hush harbor, this practice of stealing oneself is a type of study, a collective investigation into the situation we find ourselves up against and who we can become.

The book’s final section reframes collective creative action in light of vulnerability and intimacy. Reeves cites examples of published poetry and feature films, but what makes “transcendent art” is not just its content. He uplifts creativity that can do work to intervene and interrupt entrenched patterns of thinking.

He specifically calls for “parrhesia,” which is not characterized by emotional vulnerability as much as a vulnerability that comes from social risk.

These art actions are defined by how the social placement of the speaker is as much of the demonstration as the content of the utterance. He gives the examples of a slave writing a book about the brutality of the plantation while a fugitive on the run, or an undocumented immigrant giving testimony at a hostile public convening.

These acts are more than mere vulnerability. They function as an interruption to narratives of supremacy that constitute the regular functioning of a society that operates most efficiently with exploitation and exclusion. They are a voice from outside society’s accepted chorus of interlocutors. Or as Deborah Cox sang, “Nobody Supposed to be Here.”

In Dark Days, we are given encouragement to be Nobody so that we can be found Nowhere. This culminates in this third section by his meditation on what it means for Black folks to go underground:

“We must go underground not merely to escape our deaths (or at least delay them) but to figure out who we are, what we want, and what we mean to each other. Therein is our freedom, our liberation.”

Reeves continues his practice of doubling meanings. To “go underground” is a metaphor which is more than just a means of escape; rather, it is actively creating conditions for the type of intimacy necessary to create collective meaning and plot new courses together.

To go underground means to put aside the normal patterns of public discourse and create conditions for solidarity across race, culture and nation that acknowledges how we have hurt each other and creates space for us to make room for each other in our visions.

Uplifting Lineage

Reeves uplifts lineage to challenge the mythology that the United States has ever been a democracy. He disputes the notion that our accomplishments as Black people reflect anything about the United States; we have created culture in spite of the violence of this society. He calls for us to take back our own creativity and cultural acumen:

“To give jazz, the blues, hip-hop over to America is akin to giving Frederick Douglass’s master partial credit for writing Douglass’s slave narratives and autobiographies.”

In “Notes on the Underground,” Reeves confesses he feels “let down” by James Baldwin’s exhortation in The Fire Next Time that “we can make America what America must become.” That’s a false promise, he asserts. We should know our own history enough not to be foolishly optimistic about this place.

This country already used us for labor, for profits. To Reeves, Baldwin’s line of thinking continues that annihilation, this time voluntarily tossing our lives into the maw of the country for its improvement, not necessarily our own.

Reeves writes and creates with awareness of lineage, “…as a native son and a great-grandnephew of Baldwin, Wright, Malcolm X, and Georgia Gilmore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Queen Mother Moore….” and also as a parent who actively points out to his daughter that the stories told in her social studies class about civics, and cops, and checks and balances are falsehoods.

He takes her to protests when Black people are (too often) killed by police. He participates in lineage, not just by what he has inherited but also by what he leaves for future generations to survive, navigate, and imagine new paths forward.

Reeves also claims kinship with OutKast and Sun Ra. He claims lineage too with the men in the barbershop, his grandmother, the Black professors whose houses she cleaned and her lineage of mothers who snuck away to make their own root medicines, and with the working-class saints of the Full Gospel Church of God “where the Blackest among us want to be washed whiter than snow.”

I remember some of what I learned from my mother and my grandfather. My mother was a school social worker here in Detroit. I remember her as being tall, slim, dark and elegant. Her father painted buildings; during the week he painted Veteran’s Hospital, and on weekends he painted the homes of friends and neighbors for his family’s side hustle.

In her job, my mother worked to find resources for children of overworked parents, children who were snatched in and out of state systems, children who were dismissed or given up on, children who were taken in by extended family after chronically painful moments.

With a twinkle in his eye, my grandfather brought up from the basement books on Black history by Carter G Woodson, JA Rogers, Chancellor Williams, and many others.

They invited us to seek out American stories that told the brutal truth of how this country did its damndest to use us until our bodies were spent, African stories where we could feel togetherness, dignity before and beyond compulsion and whatever scraps of citizenship were tossed our way.

After I was hospitalized with kidney failure in middle school, my mother would help me carry up boxes of dialysis solution from the basement, our arms full, our legs slowly pumping up two flights of stairs.

We would mask up together, in shared sterile procedures to connect me for nightly treatments. What saved my life, what became known to me as care: both stories and collaborative action.

In the lineage Reeves draws upon, our first responsibility is not to the structures of government, nor the institution of this society. It is to help our people survive the country itself, and now the tearing down of that country, the disruption of expectations in this country, the transformation of this country.

Communal Wisdom

Activists may criticize this book for centering art, and not promoting “strategies” on how to fight the right wing. This criticism misses the point and misunderstands Black History, which unfortunately is too common in Western leftist organizing. In Dark Days, Reeves draws from a deep pool of Communitarian wisdom, ancestral if you listen for it.

In An Anthropology of Marxism, Cedric Robinson proposes that socialism did not begin with Karl Marx (and will continue beyond Marxism). The book argues that the socialist ideal was embedded both in Western and non-Western civilizations and cultures long before the onset of the modern era and did not begin in response to the existence of capitalism.

Robinson notes the idea of socialism, the socializing of resources which challenges the accumulation of wealth can be found in the West as early as the 13th century. These visions, the resulting organizing, and their rebellions have diverse roots in the “politically secular, the mystical, and the heretical.”

Socialism is often interpreted today in ways that prioritize the de-spirited ideal of science. This dominant rationality has the unfortunate effect of removing much of the funk — the same style and grime that Reeves beautifully observes has always made up our collective navigation, survival, meaning making — from how our collective future is imagined and discussed by today’s radicals.

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa points towards a diversity of political states that made up the African continent. Some had elements of hierarchical structures and misunderstood the ways of the colonizers as being compatible with their values, playing roles as slavers and henchmen until it was too late and they were betrayed.

When we were brought to this “New World” many of us brought communal wisdom, practices that well preceded the encounter and were formed not only in response to exploitation or brutality.

When Reeves reflects on our lineages and how we survived and built community that encouraged each other during the dark days of our enslavement, he is pushing our understanding of ourselves beyond society’s victims or even people in mere rebellion:

“In other words, to think of the Black, brown, or disabled body not simply as a body only in pain but also as one complicating and contesting pain and subjection.”

We see ourselves as sophisticated architects of social technologies that develop “person centered care” or “sense of belonging” for the “underappreciated” or those at “most risk” and allow us to create our own objectives under conditions of unimaginable stress.

We are syncretic people; this too is our lineage; we use the scraps we were given, including even the “social justice language” we see in the media and what, until recently, were well-funded organizations, and cook up soulful dishes, food for the soul, music to the ear, power to the people. (These phrases in quotes are also on the list of words being removed from organizations receiving federal funding.)

Conclusions

In Dark Days, Roger Reeves invites us to sing “into the Silence of the State.” This is silence ongoing, connecting the violence of the families that view us as property and their enslaving state to the brutality of the police license to kill human beings with our darknesses, our culture. The silence is also an inability or a refusal to hear the screaming and recognize it as language.

The silence belongs to the state, to the constructs of race, belonging, amnesia, and citizenship that the United States has been built upon. It is forced upon us by those who can’t hear us unless they are tokenizing or commodifying us or our creative projects.

“What is the song that can be sung to soothe a fretting child in a bomb shelter? What is the song sung to disrupt a State-imposed curfew? What is the necessity of singing during a catastrophe, whether State-created or virus-induced?…

“What is the poem, the singing that can console and be with us while a city burns, and the people die in the burning, die on gurneys in the hallways of the hospital, die and disappear because our politicians are too in love with their mouths, which they mistake for beauty.”

When we sing into that silence, we show ourselves and our loved ones, those who walk with us or live beside us, that the silence isn’t everything. Nor is it all-powerful, even if it comes from a system that legislates obedience.

It’s important for Roger Reeves and for the denizens of the underground that this breaking up and breaking through takes the shape of a song. Or a poem, or a chant. Not because these can be published and packaged as art, no. Rather because they are invitations to beauty in the midst of forceful ugly.

I recently spoke at a Detroit commemoration of Red Books Day, a celebration of socialist literature. The speakers talked about how they took inspiration from reading personal narratives from Cuba, China, the U.S. prison system and other working-class struggles.

Detroiters for Tax Justice wished us all a Happy Black History Month and then warned the gathering audience about how the current United States regime is making international connections that also embolden white supremacist and far-right parties across Europe and India. They salute each other, speak in codes and whistles, and talk about what turning back the clock means to them.

When it was my turn to grab the mic, I read the above quote from Reeves which asks what song, what lyric, what creativity we need for “Dark Days” and invited the assembled to consider how in our Black traditions, the working class is the most aesthetic, the most slangful, the creators of cultural resonance. So if our group has a vision of working-class victory, then we shouldn’t speak only in the formal tones of the upper crust and the merely academically educated.

My Granny told us not to be “educated fools.” It would be foolish to abandon lineage and all the survival (and yes the pain) that comes with it.

In writing a book of essays, Roger Reeves is sharing his reflections on the ethics and the aesthetics of survival that nourished us when we were unpaid labor, when we were segregated citizen, when we were acceptably targeted for official violence and neglect.

Yes, these fugitive technologies come from Black cultures. Reeves also shows their resonance with other creative people trying to make their way through domination. As these patterns of exploitation, systemic neglect and brutality continue, these lineages of creativity continue to generate power.

In Dark Days, to go underground is an act of refusal, primarily to refuse to be defeated — to refuse to concede that the power brokers and power-hungry play all the cards.

This book is not an official document, not the language of officials, and you won’t find here policies that will restore the American Constitution, reconnect the United States with its traditional allies, or renew American institutions of science, environment or education.

For some, “dark days” is a negative, folks think that darkness is bad to be avoided like “a blacklist” or the “black market.” We are the people who are dark as the blues. Perhaps we will survive to find the darkness of our days to come is also what we’ll see when we submerge ourselves underground and sing together.

Then we might just wield a cultural force based not only on opposing the decision-making power of people who want to see our faces in the mud, whether bowing down or dying, but we’ll bring together the raw materials of what we’ve learned and who we’ve become as survivors and strategists.

We will feel “not just dirt — but the grime, funk, and get-down of it. The mischievous, rebellious, opaque, smart, signifying dirt of us, our rebellious bodies and mouths and language at the end of it.”

May-June 2025, ATC 236