By Poetry Co-Editor Reinfred Addo
In the 2022 issue of Bacopa Literary Review, we the editors had a special request for the poetry submissions: in addition to general themes and non-themes within free verse, formal, and visual poetries, we asked for free verse and formal poetry that touched on the theme of health/sickness/wellbeing by Black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). This theme came about because I’ve noticed that, throughout history, systems of injustice have infiltrated health, whereby health and wellbeing of BIPOC people has been placed on the margins whereas that of White people has received more attention and eradication effort. Historically, this pattern has included examples such as: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, medical textbooks using illustrations and models of predominantly white people, physicians’ not considering that BIPOC people display physical symptoms to certain conditions in a different way to white people (e.g., eczema), and the assumption by health professionals that Black people have a higher pain tolerance and thus their complaints about pain can be minimized (which has contributed to issues such as a higher maternal mortality rate for Black mothers compared to their white counterparts).
During the last few years, we’ve seen this issue in the form of the COVID pandemic, whereby BIPOC individuals have lost more people than white people, and whereby BIPOC scientists played key roles in developing the needed vaccines yet the public face of said vaccines have tended to be white people (especially white males). Because Bacopa is an international journal that receives many submissions from BIPOC individuals around the world, and because poetry offers a creatively powerful angle into the theme of health, our call for submissions was our small attempt at ensuring the voices that make up this portion of our submittership are heard regarding such an ever-relevant theme.
Surely enough, the poems we received did not disappoint. The quality of submissions around this theme was so high that it was a tough job for us to decline some of them due to the logistical/spatial/economic constraints of the journal. The ones we did publish, we feel, are symbolic of the high degree of health-related poems we received during the submissions period. In the journal, readers will find many examples, such as this section from “In the Name of the Name” by Missouri-based Sunyoung Kay: “Today, I march / to this building / that rises like a castle of mirror-gleam windows / where my dad once stayed / stomach stilled, putrid, black gunk / being drawn from a tube down his nose, / to witness the next thousand little drownings.” Of note, we felt so strongly about this poem that we gave it the honorable mention distinction in the free verse category. Another such example is the pantoum “Solitary Musings” by Afro-British writer Maroula Blades, from the formal poetry category. Here’s a line of this work’s vivid account of COVID-19:
Heat kills COVID-19. I hunch over a bowl of steaming water.
The mind is foggier than the rising menthol mist.
My head slumps like a clump of tabloid papier mâché.
Ten hours to pass before bedtime, solitary confinement.
My mind is foggier than the rising menthol mist.
I need groceries. Should a friend make a visit?
Ten hours to pass before bedtime, solitary confinement.
The clock’s second hand turns in slow motion.
Bacopa 2022 contains more health-related pieces like the above which speak to us on both a craft level and content level. We hope, like us, readers are stopped in their tracks and develop an appreciation of the brilliant work created by each author who tackled this special theme.
