By Bacopa Literary Review 2023 Poetry Co-Editor Reinfred Addo
In the 2023 edition of Bacopa Literary Review, the poem that received an honorable mention in the free-verse poetry category was “how to sing in an electric chair” by Martins Deep. This poem felt to me as a sort of vignette, a moment in time, of George Stinney. George Stinney was a 14-year-old African-American boy who, in 1944, was executed by electric chair for the murders of two white girls in Alcolu, South Carolina. It was later determined that Stinney was wrongly convicted, especially considering the courthouse was made up of a cast of an all-white jury and judge. Even the attendees were all white as African-Americans were barred from entering the courthouse during the trial proceedings. In his poem, Martins Deep paints a heartrendingly vivid picture, using a semi-omniscient, semi-personal voice, to narrate the passage from life to death of a boy being executed in an electric chair. The voice views George Stinney’s moment of dying as a vision whereby Stinney is going through the act of joining the atmosphere and his ancestors. Perhaps, this voice is Stinney’s spirit itself, using the word “you” to refer to itself.
somewhere in this vision, you’re swallowing an anther, for the pollen it’ll bear
in your throat, so that whenever you sigh, you become airborne:
black boy, light as pollen grain. black boy carried in his own breath,
slipping through the fingers of time.
--
in this vision, you’re leaping off the edge of a bible to the railway track
in alcolu that leads straight into your mother’s bosom
A number of poems have been written of African-Americans being murdered for crimes they didn’t commit (“Silhouette” by Langston Hughes and “Afterimages” by Audre Lorde are examples that immediately come to mind). What makes Deep’s unique is that the author himself is from and lives in Nigeria, half a world away from the location in which the poem is set. This, however, does not make Deep’s poem any less powerful. See, there is a collective trauma that is felt across the Black diaspora and across generations, however spread around the world Black people are. In some ways it’s spiritual, thus, it’s not too far fetched to imagine that the spirits of Black ancestors who suffered under white supremacy and slavery moved upon Martins Deep to allow him to write this poem of his spiritual distant relative George Stinney. In a way, it makes the past the present and transports the reader into that execution chamber in 1944. Martins Deep’s poem is so powerful that it morphs the room of the reader into an execution chamber to reveal a black boy singing his own elegy, a song of innocence, as electricity passes through him. This electricity is so powerful that, for however long the poem lasts, it seems to jump from the page. It seems to bounce off the walls. It seems to pass through George Stinney. And it seems to pass through the reader.
About the contributor: Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet of Urhobo descent, a Taurus, photographer, digital artist, & currently an undergraduate student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He says hi @martinsdeep1.
