Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza GriffithsPhillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). A Cave Canem graduate, he has received several Bread Loaf scholarships. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Callaloo, The Southern Review, Sou'wester, West Branch, Blackbird and others. Phillip is currently a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis and is working on his MFA in Creative Writing and the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.
His poem, “Almost and Completely,” appeared in Issue 50 of The Collagist.
Here, Phillip B. Williams speaks with interviewer Michele K. Johnson about hatred that sprouts from difference, avoiding sensationalism while staying truthful, and the difficulty of bearing witness.
Could you talk a little bit about what was going on in your head or your heart when you decided that the deaths of Mercado and Makutle would be featured in one of your poems?
I had been working on a long poem about Rashawn Brazell, a young gay man who was murdered in Brooklyn 10 years ago, for years and this poem in The Collagist was originally a part of that project. I wanted to show how internationally the atrocities against LGBT people connected with each other via dismemberment, as though the assumed-to-be straight men who murdered these young men in Puerto Rico and South Africa were looking for something inside of these queer bodies that they themselves did not have but wanted.
I soon realized that this poem had to stand on its own, as it dealt directly with hate crimes in a way that Brazell’s case had never concluded toward. There was no proof that his murder was, indeed, a hate crime, though his dismemberment was the first thing I thought about when I read about the cases of Mercado and Makutle.
I was distraught, for sure, thinking about how easy it seemed for people to become violent over a person’s sexuality. It’s pretty sad to see the hatred people have toward other people that they do not also have for the very things that make them different, or even more complicated, toward actual systems that have relegated them to victim status generation after generation.
I recently read a post that someone made on Facebook that wanted to shame a group of young men for expressing themselves in what is frequently considered more feminine expressions of sexuality. One of the comments beneath the post was from a Black man wanting homosexuality to be illegal. And it made me wonder how someone who come from a legacy of having every right denied to him and his people, the once-enslaved Afrikan, could also imagine a world where that same level of erasure via legislation would be enacted against someone else. It’s horrifying, actually, the hypocrisy and self-righteous idea that somehow he personally was getting being human right while others were getting it wrong. Meanwhile, as proven by the seemingly infinite cases of police brutality against Black bodies, neither he nor his would be illegalized queer targets are seen as worth anything in this nation. The idea that one’s personal moral code somehow trumps the right for other people to exist really disappointed me and I continue to be disappointed. I will never understand how in one breath people can fight for their rights but not see how their denial of others’ rights only makes it easier for us all to continue to be destroyed. And this moves through all races, gender identities, and classes.
Your poem acknowledges the importance of images, but is also fraught with the complications of describing horrific crimes in detail. How did you go about finding this balance?
I’m not sure I thought about it. I know that I wanted the poem to itself be a form of witnessing and to create a space where the discomfort with the grotesque has to be faced head-on. So many people are willing to watch a movie where heads are flying in every direction, homes are blown up, women and children and slain, bombs annihilate communities but refuse to see the everyday atrocities that people live through, scriptless and without the ability to have someone say “Cut!” and interrupt/undo all that has been done. To keep it from being sensationalistic I simply stuck with the facts and avoided adjectives as much as possible. I did not need to dress up the dead and how they were killed.
How did you decide to include the footnotes that gave a fuller account of the deaths of Mercado and Makutle?
The footnotes are to let people know that this is real, this happened, and could happen again. These are not characters about which I write and too this poem, as attempting to perform (and failing to achieve) the act of witness, it also looks towards documentation and memory. We have to remember what has happened to all of our people. How do we create poems that allow us to be global citizens? I think it helps to use the facts as they appear without dressing them up or Americanising them, meaning making subtext of all we write be about how it feels to be an American. And the latter part is as difficult, perhaps even impossible, as me writing outside of my experiences as the unique person I am, but it is worth a try to get at what happens elsewhere with as much objectivity as possible, even when that, too, fails us.
What are you currently reading? I am currently reading the collected essays of James Baldwin and will probably be reading those essays forever. Also on my list are the following:
[insert] Boy by Danez Smith
Digest by Gregory Pardlo
The Collected poems of Sylvia Plath
The Amiri Baraka Reader (recently reread the play The Dutchman)
Sula by Toni Morrison
Selected Plays of Alice Childress
The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound
What else are you working on right now?
Right now I am working on a novel that I had been avoiding for a few months. What it’s about I cannot say as that has changed over the years and I might as well just wait until I finish to see what becomes of it. I am also working on a series of interviews with young artists and entrepreneurs on the website www.Glappitnova.com, which has been a blast because it allows me to learn how other people treat their promising careers and passions. I also love exposing people to new or newish things. I think so often we forget that standing for something includes spreading the word about quality work that exists but made not get the attention it deserves. Most recently I interviewed the poet Joshua Bennett who has been making moves for years as an artist, but there are still many people who do not know how he is. Again, it’s all about building a community. That is what is most important to me.