Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach
When I first picked up Faylita Hicks's debut book of poetry, HoodWitch, I was stunned by the cover art—a Black woman without arms, power radiating from her hair, eyes, and center—but the title mystified me. It was not until I read the final poem that I understood it in that fabulous way poetry has of lighting up inside you: A HoodWitch is a witch from the hood, a powerful Black woman who works her magic and walks with Gawd. As Hicks writes in "Photo of X, 2007: HoodWitches":
#hallelujah to the HoodWitches
to the shellac clapbacks & neck-roll snaps
of sistahs who snatch tracks & dodge ditches.
This book takes place in Texas and California, on military bases, on the streets demanding justice for Black women and men, and on the corner with the prostitutes (not to say that isn't the same as on the streets demanding justice). In it, you will meet a woman who gave her daughter away, mothers mourning, young Black women who refuse to twerk, dead Black women, ghosts, abusers, murderers, and a girl who becomes Gawd. This is not just a book of poetry. It is a book of magic and spiritual action structured around three rites: water, flesh, smoke. As Hicks tells us in the notes, each section opens with a veve, a symbol that references the loa (spiritual leaders) of Haitian Vodou and acts as their representative during the rituals. So, I feel I am being told these poems of incantations, curses, and transformations are a sanctified part of a religious ceremony. Hicks uses magical realism, contrasting energies, and mixed dialects in the service of this ceremony.
In this book, magic happens in the everyday world. In "The Fantastic Life of My Guardian Angels" a speaker tells us:
Most afternoons, the angels hung over
the railings right outside my apartment door, flirting with the never-ending
partygoers & drinking fermented juice from the neighbors.
Like the Biblical angels that appear at the well, these angels come to the ordinary places of your life. The first poem, "About the Girl Who Would Become a Gawd," immediately establishes the girl as both a young woman in the everyday world, typing with "acrylic clicks," and a powerful being capable of extreme vengeance beyond death. By using magic realism, which interweaves the ordinary with the magical, Hicks normalizes magic. In this world, it is just as real, just as likely, to have ghosts speak as it is to have "a pack of eighteen-wheelers out hunting along the rain-soaked highways." And by normalizing magic, Hicks shows an alternative world to one where women are abused, hunted, and killed. She makes the "Hex for R. Kelly" possible. She makes claiming an identity possible. In a world of "Coded Binaries," which I took to mean the pressure to be either male or female and follow the societal codes for the gender, a speaker who does not follow those rules magics herself into existence: "I wished me whole & here / & so I am."
Hicks also creates two opposing pacings in this book. The poems push forward, often with long lines and the themes of becoming, being, and transforming. And yet HoodWitch is a book full of photographs, moments stopped in time and place. Every section has poems with titles like "Photo of a Girl, 1985: Sistah Gardena, California" or "Photo of X, 2005: What Dreams Are These? Somewhere, Somewhere." The poems stop and pay attention to a person, time, and place. I enjoyed both flowing along with Hicks's vision—her theology, a path towards justice—and feeling myself drawn up short to pay attention in a different way. This is a book with big ideas, but it is also a book of individuals that matter, as a speaker says in "The Battered Woman's Prayer for Power": "I am pound for pound / every bit an echo of the god I was before / I became what I am now." The photos keep the focus on those individuals.
Hicks draws on different language worlds in these poems. Some of her words she defines in a glossary. "Womxn," for example, means women of all origins, and the spelling "blxck" includes those from mixed backgrounds. But the definition for "Gawd" comes out within the poetry. As she says in the poem "Gawd":
Gawd is a black womxn, the femme
body in blxck—come to take back what was theirs:
the universe & everything in it.For the sake of balance, Gawd
is a body that knowsno boundaries.
Gawd is the creator, the reclaimer, the body without the boundary of even death.
You'll notice in those lines how Hicks uses "is": "Gawd is a black womxn," but she is just as comfortable dropping "is," a linguistic form called a zero copula, as when she writes, "She a Wolf now." Her lines move seamlessly between ones that use "she say" to "she says." And lines like "She says I a Witch now" have the Standard English conjugation of the verb and then have no copula between the subject and predicate, combining the two grammars in the same sentence. I feel like I'm reading a speaker equally confident and powerful in both grammars.
Hicks also brings in and uses the patterns of academic writing in new ways, particularly the footnote. Footnotes create a hesitation, breaking the reader out of the flow to discover how the information is extended, complicated, grounded. Reading material with lots of footnotes is like listening to music with lots of full stops that send you scrambling under your seat for the program. Footnotes have the gloss of scholarly writing: they tell us this information is important, part of an academic culture. Hicks uses footnotes throughout the book, but most strongly in the multi-sectioned poem "About the Girl Who Would Become a Gawd." Nearly every phrase in section iv of that poem has a footnote to it, and when I turned the page to find the references, "#SayHerName#SayMyName" covered nearly the entire page. It felt like I was hearing an incantation bringing back hundreds of murdered women. This book was published in 2019. Reading this poem when I, and so many others, are in the streets chanting "Say her name" for Breonna Taylor, who was killed by the police on March 13, 2020, makes the message and visual impact of the line even more heartbreaking and agonizing because it continues to be the spell we need. This book holds many spells we need.