Finna and the Poetics of Black Futurity .

WRITTEN BY SHARAH HUTSON

PHOTOGRAPHED BY LILY C. ROUSSEL

Finna is a text that breathes life into Black futurity. Out now via Penguin Random House, Nate Marshall's debut collection of poems is overflowing with references to lyrical geniuses that Marshall holds near to his heart, many elegant odes to Blackness, carefully curated spaces that make room for Black folks to bring forth their full range of emotions, and Mariame Kaba’s reminder that, “hope is a discipline.” As Marshall shares his truth with us through his poems, he also simultaneously creates room for readers to ponder on how Black folks have been rendered as disposable, the plight of Black death within places such as Chicago, and working towards imagining a new world where systems of oppression have been destroyed.

During my interview with Nate Marshall, I was immediately drawn towards the imagery and craftsmanship that went into creating the cover of Finna. Painted with a deep red backdrop and a figure of a Black person looking into the distance on a Spade card, the cover suggests looking towards a kind of future where no one is suffering under the yoke of oppression, and the imperativeness of moving towards that vision. Nate expressed that creating a captivating cover for a book is important. He said, “The cover is how the book becomes to be defined by. I was really lucky to work with a press that made sure that I had a cover that I would ultimately fall in love with and be excited about.” The spades card on the cover speaks towards the importance of card games within parts of the Black community. Marshall told me, “As far as we know and can trace it back to, this card game came from Black folks in Cincinnati, Ohio around the 1930s, and passed around the country. I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and went to a school in Tennessee where spades existed as a space of cultural exchange. Folks would play with their own set of house rules. It is a place where [a sense of] partnership is imperative, but also a place where everything is happening. You would see people getting mad, talking shit, and high fiving.”

The usage of the image of a Spade card also speaks to the phrase, “calling a spade a spade” which stands as a reminder for people to keep it real. While this phrase is commonly used, it is important to be aware of the term’s racialized history. “Spade” also exists as an antiquated epithet for referring to Black folks as the n-word. Finna exists as a collection of poems that dives into Marshall's frustrations with the current state of the world and serves as a tool for the readers in their everyday lives.

Several aspects of this collection are drawn from personal experience. Marshall explained, “One that is sort of surprising, I pledged a fraternity when I was in college (Kappa Alpha Psi). My membership in the frat is something that has impacted my art a lot. Both because the fraternity is this way of sort of passing cultural folkways: chants, stepping, fraternity songs, all of these things. Drawn to the way that those sort of organizations become kinship..something that Black folks have always been doing as we remake the notion of family…What does it mean to call someone who I [have] no blood ties with “my brother”? What [does] that sort of association demand from both of us to care about each other? Some of the ways that the book thinks about masculinity and how do we sort of untether ourselves from the masculine notion of domination as the way to define masculinity comes out of conversations via that frat space.”

Marshall started working on this collection of poems in 2016. He reflected, “One of the ways that I finish the collection is by reading it out loud in a single sitting. This helps to figure out if a poem is working by putting it on its feet and figuring it out.” Based on past experiences touring with his last book, Marshall found himself captivated by the ways in which Black and white individuals interacted with his work. He recounted a memory of himself at a reading and explained, “A white woman asked a question around ‘Why was this so sad?’ in reference to my poetry. For me, that was not my experience at all, nor the experiences of other Black readers who interacted with the text. I was shocked by the text being read as ‘sad’ and a ‘tragedy.’” From there, the work that became Finna was written as a sort of response to the ways in which white readers interacted with texts by Black authors -- it aims to push the white readers to ask how they have prepared themselves to engage with Black art.

I hope that the poems are sort of projects that offer people some sort of subsistence and power to get them through.

Marshall expanded, “So much of the cultural history within the United States is about glorifying Black trauma. What did people see in the poems of Phillis Wheatley, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and many of the things that were created during the renaissance that got celebrated by white critics in particular? We can think about how Hollywood and things that are ‘liberal’ or articulate a sort of sympathy about Black people is wrapped up in the adaptation of reveling in Black pain.”

From there, Marshall reflected on his own work, “How do I deal with that? How do I not give myself entirely over into that project? Will white audiences ever be able to fully grasp what I am saying?” While moving through these difficult questions and a variety of spaces, Marshall turned to draw strength from the work of Phillis Wheatley, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and All About Love by bell hooks, Jamila Woods, Roy Kinsey, Fatimah Asghar, and many more. While writing Finna, Marshall recounts how the book was written over the course of some of the most difficult years within his life thus far. He says, “There have been a lot of people who have ushered me through that and through that sort of crucible with a lot of care. I don’t think the poems would have been able to come to fruition without those people and without that level of care. In terms of who those people are, there are a ton of folks. A lot of my family, political comrades, artistic homies, communities that I am a part of, and too many folks to name, although I do attempt that through the thank yous in the back of the book.”

One of the many topics that Finna heavily contemplates is the role of historical memory on how we collectively converse about the role of Black people within art production. As Marshall puts it, “In this country, we have not entirely thought about and reckoned with Black folks’ role in the American project as the innovators who create work. Their labor was unpaid, underpaid, and largely not acknowledged.” Marshall is speaking about the role of Black folks within this segment of society was to also exist as the unthinking thinking machine. This thought can be traced back to understanding Black enslaved folks as one of the first articulations of what we might now think of as artificial intelligence or a kind of version of the robot/machine. This goes back to the 1800s when the industrial revolution was taking place in the north and with the creation of factories and machines. Marshall illustrated what was occurring by describing how, “In the south, there was a machine that was flesh and bone rather than iron and steel.” These points are being connected to explain how Black people were not allowed space for an emotional life in public spaces as they were subjected to anti-Blackness in all facets of their life. Marshall added, “We are still undoing and understanding the kind of cost of these mechanisms that have been at play for longer than any of us have been alive.”

While I was reading Finna, I found that many of the poems dealt with vulnerable topics, from Marshall recounting stories of family members, navigating intimate relationships, and feelings of temporality within an anti-Black world. When asked about the work displaying a kind of vulnerability, Marshall said, “The hope is that the work is an example of a kind of vulnerability for folks that they can access, draw strength from, and draw some education on how to do that within their own lives.” Moving forward with the hope that Finna exists as a book that expresses care about specific individuals that Marshall has within his life and larger communities, Marshall continued, “I hope that the poems are sort of projects that offer people some sort of subsistence and power to get them through. I think about the relationships that I have with certain albums, books, and TV shows that I was really shaped by during the time of my life. That feels to me like so much of what the role of art has been for Black folks, certainly in this history of the United States and I would venture to say ‘West’ more broadly. All Black and African American cultural reproduction is in conversation with the work song.” The “work song” is used to explain Black people would use many forms of art to get through the day while they were engaged in back-breaking labor and were forced to endure an entire series of indignity throughout the course of the day. This can be tied back to a historical moment in which Thomas Jefferson “examined” Black people who were enslaved and arrived at the conclusion that they appeared to work longer, sleep less, and need less food than any white person.

Marshall added, “Jefferson is missing a lot in his racist reading and this makes sense because racism is by nature an unimaginative space. His reading misses that part of the reason why Black folks would be up past bedtime even though they had to get up before the break of day to go about the work on the plantation. [It] is because that time after dark was the time that they had to themselves to be sort of creatively generative.” Creative generation might have looked like them planning to make love with their partner, telling stories with others, singing songs, imagining someday where they can stab the slave master in his neck, and other reimaginations of their current life. This exists as a kind of making and adds to the point that there is a night to the day that is the work song.

Brimming with many moments in which Marshall unapologetically walks in his truth while committing himself to his own healing, Finna is a text that urges readers to question how they're honoring Black folks reveling in the radical expression of their full range of emotions, how they interact with work that is created by Black folks, and question if they are continuously creating space for Black folks to bring their full authentic selves. From poems that speak towards the vitality of Black kinship, to imagining a world, “without the cop’s unruly bullet or baton” (what it is &will be by Nate Marshall), Marshall pushes us to imagine a better world through the poetry of possibility.