The Albuquerque Graveyard by Jay Wright
"The Albuquerque Graveyard" is a poem by Jay Wright, featured in his collection *Soothsayers and Omens*, which delves into the complexities of African American identity and memory. In this work, Wright reflects on his visits to a cemetery that serves as a symbolic space for exploring the legacies of past generations. The poem begins with a contemplation of the challenges associated with accessing this site, highlighting a tension between the poet's personal journey and broader historical narratives. As he traverses the cemetery, he observes the stark contrast between the graves of white individuals and those of African Americans, prompting a meditation on the hidden histories and struggles of Black lives.
Wright utilizes the concept of "limbo" to convey a dual sense of uncertainty and a necessary balance within the African American experience. Through vivid memories of individuals buried there, he attempts to honor their contributions while grappling with feelings of alienation and the desire to articulate a meaningful context for their lives. Ultimately, "The Albuquerque Graveyard" serves as a pivotal exploration of belonging and the quest to connect personal history with collective memory, illustrating the poet's evolution towards understanding his place in the world.
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The Albuquerque Graveyard by Jay Wright
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1976 (collected in Soothsayers and Omens, 1976)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The Albuquerque Graveyard” comes from the middle section of Wright’s third book, Soothsayers and Omens, a volume that marks his first steps toward defining a spiritual order and his place in it. In these poems, Wright explores African creation myths that have become a part of the cross-cultural collective memory. Using this new perspective, he revisits the Mexico and New Mexico of his earlier work.
“The Albuquerque Graveyard” is typical of the transitional poems in the second and third parts of the four-part volume. In it, the poet returns to a cemetery he has visited many times, but this time with a new challenge: understanding himself in the context of past generations of African Americans.
He begins the poem by commenting about the difficulty of getting to the cemetery: “It would be easier/ to bury our dead/ at the corner lot”; that way, he would not have to get up before dawn and take several buses. The search follows a familiar routine. On the way to the rear of the cemetery, he passes the opulent graves of white people and remarks that “the pattern of the place is clear to me.”
The poet articulates what that pattern means in the next four lines: “I am going back/ to the Black limbo,/ an unwritten history/ of our own tensions.” He refers not only to the cemetery’s physical layout but also to a historical pattern. In the poem, “limbo” has two meanings: Blacks are in limbo, an area of uncertainty and neglect where their struggles have not been articulated; moreover, they must consciously maintain a tense balance, as a person does when doing the limbo, the dance created on the crowded slave ships. The poet wants to write the history that has been forgotten and to unwrite that which has been done in error. He wants to solidify the place of the African American—the dead as well as the living—in Western culture.
The poet sees the cemetery’s occupants lying “in a hierarchy of small defeats.” He stops by individual graves and recalls the people buried there: a man who saved pictures of the actor and singer Paul Robeson and who dreamed of acting the part of Othello; a woman who taught him to spell so that he would become the writer she could never be. Yet the memories of these “small heroes” bother him, because he cannot put them and himself in a larger, more significant context.
He ends the poem by describing the uneasy search for his relatives, the “simple mounds I call my own.” He finds them, drops his flowers on the graves, and heads for home. He confronts his relatives’ graves still feeling alienated. The experience of connecting with his personal past is pivotal in Wright’s poetic development, however; it paves the way for his process of conversion by enabling him to see himself as an integral part of an order in the world rather than an unconnected life.
Bibliography
Callaloo 6 (Fall, 1983). Special issue on Jay Wright.
Doreski, C. K. “Decolonizing the Spirits: History and Storytelling in Jay Wright’s Soothsayers and Omens.” In Reading Race in American Poetry: An Area of Act, edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Harris, Wilson. The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Kutzinski, Vera M. Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Okpewho, Isidore. “From a Goat Path in Africa: An Approach to the Poetry of Jay Wright.” Callaloo: A Journal of the African American and African Arts and Letters 14 (Summer, 1991): 692-726.
Stepto, Robert. “After Modernism, After Hibernation: Michael Harper, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright.” In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Arts, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Stepto, Robert. Introduction to Selected Poems of Jay Wright. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Welburn, Ron. “Jay Wright’s Poetics: An Appreciation.” MELUS 18 (Fall, 1993): 51-70.