Barrelhouse Reviews: Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) by Karla Brundage
Reviewed by Rae Diamond
Finishing Line Press / February 2024 / 76 pp
Karla Brundage's Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) is a submarine that tours readers through the murkiest depths of the Who-Are-You-and-How-Do-You-Know-You're-Human Ocean. Brundage's phosphorescent poems guide us through the particular territories of this dim abyss, defined by race, gender, and the interplay of these two forces within ourselves and our societies. In Blood Lies, we swim through this sea on currents of eddying emotion, along confluences of family and national history, and down glittering lines of swift intellect. Brundage's verses undulate not just between Black and white, but between mulattress and equation, trauma and betrayal, traitor and trader, etymology and enlightenment.
In these pages, the reader swirls in centripetal currents with lines like “Grandpa is a Black Indian. / His parents 14th Amendment certified / full persons” in “Octoroon (Definition in Process)”—or in “Noun and Adjective”—"a person having one white and one black parent; / a hybrid; / a green sandstone; / a chili.” In “Context Cultural” Brundage owns a black body and a white body, but asks the reader a koan: “Under which label will you prefer to / submit my mental health record?” That is, what color is her mind? What color is anyone's mind? And is anyone’s mind free of the tidal push-pull of division and unification of self?
Brundage’s explorations of self, history, and language prove as multifaceted in form as they are in inquiry. Some poems look like definitions, while others mirror algebraic theorems. Some poems read with the rhythmic punch of hip-hop, while others fall into the eyes and ears like breathless spirals of memory. Some poems hug the left edge of the page, while others waver side to side or fall diagonally down some half blotted-out stairway. Some poems are dense with word and story, while others scarcely color the page with ink. These barely-there poems offer the reader space to pause and allow the words—and the complex histories behind the words—to inspire a way of seeing the overwhelming vastness of the horizon of the Who-Are-You Ocean.
We use words all the time, but do we know what those words really mean, and therefore what we are actually saying? With the finesse of a magician, Brundage unpacks, upends, and performs sleights of hand with words we have shoved into closets, like mulatta and octoroon; words we don't know what to do with, like Black and White; and everyday words we assume we understand, like body and mind. In “Both, And” she defines, undefines, and redefines “mulatto” into a disappearing-reappearing rainbow of expression: “Of mixed breed / a half-ass... / two segregated halves of privilege and want / Socially acceptable and degraded... / Related Entries: Mule.” A mule, she defines as “offspring of a beast of burden and a stud / ...a hybrid plant or animal, especially a sterile one.”
Brundage follows the lead of language and law, and takes a measuring tape and a calculator to the soul. As she quantifies, combines, if-thens, and divides, we find that nothing adds up: “One eighth Negro blood (still not free—but maybe passes sometimes) / Daughters of rape we are / Mulatto-mother + white father=” in “Octoroon” and “Grandpa is one half Native American but embodies black / Grandma lives black but presents as white / What is mom? / And me / I am 1/2 that plus / 1 whole white... / Mulatto+Black =Sambo” in “Octoroon: (noun).” In the online journal periodicities (Process note #31), she asks, “If one’s blood can be diluted, can it also be recondensed?”
During an interview at a poetry salon I attended in Oakland, Brundage explained that the term “mulatto” had been a comforting word for her when she was a child because it settled her indecision about whether she was white or black. She was both, and finally she had a word that expressed the both/and-ness that was her personal experience. Later, however, she learned that “mulatto” is a word with a baleful history. Beneath the book's acrobatic explorations of cringeworthy words like quadroon and mulattress, the pain of Brundage's breakup with the word “mulatto” is as palpable as a pulsing artery.
Blood Lies examines, extracts, and titrates the experience of being female within a body-mind-self born of a black parent and a white parent. In periodicities (Process note #31), Brundage explains that “historically women of my skin tone and hue bartered our skin tone for more comfortable lives closer to the Big House, which left us alienated from our community of Black women of darker shades.” Brundage takes us through her personal history of living this pattern out herself, only to find this: “Is the propensity to be raped / inherited? / Statistics say yes,” in “One-drop rule.” Then, in “High Yellow Gal,” “I learn how to hide / to walk in shadows / Black women there / see me.” After such traumas, this experience of being seen by others—not as a role someone else wants us to play, but as a unique human with needs, wounds, feelings, and particular luminosities—is for many of us the moment we start to heal and to see ourselves more clearly.
“This idea of not being ‘enough’ or having to choose seems to speak to females,” Brundage explained when I asked her about the fraught stream of female experience in Blood Lies. She shows us “how universally women and specifically BIPOC-identified women still encounter issues of self-worth when measuring themselves through the white gaze.
“I also hope to speak across the spectrum of blackness to open dialogue for healing within the Black community at large, most specifically within families where the wounds seem to cut the deepest. These stereotypes of beauty and non-beauty impact people of all genders.” In families, many of us experience a watersmeet of persistent love and hopeless misunderstanding. We see this in Brundage's complex relationship with her white father. He says, “I am so glad they said that... your hair was not red... your hair is so straight so good hair... who would you be who would you marry” in “She's a Mulatto,” while in “Inheritance,” she tells us that “When I was born my daddy left me... his gift was to be worn like a cloak / of invisibility / rendering me power and less.”
Throughout Blood Lies run competing undertows of “power and less” as they play out in both race and gender. In “The Great American Experiment Part 1967,” Brundage points out that the year of her conception—the Summer of Love—was also the year that anti-miscegenation laws were repealed by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. The poem conflates racial oppression with male supremacy: “Change the system by willing subjugation of white semen / and that stuff that women ejaculate that has no name.” In conversation, she said, “Power is one of the most intriguing dividers within the self when bringing up questions of race,” and explained that according to studies by Paula D. McClain, professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University, males tend to align with power and privilege more readily than females.
For Black men, though, this alignment with power often backfires. In “Memories,” we encounter Brundage as a child, transfixed by a photograph of her second cousin, sprawled on the ground, killed for using a bathroom designated for whites: “We don't talk about him. / He marches / He joins SNCC / He follows the rules of revolution / But one night / he doesn't.” In “Alabama Dirt,” she asks, “was it in his beautiful head / that they found the bullet / college educated brains shot out / for being hot headed, uppity / ripples of this one death / penetrate generations.”
This death and so many like it resonate beyond bloodlines and racial divides. We are all in this ocean together. In “Quicksand,” Brundage asserts, "Go through it. / Your whole instinct says / drive around it, but you gotta / go through it.” Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) is a way of moving through the surging ocean of “power and less,” of division and mis-definition, of identity and humanity. As we swim through the book's oscillations of lightlessness and luminosity, we learn new ways of seeing others and therefore of seeing ourselves, and we also learn how to flow alongside each other with more understanding, compassion, and respect. There is urgency here. Brundage begins “She Dreams a 10 Point Plan” with “the brutal killing of Black people must stop.”
But that urgency rides alongside a vast and timeless vision—she concludes her plan with “our destiny is not robbery by Capitalists but Unity.” Ultimately, any label we give ourselves or another, regardless of its history and etymology, is just that: a label. Labels enable us to make assumptions. They also make it possible to sell whatever’s behind that label. Thus we encounter the undercurrent inquiry of this shrewd book: In choosing a label for ourselves or others, whom are we trying to sell—and to whom?
Rae Diamond is a neurodivergent interdisciplinary artist, educator and nature advocate. They are the author and artist of floating bones (First Matter Press), the author of The Cantigee Oracle (North Atlantic Books), and the founder of the Long Tone Choir. She is a student and teacher of Qigong, and harbors equally deep loves for the transcendent and the absurd. Find them online at raediamond.com and @raediamond on Substack.