Ariel Francisco |

Jacques Viau Renaud was born in Haiti in 1941 and raised in the Dominican Republic following his father's political exile in 1948. During the Dominican Revolution of 1965, he joined the rebel forces in support of ousted president Juan Bosch, fighting against the US backed dictatorship. He was killed in battle at age 23.

I first encountered his work when my dad gave me a copy of his collected poems, published in 2005 and later a chapbook of Renaud’s epic poem “Permanencia del Llanto” (“Permanence of the Cry”), published in 1985 and believed to be the first posthumous publication of his work. In his collected poems, this epic appears in sixteen numbered sections. However, in the chapbook (the older and presumably original version) there is a seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth section, inexplicably excluded from the collected works. The poems as whole deals with the struggle for revolution and the need to continue the fight and remain united against insurmountable odds, and those last three sections (included here) contribute greatly and bring the poem to a powerful close.

Dead far too soon, I think of him as our Caribbean Keats: wise and talented beyond his years, taken from us too soon. We can only imagine the way his work could have continued to evolve had he lived. What he did write during his lifetime though is incredibly important, especially to those who come from the diaspora caused by the war he fought in. Renaud had an incredible awareness of oppression in his neighboring countries as well, with some poems addressing racism here in the United States. For example, a long elegy titled “For an Assassinated Black Leader” to Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader assassinated by the American government in 1963 that clearly invokes the grand “we” of Walt Whitman (whom Renaud evokes directly quite often in his other poems). Many of the poems call for solidarity among all of the Latin American nations going through political turmoil (caused by the United States).

Renaud’s poems are a call to arms, literally and figuratively, to oppressed people across the America’s, which resounds incredibly loudly with the state of the world today, particularly with the growing socialist movement here in the United States.

FOR AN ASSASSINATED BLACK LEADER

All the white shadows were conjured
to kill a black man.
All the black vigor rose
to carry the murdered black man on its shoulders.
They killed a black man from the roofs of the South,
from the cotton of the South
under the gagging sun.
They killed a black man.
They fractured Lincoln’s unborn ideals
in the mutilated heart of Mississippi,
shredded the dawn
and a thousand shouts tore the daily crystals of
America.
Roaring black protest
shaking from north to south the wild dilated country of hate,
striking the executioner’s face.
In the South billy clubs were handed out
while the black multitude carried the body kept
where filtered light awakens the blood.
They destroyed a piece of black vigor.
From a roof
they pierced his living body.
The man fell
hope fell
the days
the hours and minutes froze
the gallows spoke
the streets filled with death,
bricks, rocks, blood,
black blood
blood of the South
blood of America.
Medgar Evers
lies in the first womb
looking out
distilling the rivers water
the shrubberies voices
and the shouts that bounce off the frowning mountains
opening cavities in the heart of Whitman’s earth
or in the granite torso of Lincoln
in whose death we were born
where a dove sleeps with its black and white offspring.
Felled
armed with tenderness
true as maize
absorbing sunshine until it’s a stalk of light.
Medgar fell
shedding luminous leaves
overflowing over everything.
They murdered a black man.
Fury paved the landscape
the South crunched under the black march
that thundered from the cemetery
destroying barricades of dogs and thug cops
of spilling fire.
Many days have passed.
The dead black man of the South
has not ceased fluttering
agitating the Southern cotton
incinerating the Birmingham air
tearing the barbed wire of Jackson
feeding hope.
They assassinated a black man.
Thousands of children born into this fight
wielding a scythe of tears
marching towards the chains
of hate and terror undone
towards the light torn from his eyes
towards the song ripped from his lips.
Marching
men, women, children,
students reading, morning
labourers,
the elderly holding tight to the century
marching and singing.
Medgar Evers
from the grave armed the black anger
slamming it over the white claw
over the white hate
over the while gallows
while in his dirt filled mouth
grow lilies.
Medgar fell
on a day of boys singing their grandfathers songs
of girls mending cracks in light
a black man fell
a hope
a tear.
The clock murdered time
and there was light, so much light
in the throats that knead the songs
in the hands that birthed those howling rocks.
Medgar Evers fell.
He was black
he was hope
he was man.
A black man was felled
hope was felled
man was felled.
Rifles were raised
fire and bayonets
blood paves the Southern roads
the Mississippi drags its tattered song.
Oh Mississippi
Southern cry
black cry
American cry.
Jackson
coffin
tomb
silence.
Oh Mississippi
ripe sun
fight
Oh America,
concrete
heaps of the waiting lynched.

(the last three sections of “PERMANENCE OF THE CRY)”

XVII

Men,
our blackened hands,
humanized carbon,
banging against the hardened passage of time.
Men,
there are rumors of broken bones,
dust born in our bodies,
from our bodies
like submerged salt.
Men,
we’ll leave our names in the great book of the cry,
raze the pyramids raised by blood,
destroy them with our blackened hands,
with combative words
before the dust is unpinned from our hearts.
The wind blows out the embers of our bodies,
cracking our lips
pulling our hair
collecting
and tying it
until a word large enough to numb our ears emerges.
There’s still time to say the word.
Men, hurry,
claim your inheritance without fear,
rise,
do not collapse,
there’s still time,
say the word,
become a citizen of the world,
claim your pain,
your cry,
your life’s suffering,
your protests will raise the riots,
harboring this moment.
Complicit with your smiles,
embracing your madness
your heightened suffering.
Men,
do not collapse
it’s crucial to stand united,
uniting hurts,
love is painful,
but be loves accomplice
it’s the only way to save your lives.

XVIII

We shut our ears to the noise.
We stay quiet
      when the man reclaims our hand,
We are the flaunting dirt,
the twilight that’s slow to sink.
Vines overgrow the backyards.
The water is dusted with larva
and from these trembling eggs
comes the whining air.
The town and the city have parceled their silence
and every citizen makes use of their parcel.
There are no words,
there are no men,
only doors left ajar.
We shut our ears,
our eyes,
we can say: we saw nothing, we heard nothing
and gift tears to the windows
and sing hymns of glory
when they ask about those that weren’t
   there in that painful moment.

For those who heard and saw nothing.
Who said you can stay clean while crossing the swamp,
that you can change clothes in the rain and stay dry?
Who said nothing is compromised by not seeing or hearing?

May no one claim ignorance.
May those who say nothing suffer for not seeing.
May those who heard nothing suffer for not listening.
May those who haven’t suffered suffer for their avoidance.
Now arrives the time of sowing.
It’s crucial to rid the earth of weeds.

IXX

I save the word of man
everything comes to an end here.
Atop the dirt are trees and children.
Below the dirt— men.
Everything happened as though no one feared death.
A bountiful harvest of hatred,
the bier’s offspring inumerable.
All touch blood,
silence touches all.
Life returned to earth.
The word returned to silence.
Light returned to void.
What work can be started now that the sun is setting?
The dead do not call to the living.
They no longer look closely.
We lend them thoughts and prayers.
The dead crave nothing.
Ask for nothing. It’s the living that need
our words.
Life is overthrown,
but something remains,
there’s an inheritance to defend.
Names to continue.
Woe is us if we don’t recover that dejected seed,
if we don’t mold from the dust of our names
that heart that the earth is reclaiming.
Men,
light the fires.
Women, reclaim your bodies; and to the brave
life demands to be lived,
love demands to go further than our lives.