Fill in the blanks by Imani Cezanne
For the new year, for January 2021, I have chosen to write about a poem that has stayed with me, and probably will for a long time. It is a poem I have read multiple times over the course of a day. The poem is called Fill in the blanks by Imani Cezanne, which recently won the 2020 Fugue Journal contest and was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart. It is a poem that speaks of the erasure of black women’s voices and issues within certain white feminist politics, a poem that — by the very nature of erasing and creation of absence — makes all the more prominent the very absence which the poem addresses.
The poem is set out like one of those “fill in the blanks” exercises done at school in English class: here are some words and their definitions. Now see if you can place them correctly within the following paragraph. In this way, the poem is broken up into three sections, or stanzas. In the first, we are asked to think about the word “absent”. Example are given centring around The National Women’s March, with phrases like “The National Women’s March™ was of arrests.”
The second stanza does not give a word, but a blank space (“ ”) which is defined as “relating to persons having dark skin; characterized by the absence of light”. Examples for this section include “A ____ woman was hacked from idle mahogany and buried inside herself.” This stanza is marked by the use of violence against women, which contrasts with the non-violence of the first stanza. At the end of this stanza, a note reads “No National Women’s March™ was organized.” which hints at the issues raised in the last stanza; the absence of concern for the experience of black women.
The final stanza is the practice section where you fill in the blanks. Despite the symbol for “absent”, from the first stanza, and the symbol for “ ”, relating to people who have dark skin, from the second stanza being the same (“___ ”) it is undeniable which word goes where within the final paragraph exercise. The section highlights the viewpoint that The National Women’s March seem only really to prioritise the issues of white, middle-class women and in doing so, marginalise women who do not fit into this category, including black women and trans women. This is particularly evident with phrases like “When the white woman speaks of all women the woman is .” and “If the white woman speaks of women the trans woman is . The queer woman is .” By leaving these blank spaces in the poem, by not using the word “black”, Cezanne makes the absence of black women all the more powerful, all the more noticeable. It is unsettling. It is upsetting. But it also speaks truthfully about the realities of what it is like to be non-white in this world, what it is like to have your experiences ignored, to live by different rules. But there is also a kind of complicity on the part of the reader. The reader is an active participant in that they have to fill in the blanks. By choosing which words go where, they are in effect completing the poem. It adds a layer of meaning, indicating that the reader is to make their own truth from the poem, a truth that is undeniable. It also attests to the power of the poem that, even without the first two stanzas, the message of the third stanza would not be lost on the reader.
In the last paragraph of the poem, the speaker says: “I didn’t go to the National Women’s March™ because I didn’t know about it. Nobody told me. I wasn’t invited either way I had to go to work for which I was late because the city buses were detoured because white women prefer to gather in their own favor and then vote against it because I could be shot dead with nothing but my palms in my hands and white women would not have marched for me.” It is a stark reminder of the violence so often used against black bodies, of the lack of change and the threat that is constant. It is a reminder of the BLM protests of 2020, the murder of countless black people in America by people in a position of authority and power, the disregard for black lives. The last line of the poem brings this all to a head. It is haunting and troubling. It is a line that expresses the easiness of being able to forget things that have happened in history, things that are still happening now that are uncomfortable, the easiness to ignore things that seem too hard to confront, an unwillingness to act, to speak out against violence: “… I could be shot dead with nothing but my palms in my hands and white women would not have marched for me. Would not have noticed my .”
Read the full poem here.
Text and illustration by Rochelle Roberts
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