An Interview with Ishion Hutchinson
Neha Mulay
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. Hutchinson is the author of Far District (2010) and House of Lords and Commons (2016) and a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, and the Whiting Writers Award, among others. His collection, School of Instructions, is forthcoming in 2023.
Hutchinson’s poems are prismatic tributes to a past of colonial oppression and violence, shaped by fracture, remembrance and refraction. They are redolent of the jolt of the Jamaican landscape, which is described as being lush with “vermillion / shock of trees” and “blue water” that “whitens and collects you in its salt mine.” Hutchinson wields a high alchemical poise into transformative and otherworldly sequences that transcend temporality: the lost, burnt ships, visions of azaleas, markets, soldiers, ministers, and the father and his “flawed life.” As he notes, these forces move from “opulence to squalor, never the inverse.”
The remarkable ironwork of Hutchinson’s language (woven, sometimes heaped) never succumbs to the expected. Instead, silences intermingle with memory and incantation in his poems. In the poem “Second Return,” he writes, “Let not the blank of winter forget the buried glass; / let it pull blood out of any pilgrim who goes there / and marks a way back by the body’s scent / and light, distended, by a melting brook.” His work hearkens back to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Derek Walcott, Kamau Braithwaite, V.S. Naipaul, and Jean Rhys among others.
I spoke with Hutchinson in December last year. He was in his office at Cornell University, where he is an Associate Professor and the Director of Creative Writing. A window cut a square of crisp light next to him. Hutchinson was solemn, his speech poignant and measured. Suitably, our conversation was tinged with a reverence for the creative spirit.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How does the poem begin for you—with which unit of space, being, or language?
ISHION HUTCHINSON: Silence, or rather textured silence. That is the very first unit— discovering a textured silence in which patterns of rhythms share something in common. It’s when the silence changes into a rhythm, and the rhythm steadies into the shape of an image, that I know I’m at the beginning of a poem. A period of gestation usually follows.
But the rhythm that I find in the textured silence might’ve been there long before any intentional search to shape it into something three-dimensional. The rhythm could’ve been a thought or a certain impression—a memory, say—I might have been carrying around for a while, and that moment arrives when the rhythm releases itself to me as something.
I engage in relentless note-taking. I write a lot in notebooks, and after some time, I rework those pages into poems. It’s a long, creative process. The point at which I am relatively certain that a decent first draft of a poem is possible is when a unique sort of rhythm sustains itself. At this point, I’m mostly repeating words in certain combinations as I test out the shape of nascent lines. And so it continues, the search for the language to fit the sounds that I am hearing and feeling.
I like to write at home, at my desk. I write early in the morning. I get up early to work because I see this as a commitment. My desk is filled with books, so I read and write at the same time. My readings have had a significant impact on my writings.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Have you ever had any visions that have become poetic preoccupations?
HUTCHINSON: There are so many obsessions. There’s so much that happens before the writing. The major one for me is reading itself and reading widely. There’s a terrific book by Edwidge Danticat called Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. One of the ideas that runs through the book is the notion that danger is an inherent part of creating. For me, creating dangerously means also reading dangerously. They’re dependent on each other, and that codependence is inextricable.
Reading is one of my main obsessions, but music is certainly another. I love to travel, to go elsewhere, and encounter unfamiliar things and re-encounter familiar things. On that last point, it’s very important for me to go home to Jamaica as much as I can. When I’m home, I don’t have to overthink my way of being in that world. I just simply exist in it, and I communicate with greater ease because—and this is so glaringly obvious it will sound overly sentimental—I’m present in my own cultural context, and I don’t have to exercise the prosaic side of my brain too much.
There’s so much written about the poetics of travel and displacement. These are things I’m interested in, and I don’t think about them too hard because they feel so inevitable and natural. When you arrive home, that moment of return is so filled with emotions. It’s quite radical and precious.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You picked emerging poets from Jamaica for Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World (Poets in the World). How do you navigate the different modes of language and the larger Anglophone tradition?
HUTCHINSON: English is the official language of Jamaica. For a poet who lives outside the culture or a language outside of the one they were born with, there is so much negotiation of rhetorical postures. For such a poet, language becomes very private. The poems demonstrate the meaning of privacy.
Some poets argue that regardless of what a poem is about, it’s always about language and power relations. Even if the poet locks himself or herself away from his or her society, there’s always a negotiation of power happening because the poem is made up of language and language—even when it’s found in the privacy of the lyric poem. It’s the human animal’s oldest, highest expression of power.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m reminded of an essay you wrote about Philip Levine. You write, “That semester I was on a pilgrimage for my own kind of tune to fit the vision I had left home, Jamaica, with; but having been in New York City for more than a year, I felt the vision going soft.” How do your poems wrestle with this softened vision or memory?
HUTCHINSON: Living in a new place as an immigrant is sort of vulnerable in a double sense. You’re taken over by this new space you’re in, but you also want to become a part of it. You want to participate in its energies, but that could come at the expense of your own origins. How much is being sacrificed when you live in a new place? At that point, living in New York, I felt it was a real conundrum. I worried that I would end up writing only nostalgic poems, which was what I was doing at that time. I have nothing against nostalgia, per se, but the risk is writing nostalgic poems that engage with a kind of touristy representation of both home and the new place I found myself in.
During my second year in New York, I was thinking about home and the experience of having been away. I felt that I wanted to reconnect with my childhood spaces. There was such a distance between myself and the enclaves of childhood, which felt as if they had vanished overnight. But that process really started in Jamaica in 2003 when I moved to Kingston from the rural eastern part of the island where I grew up. Though I was only about three hours from home, the distance felt much greater and subsequently got greater when I moved to New York from Kingston. In New York, therefore, it seemed as if I was trying to bridge a double gap between two different experiences of home.
I didn’t want there to be a hiatus between memory, history, and the present in my poems. I wanted them to collide and become one stream. I didn’t come around to figuring that out until I was working with Phil (I took one of his workshops) and even more intensely with Yusef Komunyakaa, who was my advisor at NYU. It was wonderful because though I was young and sort of frantic and at a loss in the city, I managed to articulate something very personal and private to these poets, who I revered in terms of the vision I had for my poetry. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t wasting this grand privilege of being in New York—suddenly, one has privilege. It’s a very strange thing. I was very overwhelmed, but I was very fortunate to have those mentors who helped me settle down, take a deep breath, and get back to the pursuit of poetry, which I felt was a childhood gift.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The dissolution of time in your poems feels linked to colonialism. I’m wondering about your thoughts on the theory of colonialism and post-colonialism, especially because it feels like we’re at a theoretical juncture. Much has been written with the exhaustion of theory and the complexities of the notion of the “post.” As you mention, colonialism is not really something that feels like it can have an aftermath—it still feels very prevalent. How do you wrestle with theory in your work?
“A lot of the time, American and British critics have been the ones to create theoretical responses to a lot of the creative writing produced in the Caribbean or by Caribbean writers and poets. I’m not complaining about this fact, just pointing it out as a real factor in the landscape of Caribbean literature. The more variegated the field of criticism is, the better, but there is an imbalance.”
HUTCHINSON: During the past recent years in the Caribbean, a generation of creatively energetic voices have been emerging from different islands. We have responded very strongly and very well to the work of earlier generations of Caribbean writers and poets. To put it coldly, Caribbean criticism hasn’t always been in step with the high energy or accomplishment of Caribbean creative work. Critics are absolutely vital to that theoretical framework. We do need more critics.
Maybe it’s my fault, but I don’t always see contemporary critics who are writing about contemporary poets and writers at the rate at which contemporary writers and poets have been producing work of such indispensable quality. A lot of the time, American and British critics have been the ones to create theoretical responses to a lot of the creative writing produced in the Caribbean or by Caribbean writers and poets. I’m not complaining about this fact, just pointing it out as a real factor in the landscape of Caribbean literature. The more variegated the field of criticism is, the better, but there is an imbalance. Our own critical voices are not as pronounced or prevalent as the ones that impose certain terms on ways of assessing or framing in Caribbean literature.
And it’s from these British and American corners that you get terms such as “post-post.” And I’m not impatient with those terms because I see them as existing within the stream of our constant search to clarify our present moment. It’s very difficult to pronounce or to give an assessment that is far-reaching when we’re in the midst of so many changes at the same time, so critical language is always, at best, provisional and, at times, a bit deficient.
I’m always looking for the reaction to the reaction—the writings of Caribbean critics on the notion of the post-post-colonial condition are interesting. Speaking for myself, I don’t even use the term postcolonial, though I see the relevance of it, and I see how it can be very useful in a certain context.
But as you’ve said—and this is my point of contention, too—we’re still within the colonial conundrum, and we have to deal with the realities around the hangovers that are emerging out of a colonial background. It’s so heavy and pronounced on the psyche. We cannot just move away from that condition until we have really examined it further within our current dispensation and our current moment. There are still a lot of unanswered questions that relate to colonial identity. I’m much more interested in the criticism or the questions around the presence of colonial attitudes and the fact that we have not quite shifted away from those colonial pressures. So, I just want more of an examination of that reality.
Yes, in spite of the fact that there’s a lot written about colonialism and post-colonialism, I think the canon is very much established, and it could certainly benefit from additional criticism that is focused on the contemporary literary landscape.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I know you’ve mentioned Marquez as an influence, and I can certainly see that in your work, particularly in terms of the dissolution of time. Linda B. Hall writes about the idea of “labyrinthine solitude” in Marquez’s work in terms of a place in which history blends into the present moment. What do you think of this idea?
HUTCHINSON: I’m unfamiliar with the idea, but it’s a lovely phrase, and it seems very apt to describe Marquez’s work. The Autumn of the Patriarch is my favorite of Marquez’s novels. The sentences themselves are, of course, labyrinthine in their construction, operating as a metaphor for the decay that takes place when power overreaches because it’s coming from a terrible past. The implicit irony is that the liberating forces might eventually turn into the oppressors. That’s one of the themes in Marquez and Faulkner.
You can see it in Toni Morrison as well—survival is a very complex undertaking, but there is an element of surviving something that leaves the survivor marked. And who knows, the survivor might then turn to a kind of violence, whether it’s enacted on others or the self. Where does one go after discovering something horrific? What’s the process of rediscovering one’s humanity? What are the tools that offer a way back to the self without the self constantly negotiating between the idea of the self as a survivor and as a person beyond that experience?
I grew up around people who have survived terrible things. And they’re some of the kindest, warmest, most generous people that I know. I think they carry a lot of joy, but there’s a lot of baggage at the same time. So it’s not just enough to have survived something.
There wasn’t any kind of truth and reconciliation in the Caribbean or in America. At the official end of slavery, people just had to go about living their lives. There wasn›t any kind of grief counseling or things of that nature. Trauma is a word that seems overused these days. But for the people of my grandmother›s generation, there was no open conversation about the trauma of surviving enslavement. And the people in my generation inherited those kinds of silences of living in the aftermath of something so horrific and incomprehensible. The descendants of enslaved Africans have created a culture and wonderful, amazing, singular kinds of resistance—it may feel like there is no need to have any further conversations around enslavement or survival because we have already passed through those phases, although I don’t think that’s true across the board.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’ve previously mentioned Kamau Brathwaite as an influence on your work. In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, Kamau Brathwaite writes, “it is not enough to be free / of the whips, principalities and powers.” What does this idea mean to you?
HUTCHINSON: Those are beautiful lines. On the one hand, it’s conflating a lot of apocalyptic Biblical theory in terms of “principalities,” “powers,” and “the whips,” which takes into consideration the conditions of enslavement. The whip and the Bible were the master’s tools that were used during enslavement. And the whip may have disappeared, but the enslavement and the psychological trauma of the heritage of principalities and powers within a biblical framework—those things still exist. Our societies in the Caribbean are deeply religious, and the paradox is that Caribbean people have found great freedom because of this Biblical heritage. But nonetheless, that heritage is marred by the fact that the introduction of the Bible and Christianity to the Caribbean comes out of extreme violence.
So, it’s not just enough. It’s supremely important. And it’s a call to arms in its own way—to demand more from the self in the first instance and the system of power that oversees such a self and insist that none of this is enough, especially when we’ve lived through—to refer to another one of Marquez’s titles—“an evil hour.”
Braithwaite’s credo is truly remarkable. There are other figures in recent memory like Braithwaite, such as people like Paule Marshall, great Caribbean thinkers who think really hard about what is enough and what is not and ask us to demand more of ourselves.
“[F]or me, silence is very textured. I can’t avoid the tautology—it’s a textured form of absence. There’s a possibility in this silence, an invitation, because you have a slate to play around with, something on which to make the sounds that are embossed patterns on the white page that rise and reveal themselves in communicable expressive forms.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of my favorite lines from House of Lords and Commons is “a kingfisher / hushed back into the chrysalis he sang to us from.” Your poems are incredibly lush—they consider “opulence” and “squalor.” How is silence transfixed by beauty? Is beauty subsumed by silence?
HUTCHINSON: I insist on opulence in my work because it is very much a part of a piece of the language that I grew up in. Our language is extravagant and normal things are filled with rhetorical flourishes. Grandeur is very much centered in the Jamaican linguistic heritage.
My grandmother had so much style. She didn’t have a lot of possessions, but when she put on a dress or a skirt, she adjusted it a certain way to let the lines show their beauty. Or she picked very colorful clothing and tied her hair a certain kind of way. She was just beautifying herself for herself, or maybe, at times, for the attention of others as well. I want to celebrate that beauty—no one else has seen it. She was a very private person, so it is a sort of duty for me to make my own writing take on some of that aspect of her self-creating beauty. Her insistence on beauty in the midst of the poverty that we lived through—that’s a form of resilience. Insisting on sartorial beauty is a form of resistance.
It goes back to the Bible—the King James version of the Bible is so steeped in our day-to-day linguistic activities, not just in terms of the suffusion of biblical terminologies but also the biblical syntax, which is deeply coded in the way that Jamaicans speak. So there are very lush patterns of repetition and anaphoric statements—very playful and enigmatic—and part of that, of course, is the creolization of biblical heritage. So that’s just a natural part of the beautiful language that I heard around me, that I was always trying to suffuse my own work with.
Even the landscape is staggeringly beautiful. I grew up overlooking the sea in my grandmother›s house. That sight was present every morning. It was this aquamarine, limitless body of water that I saw on a daily basis. And behind the house was the Blue Mountain range. So the beauty of the landscape and the natural world was a remarkable part of my upbringing.
I have no qualms about beauty because I want to have just a little piece of it because, well, beauty is truth—there’s a felt honesty to beauty. I will not let history ruin beauty. History is certainly minor in comparison to the great swelling of feeling that is emotionally inspired by the fact that this landscape exists and I live in it.
And, of course, there’s a lot of silence that goes along with that. But as I was saying, for me, silence is very textured. I can’t avoid the tautology—it’s a textured form of absence. There’s a possibility in this silence, an invitation, because you have a slate to play around with, something on which to make the sounds that are embossed patterns on the white page that rise and reveal themselves in communicable expressive forms.
I’ve heard people talk about being frightened or terrified of the blank page, but I think it’s very dramatic because the poet translates these silences into tactile, felt rhythmic structures. I don’t believe we begin in absolute silence. I think the page is a sort of a clearing. In the midst of the crowded landscape, there’s this little space that you are given that you can fill with the most striking parts of the woods or the thicker landscape.
It takes me back to thinking about The Tempest and Caliban’s famous speech about the isles full of noises. He goes on to describe those noises as melodies. He refers to berries that you put in the water—these little flashes of beauty, which are silent images that have a certain sound. These berries, because of their shape, color, and being, submerge to make a new sound. What might appear silent is always laden with sonic possibilities.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’ve been thinking about the phenomenology of memory. Memory is often tied to knowing and familiarity, but it’s also episodic (Dokic). In “The Small Dark Interior,” you write, “you see the scene because you think it.” In “Second Return,” you write, “Let not the blank of winter forget the buried glass.” How do you approach remembrance and amnesia in your work?
HUTCHINSON: It makes me think about the memories that I didn’t have or create. The only way those memories come out is through the effort of the imagination. For instance, imagining the transatlantic middle passage—it’s a very scary place to enter. It’s necessary to go back, but how far back can we really go?
Beyond that history, the history of the people who were trafficked into the new world—what’s the history of those people prior to invasion and capture? It’s hard to have a clear picture because no clear picture has survived from those people who had that experience. The logbooks of ship descriptions from slaves may still exist, but that’s not really memory.
But for me to understand where I am and who I am, I have to go back into my own psyche to see if I can remember an experience that wasn’t mine. And it›s the imagination that empowers me to do so. I›m interested in that process of memorialization and remembrance because I think of it as a way of creating the conditions in which justice becomes possible for a crime against humanity that hasn’t been recompensed.
You brought up Kamau Braithwaite and his early work. His Rights of Passage trilogy imagines Africans being trafficked into the New World and mixes it with the blues, folk songs, Creole languages, and other New World creations: that’s one way in which he was able to make that memory so vivid and present. That process is still open to a contemporary poet. We have so many resources available to us outside of our own personal lives. But the kind of cultural creations that have emerged after enslavement are all emancipatory forces. So I think it’s important for the poet to take as much creative license as possible in imagining history outside of the recorded document and the statistical structures.
And going back to Danticat’s idea, that’s how you create dangerously: by articulating those groans and grunts and the dark damp interior of the hulls of the slave ships crossing the ocean. It’s difficult to hold onto those images or to create a language that goes beyond just registering suffering or describing it. How do you make those sounds and smells and the whole sensory range of those experiences vivid? How do you create in such a way that a poem has all the immediate and shocking implications that one can imagine such experiences carried? The present is very much part of the notion of density and opacity. The present is dense with historical memories that I have to—through a process of semantic, structural, and patterning—come close to realizing their different dimensions.
“What I love about the poetry of the people I most admire is that reading their work makes me feel transformed in ways that they can never quite describe or justify. I sense it so deeply, and I realize this because my own work is immersed in that transformative state. So a poem of theirs is a form of multiplicity—so many simultaneous worldviews and multiple states of being held together in a single movement of a phrase or a line or a stanza and a poem.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Could you speak to the role of surrealism and transmutation in poetry?
HUTCHINSON: A poem is a constant act of transformation. Even when there is a unity of sounds, when a line might follow a recognizable pattern, if you interrogate it closely, you›ll see that a hop from one word is a great leap.
What I love about the poetry of the people I most admire is that reading their work makes me feel transformed in ways that they can never quite describe or justify. I sense it so deeply, and I realize this because my own work is immersed in that transformative state. So a poem of theirs is a form of multiplicity—so many simultaneous worldviews and multiple states of being held together in a single movement of a phrase or a line or a stanza and a poem. It›s like the chemicals in our bodies: they’re carrying out so many functions at once, and that’s what a word is in an etymological sense. You could trace the many vowels that a single word contains.
A word in English may still have its proto-Sanskrit root viable. The further you go into excavating such a word, the closer you come to understanding what the word means in a contemporary context. When a word has been corroded by history, it’s the poet’s job to sift through language and create a new sense of what’s possible when one word meets another. That’s why rhythm is the ultimate test of a poem. It’s recyclability, not just in and of itself as a verbal play, though that ludic aspect of poetry is very important. The modernist credo “Make it new again” is very important.
That’s a question one might ask regarding a poem that one has written. Of course, the question becomes so much more complicated when you ask, “new to whom?”
I think the poet’s duty to language comes before anything else in terms of the aesthetic risk that the poet takes. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the poet is more interested in aesthetics than ethics, but I would say that if the aesthetics aren’t strong enough to carry the ethics, there’s something off there. The poem that preaches to a reader is not the most interesting one. I’m interested in the poem that gives the reader a fresh sense of the reader’s reality—something the reader has not anticipated. That’s why I read for myself, to discover a language pitched in a certain way that makes me feel new and transformed. When we consider the term “political poetry,” we should ask what that really means and why there should be a qualification to this poetry. Why isn’t it just poetry? One response someone might have is that political poetry is interested in a certain agenda.
I think political poems can be very powerful. I would risk it all for the poem that offers the most beautiful enlightened, new way of experiencing language rather than the one that dictates how to think and feel. You could evaluate the presence of a certain sort of politics in Dickinson’s poems. That’s certainly her recollections and her refusal to traffic in the vocabulary of her time. Rhythmically, most of her poems are based on the ballad form and on the hymn structure. There’s a way she’s using music that doesn’t isolate a reader or a listener. She›s challenging such a reader and listener with a kind of aesthetic singularity.
She has created a whole language field of her own. You could draw a similar comparison to Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage,” which depends on historical documents for much of its structure, but the quotes cited in the poem are undercut by hymns and African Negro Spirituals. Further, some parts of the poem move between quatrain stanzas to passages that feel like prose—all of that is an aesthetic choice that is in service of delivering the experience in a way that makes it memorable.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You write, “serenely vexed / that your life is not a chess game, played again / in the shade.” I’m struck by this aware consideration of narrative. Do you write against the simulacrum? How do you channel the voices in your poems?
HUTCHINSON: I’m interested in writing into (rather than merely against) the English language, playing with the various poetic traditions at hand. I’m invested in creating a language that is unpredictable. It’s the trouble between inheritance and earning one’s place. There are things that are inevitable due to my background, but I also know that there’s a lot I have to work hard to lay claim to. I can’t dismiss anything outright when it comes to literature because that puts me at a disadvantage. I want to find a way of writing myself into the various forms of literary reception in order to discover this voice of my own. Having a gift is great, but the only way poetry works is through great labor. This labor is proof that you are or you have been alive to your time on age and time on earth.
We can think about Emily Dickinson in this regard, writing her poems while being locked away in her room. We might think that she just wrote some poems about her own suffering, but when she created those poems, she was everywhere at once—in the world outside and with herself—without leaving the solitude of her room. This may sound mystical, but the mind of a real poet is a mind that submits itself to a risky furtherance of normal thinking. It has to go beyond even the language that it uses. It’s what the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva defined as the impossibility of the lyric voice. It is impossible in that it goes beyond the received conventional voicing because it has to become a unique and individual thing. It has to go even beyond the influences that such a voice might be in touch with. Whatever the poet reads or draws on ends up being material that gets the voice going, but it has to abandon some of those and reach towards some of the ways of expressive form.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m intrigued by the mention of Heidegger’s Being and Time in “The Lords and Commons of Summer.” How have you interacted with the writings of Heidegger?
HUTCHINSON: I had a huge fascination with Heidegger when I was in graduate school. I didn’t always get it, but it was a lot of fun to read. In the line of the poem you mentioned, I was making a pun on “bean,” which in retrospect seems kind of crude, but as a graduate student, I was really hungry for literature, but I was also really hungry all the time. It was a lot of fun coming up with puns and thinking about literature as food in more than one sense. In terms of Heidegger, I found the notion of time and appearances very fascinating as a younger poet and reader who was looking for a philosophical grounding. Heidegger is one of those voices that meant a lot to me.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Which other philosophers have influenced your work?
HUTCHINSON: I’ve always loved Simone Weil. She’s very important to me. I like to think I’m a student of her work even though I’m still so underread there. There are a lot of German philosophers that have influenced me. I just read the book Magnificent Rebels about the Jena school of philosophers, and it was really great to go back to romantic German philosophers such as Schlegel, Schiller, and Fichte, who had such an important influence on the English romantics, whom I adore, particularly Coleridge.
I read a lot of theology and also quite a bit of German theology, my favorite being Bonhoeffer. In terms of Caribbean thinkers, Édouard Glissant is the one I return to. Wilson Harris is also one of those great philosophical Caribbean writers who are very important to me.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Are you working on anything at the moment?
HUTCHINSON: I have a book of poems coming out next year. It’s a booklength poem. It’s called School of Instructions, and it is about West Indian soldiers who were volunteers in British regiments during World War I. It’s a sort of memorial, a remembrance for those soldiers. Some of them died in Europe and the Middle East, while others returned to Jamaica and other islands and became key figures in national liberation movements like Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and various Pan-African institutions. Surprisingly little has been written about that experience. It’s a poem that tries to give voice to, meditate on, imagine, and confront that history and celebrate those men.