“Unshuttered” Fills 19th-Century Archival Silences with Staggering Sound
The archive is both incomplete and endless. Led through it by the best of historians, one only gets so far before the edges of the map dissolve into the unknown. Letters unanswered, events unrecorded, and photographs unlabeled obstruct us from total certainty. The most damning of these gaps in knowledge are those created intentionally — through bigotry, greed, and notions of supremacy.
In her latest poetry collection, Unshuttered, Patricia Smith fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge of Black life in 1900s America. Each poem is based on a haunting nineteenth-century photograph from the poet’s personal collection, in which all but one of the pictured people remain unidentified. With her signature wit and warmth in hand, Smith lends a voice to these silent stars in the form of taut, aching monologues.
Readers are left in awe of the lives Smith imagines for these Black men, women, and children, as well as with grief at what can never be known for sure about them. Smith takes the ekphrastic poem to new levels, waiting at the edge of that dissolving map of history and beckoning us further along. Her speculations come from a place of honest yearning as she invokes pride, joy, lust, and fear to reveal the rich inner possibilities of these unknown people.
