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See: His long long face His broad broad nose His thick thick lips His dark brown eyes His Black black skin I’ve watched his transfiguration. His face hard then soft, inscribed flesh soft then hard, anguish pouring into terror, terror churning into fear, fear drying on the street. A sculpture of a man, wrestled, flattened, then raised up. He is—this Man—what we have learned art is supposed to do for us, for humans: teach us to ourselves, showing us more than what mirrors can show. Light loses itself in him. He is everything and everything we have been taught to hate—some of us to hate even about ourselves. He is everything—long, broad, thick, dark, brown, Black—and more than everything. A mural: Black Life in Perpetual Memoriam. I regard it now—the art we suffer and often die to become— and wonder (secretly) if it is better to be alive.12 Speaking for myself, I have hated my own round face, my own sharp nose that flares, my own lips like dried bauxite, my own jaundiced eyes and teeth, my Black black skin.13 But I know better. There is more to me than this self-loathing, a better, more beautiful path to my people than this. I need an everything that will reflect this understanding. We need a new everything. Everything that, in a way, would defy certain metaphors.14 Understand that I am not against metaphor, in general, only the ones that make less of me to argue that I am more than I am. I am not, for instance, a beast with superhuman strength. My defiance of metaphor may be a superpower—a talent KEVIN ADONIS BROWNE 11 in need of parables and bodies to breathe life into. But I am not superhuman. I am not subhuman either. I do not—cannot—claim one or the other, and not so I can claim the human in me. I am, like you, the thing itself: a human life in perpetual imagination of itself. And I wonder if this is what it means to exist in memoriam of a future that is better than this. I am made up—composed—but not a concept. Nor are you, for that matter. Nor is he. And yet, in his face I imagine the subtle crags and clefts of an ancient monolith. I might be forgiven for 10 Direction: Clap, if you have hands to clap, in a steady one-two, one-two rhythm. Pick up the pace to double time. Rock. Bend your knees. Come. Bring the chorus with you. Take it, as if by the hand. Pull it gently with you. 11 Direction: Let the singing subside. Let the voices drop of their own accord. Take a breath for yourself. 12 It is, I think, and I wish to die as my grandfathers died: old. 13 These things that compose me are not mine to hate. They belonged to those before me, and to those before them. I know this as I know myself. I know, too, that to hate these things about myself is to hate myself. It is to hate what—and who—it was that made me. It is to hate space and time, to hate those who loved me into being. I have, at one time or another, hated everything about my Black self. 14 There are many, not just the dead, who find themselves as inadvertent everythings in the dried-up eyes of cynics who are forced to exhume their own people. Their findings are usually thus (or close to thus): Uprooted people and our descendants are harder to exhume than you might think. Between the ground and the open air, they are harder to grasp than you might want to believe. How else but through symbolic devices—like metaphor, but there are others—can one claim that which can no longer be owned? How to call as mine and ours that which no longer resides in anything we can hold or protect, a thing more likely to possess than be possessed?

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