Anger insists on its own legibility in slave poems

Pamela Mordecai’s poem Thomas Thistlewood and Tom confronts a familiar anger dilemma in the annals of slavery: the disproportionate endurance of the oppressor’s voice.

Thistlewood, a historical plantation boss, left behind a particularly detailed diary of his life and deeds.

That record, preserved and studied, offers a chilling clarity about the everyday goings-on of plantation cruelty.

By contrast, Tom – the enslaved man in Mordecai’s poem – exists in history’s shadow, known only through the distortions of someone else’s documentation. Except through the recovery of poetry. That poem doesn’t simply review this unevenness. It presents it as a moral conflict.

What does it mean for the archive to remember the wrong person in more detail than the wronged one?

The poet’s intervention isn’t to correct the archive in a literal, technical sense, but to re-balance its ethical influence and meaning. Where the documented record preserves the one who meted brutality out, the poem restores the humanity of the one who was violated, and the poem needs us to offer such ancestors an adequate sort of attention.

Besides being a question of historical justice, it’s also a question of how violence survives itself. Slavery is not confined to the past. It persists in today’s structures of recollection: in who’s named, who’s quoted, and who must be restored from fragments, as well as in those who continue to call for reparations, and in those whose lives are cut short by police brutality.

Mordecai’s poem is an active counter-archive that refuses the proposal of a neutral record. “Shit in my mouth”, it begins. “He makes my woman put / her bottom in my face and push her doo- / doo in between my lips. When she stops he / says, ‘More! You black bitch, more! Shove it out till / it bung a clog inside his throat or I / will strip your back’”. I have read it a hundred times.

It was that tangible depiction of cruelty that shivered me, until one day I sat down and wrote a poem I named Anger, as if out of thin air.

In that poem, things begin in the body, they begin with a “festering”, with the liver remembering and the stomach storing what refuses to be resolved. Then the ­experience asks for scripture, in the hope that moral order might be forced on such disorder. “When evil folded tight inside / its shell so that sky waters would not wash / it clean...”, Mordecai’s poem says, confirming the type of iniquity that stirred me.

I return to these questions in relation to Anger. If Mordecai records an unspoken archive, my poem looks at psychic deposit. In its context, rage isn’t an abstract moral state. It is physical sediment; sourness tasted in today’s memory, whatever remains when experience can’t move toward clarity. It is a cleansing, not a transformation.

The poem moves from internal pressure to ritual expression.

Both poems engage violence, but at different registers of time. One confronts the problem of record; the other confronts the problem of residue. In one, anger is an ethical response to what has been documented and omitted. In the other, something is almost a condition, an atmosphere that alters perception, language and bodily function.

Yet both poems refuse the comfort of resolution. Instead, both insist that violence does not conclude neatly in the past. It persists in the structures through which we attempt to narrate it. Whether through the archive or through the body, something is unassimilated.

What remains, then, is not resolution but accountability: read with care, refuse the erasure of strain, and appreciate how anger – whether stored in archives or in bodies – is not simply an emotion to be managed, but a form of knowledge that continues to insist on its proper legibility.

Michael S Harper, in American History, tells us: “Those four black girls blown up / in that Alabama church / remind me of five hundred middle passage blacks, in a net, under water in Charleston harbor / so redcoats wouldn’t find them. / Can’t find what you can’t see / can you?” No one can.

Maya Angelou agrees, when her poem Still I Rise says, “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” And she’s by far not the only one. Many voices have picked up the flame and lifted it to reveal such amnesia. A firm voice in Audre Lorde’s Afterimages cries out: “A black boy from Chicago / whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi / testing what he’d been taught was a manly thing to do / his teachers / ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue / and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone / in the name of white womanhood.” Yes. Emmett Till.

What these poets finally remind us of is that memory is never an inactive inheritance. It is a struggle over visibility, over whose pain acquires language and whose suffering risks being normalised into quietness. The word anger here is not merely reactive; it is also archival. It keeps returning to what official histories would prefer to forget, insisting that wounds are not closed simply because time has passed.

Poetry becomes the medium through which these submerged histories and accounts re-enter public consciousness, refusing withdrawal and demanding proper attention. Your task as a reader isn’t to seek rapid consolation, but to dwell with the discomfort these poems conceive and rock with them as you acknowledge that the past isn’t over, and that violence leaves residues in institutional bodies and in fleshly bodies alike. The work of remembrance is inseparable from that of justice. DM

Rethabile Masilo is a poet from Lesotho living in Paris.

Anger

After festering enough inside her, in bile

which the liver makes each time she remembers

his face, her spell is ready, a spell like a sore.

She swallows more pills every day to destroy

the memory of his name, reads the Bible

to find a verse that vilifies him.

One day, while riding him at night,

with his apex rising fast, she unfastened

the knot of his navel and poured

the spell into him, spat in the hole

and re-tied him with a doom.

– Rethabile Masilo

Letter to Country, Canopic Publishing, 2018

Thomas Thistlewood and Tom (excerpt)

‘I tell myself: “So many days I dig the soft

ground of her front, water it, plant my seed,

watch it breed in her belly. If one day

I have to eat the stinking fruit it voids to live,

See my mouth here. Come. Fill it with her excrement.”

My name is Tom. It is this fiend’s as well.

He is no person, nor no man, nor common visitor

From hell.’

– Pamela Mordecai, Subversive Sonnets, Tsar, 2012

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.