Guns in the Hands of Poets: Depictions of (Gun) Control in the Works of Black Poets
Guns are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans every year. The U.S. is also the world leader in annual mass shootings. Academic research on guns hence focuses — and rightfully so — on the results of gun deaths and gun violence, and the “gun violence epidemic” as a public health issue that public policy desperately needs to address (Butts et al. 40; Spitzer 13). Yet, gun control remains a controversial topic in the country, with even common sense gun laws facing immense pushback and difficulty in becoming legislation. Still, little research has been conducted into the semiotics of guns to uncover what guns mean, in addition to what they do. According to Jonathan M. Metzl, there exists a need to address guns symbolically, as that would allow us to recognize ways that “firearms emerge as powerful symbols shaped by history, politics, geography, economy, media, and culture, as well as by actors such as gun manufacturers or lobbying groups” (2). And it is through understanding the social meanings of guns that researchers can better understand the role of culture in shaping debates on firearm regulations (Metzl 2). Such discussions about the symbolic lives of firearms in art and literature then become key to public discourse about gun control.
Guns have varied meanings when viewed from the perspective of each community of individuals, from proud gun owners to traumatized victims of gun violence. Here, one community stands out among the rest when considering the sinister trend that has emerged: out of all gun deaths, a disproportionate number of them end up being those of Black Americans. For instance, Black Americans made up 12.5 percent of the nation’s population in 2020, but were the victims in 61 percent of all gun homicides (Edmund). The Washington Post also reports that in the last five years, Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans, often fatally shot (“Police Shootings Database”). Several questions thus emerge when considering the semiotics of guns according to Black Americans: What do guns mean, symbolically, to the Black experience? How has being Black influenced their relationship to guns? In what ways have these influences found their way into Black art and literature? In this essay, I focus on Black poets and the symbolism of guns in their works. Specifically, I perform close readings of Donika Kelly’s “Gun Control,” Jericho Brown’s “Bullet Points,” and Natasha Trethewey’s “Artifact” to uncover the symbolic meaning of guns in the Black experience. I argue that in these works, the gun serves as an ironic symbol of both violence and protection for Black Americans. I then investigate how the intersectionality of identities complicates this ironic meaning of guns for Black Americans. Finally, I argue that the gun, though often a site of pain, becomes a motif in the hands of these Black poets to reclaim control over a symbol of the violence that has historically been enacted against them.
Guns as symbols of violence is a theme that features heavily in Black poetry. Jericho Brown articulates this oppressive power of guns in “Bullet Points,” using police brutality to exemplify the systemic gun violence faced by Black Americans like him. The title “Bullet Points” first serves as a double entendre; while bullet points refer in his poem to literal gunshot wounds, bullet points are also used in writing to introduce an item in a list. The comparison Brown makes here is seen in how a gunshot wound shortens the lives of Black people the same way a bullet point is used to intentionally shorten a sentence. But more pertinently, Brown shows how guns serve to reduce the Black person to a mere body, and literalizes the objectification of the Black American in the poem. He does this in this line where he shows his deep mistrust for police officers: “I promise if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me. He took / Me from us and left my body.” The line break before the word “me” capitalizes it and makes it look like a proper noun. The officer that took his life in that hypothetical situation thus also takes away his agency and identity, and leaves behind only a shell, his body. The next line continues, “…which is, / No matter what we’ve been taught, / Greater than the settlement / A city can pay a mother to stop crying, / And more beautiful than the new bullet / Fished from the folds of my brain.” The bullet that takes his life is collected from his brain, with the word “fished” evoking a sense that his lifeless body is being groped, searched, and mutilated. Brown implies here — despite his own views of the beauty of the Black body — that he is rendered an object after death that the police deem are not worthy of respect. This idea is echoed earlier in the poem, where he states that he trusts maggots to decompose any carcass more than he trusts a police officer to give him a respectful send off: “…more than I trust / An officer of the law of the land / To shut my eyes like a man / Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet / So clean my mother could have used it / To tuck me in.” The purposeful line break provides an alternate interpretation to the sentence “To shut my eyes like a man / Of God might,” as now, Brown seems to reveal how he does not trust the police to treat him like a man, especially in death. Guns, wielded by the police, are thus symbolic of not just violence, but also oppression and objectification to a Black man like Brown, whose life can be taken away on a whim by an errant police officer.
In Donika Kelly’s “Gun Control,” we see how gun violence is not just an issue of racist police officers shooting and killing Black citizens. Kelly describes in the poem an instance of Black-on-Black violence and shows how the Black body has sometimes been internalized by Black people themselves as violent and threatening. Kelly writes about a time where a sibling fight went too far when her mother pulled a gun on her: “that my mother / had just pulled a gun on me, / the good child, the obedient / child, and she, later, saying / she had no other choice / she had to save her boy.” Implicit in Kelly’s critique of her mother for seeing a threat in her usually obedient, 16 year-old child. She writes that her mother saw no other way to stop her than to threaten her with gun violence: “misreading the scene, seeing / her youngest in danger, and me, / too large in her mind to be / handled any other way.” Here, Kelly highlights the adultification bias that Black girls face, which is when adults view them as “more adult-like and less innocent than white girls” (Georgetown Law). This results in society’s harsher treatment and higher standards for Black girls, as well as negative stereotypes of Black women as angry, aggressive and hypersexualized being perpetuated onto young Black girls (Georgetown Law). Still, the threat the “I” supposedly posed to her brother is undercut by Kelly’s own use of tightly woven consonant sounds: “pulled by our mother six years / later as I straddled her son’s / small body to stop his fists / from battering me.” The cluttering of the “s” sounds in “six,” “straddled,” “son’s,” “small,” and “stop,” with the “b” sounds in “body” and “battering” make for a vivid, action-packed sequence that reflect her frenzied mental state. Therefore, according to Kelly, Black-on-Black gun violence becomes a problem when negative stereotypes about Black people are themselves internalized by other Black people.
Kelly’s “Gun Control” also raises interesting issues pertaining to Black gun ownership. For a symbol of police brutality and Black-on-Black violence, the gun is still presented as a common object in the household used for self-protection and self-defense. The title, “Gun Control,” becomes ironic when it is revealed in the first few lines how easy it is for people to own guns and display them around children: “The gun — purchased legally / by our parents when I was ten, / shown to us, placed in our hands / that we might sense the weight, then placed / on a shelf any of us / could reach.” While there seems to be some irresponsibility on the parents’ part for leaving the gun out and accessible to their children, we can’t help but also think that this may be necessary; perhaps it is for the protection of the children that the family is able to access the guns easily in time of emergency. Perhaps the displayed gun acts as a deterrent to intruders. In any case, the relationship between Black people and the guns they own is made complex and layered. Crucially, Metzl observes that Black gun ownership represents “a right of American citizenship and an essential component of self-protection” for historical figures like Robert Williams and Malcom X, and also present-day groups such as Black Guns Matter (3). Armed self-defense by oppressed groups also becomes central to public discourse as it shows a willingness to defend themselves (Metzl 3). Guns as symbols become laced with extreme irony as they represent both violence and necessary protection to Black Americans.
“Artifact” by Natasha Trethewey also highlights the ironic symbolism of guns to Black Americans. For Trethewey, however, having a gun in her household complicates the issue of Black gun ownership as Trethewey’s father, the “you” in question, is white. Beyond just being a symbol of violence and protection, the antique rifle in his house becomes a symbol of white authority (Metzl 3), and symbolic of the historical oppression enacted by white people against Black people. To their household, the rifle is also a source of pride to be stored and displayed upright in a visible place. In such an environment, Trethewey expresses her initial admiration for the gun despite its painful significance: “It did not hit me / then: the rifle I’d inherited showing me / how one life is bound to another, that hardship / endures. For years I admired its slender profile.” Trethewey also writes that she is initially unsure of the true meaning of the gun to her father, writing that the gun was a “remnant” she studied as if it would provide her the key to a door she had yet to find — a metaphor for the enigma that is her white father to her. What provides her clarity is finding out from her father, in drunken somber, that it is kept loaded. The ammunition in the gun returns it in Trethewey’s mind from something merely symbolic of violence she never witnessed or enacted, to an item capable of violence against people that look like her — in the name of protection. Yet, this sense of protection conferred by the presence of a gun in the household still differs from that of Kelly’s. As Metzl writes, “mainstream society reflexively codes white men carrying weapons in public as patriots, while marking armed black men as threats or criminals” (3). The justification used by white people to own guns is often in response to the perceived threat of a “criminal class” of people of color (Metzl 3), while as shown above, the need for Black people to own guns is in response to the real threat of white authority and systemic oppression. In other words, the whiteness of Trethewey’s father changes the symbolism of guns to her, as his Black daughter, from that of necessary protection to that of white authority. Still, Trethewey realizes the multi-faceted symbolisms of the loaded rifle, and sees it for something her father as a white man cannot: “a relic / sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.” The rifle that is a source of pride and authority for her father is thus rendered a site of pain and sorrow for her.
While going unsaid by Brown and Kelly in their poems, their identities as gay and lesbian respectively further complicate their relationship to firearms and how they are portrayed in their writing. Individuals in the LGBT community “have a higher prevalence of suicide ideation and attempts, comparable or higher prevalence of intimate partner violence, and higher lifetime prevalence of victimization from hate crimes, school-based violence, and discrimination” (Romero et al. 5). In response to an interviewer who asked her how the frequent shootings of Black people in the U.S. have affected her, Kelly answered:
You and I have talked a little about this before, and honestly, I struggle. I struggle to get past the anger, which is a symptom, I think, of the bodily fear I feel as a black, queer woman who could be murdered, and the knowledge nothing would happen to the person who killed me. I carry that feeling of disposability in my chest. (Finney, emphasis mine)
Kelly makes it clear that it is her identity as both Black and queer (and not one or the other) that makes her incredibly vulnerable to violence, specifically gun violence. Here, she also introduces the element of bodily fear and disposability experienced by minorities, especially individuals who are further made the sexual/gender minority within an already marginalized race. As for Brown, he makes it clear that in his poetry, there is no need to make clear which sub-identities he is drawing on for inspiration: “I’m so much myself that I don’t have to be a Black self in the midst of that” (Murphy). In other words, even if Brown writes about guns symbolically, he is writing not just as a Black man, but as himself: a gay, Black, Southern man and much more. Guns as ironic symbols of violence/protection hence become even more deeply entrenched in the minds of these poets who are marginalized on two fronts.
Together, these three poets have illuminated how guns have become an increasingly racialized symbol in America. As established above, they also do not just simply exist as markers of pain and violence for the Black community. Metzl also writes that “Guns can function as symbols of resistance or markers of collective trauma. Artists Jonathan Ferrara and Brian Borrello launched a Guns in the Hands of Artists project (2016) in response to soaring gun homicide rates in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the project, painters, glass artists, sculptors, photographers, and poets used decommissioned guns from a gun buyback program to ‘stimulate thinking about guns and gun violence in America.’” Art, Metzl implies, is a site for the Black community to take back their agency in the face of guns, and establish control over the same object that controls their lives.
How then do these three Black poets use the gun as a motif to reclaim control over its symbolic meanings, specifically those of violence and pain?
Brown reclaims control over the gun and its symbolisms through asserting his agency. In “Bullet Points,” Brown is largely concerned with deciding his own fate and not having his life left up to a police officer. He repeats the phrase “I will not shoot myself” in the first two lines and writes “I will not hang myself” on the third, with the repetition of “I will not” evoking a sense of finality and determination. This obsession with controlling the circumstances of his death reaches a crescendo after these lines: “When I kill me, I will / Do it the same way most Americans do, / I promise you: cigarette smoke / Or a piece of meat on which I choke / Or so broke I freeze / In one of these winters we keep / Calling worst.” The phrase “when I kill me” is a purposeful and strange departure from the more common phrase “when I die.” Brown does this to emphasize his agency, and his ability to actively control his own life, and therefore his own death — whereas “when I die” would be ambiguous and possibly implies the speaker is a passive subject in his death. His use of the absolute tone adds to this sense of wanting total control over his life and death. This is seen in his repeated use of terms like “I will (not),” “I promise,” and “when” instead of “if” and gives the impression of complete certainty. Of course, Brown cannot be completely sure that his death would happen the way he wants it to. As Metzl argues, guns can function as “symbols of resistance or markers of collective trauma” (4). Brown’s complete certainty here can thus be read as resistance towards the prevailing status quo, as he points the metaphorical gun at no target in particular. In other words, by refusing to use the symbolic gun to enact violence, he renders it useless as a facilitator of violence, and transforms it from a symbol of violence/protection to a symbol of resistance. By asserting his agency, Brown is able to control the symbolic gun, which aids him in his wish to control his fate.
For Kelly, control is reclaimed through controlling a narrative. In her poem, the narrative is that she is misjudged by her own mother to be threatening, and her mother pulls a gun on her. We see some meta elements of authorial construction in the lines where she contemplates what words best describe her state of mind: “to tell him with incredulity — / no, with something more naïve, / say, shock or hurt.” In these few lines, Kelly reveals her speaker to have both the benefit of hindsight and the fallibility of memory. On one hand, she is able to review and reflect upon the emotions she felt as a child and evaluate them as an adult. On the other hand, she also sets herself up to look like an unreliable narrator who is constructing a story out of memory fragments. Borrowing the same metaphor as before, Kelly is picking up the metaphorical gun and pointing it at herself, by writing in a way that allows her to appear as the victim. While Brown as a speaker is concerned with having control, Kelly depicts a character that lacks control. The mother in this poem is lacking in control — she is drunk. This stands in opposition to the way the narrator speaks with control; her tone is composed, and almost matter-of-fact: “My mother / had just pulled a gun on me, / the good child, the obedient / child.” Control thus becomes a way to separate between perpetrators of gun violence and victims themselves.
In Trethewey’s poem, control is not explicitly depicted but implied as something that is historically wielded by white people with guns. For her white father, the gun is a symbol of historical white authority, where guns were used in the privatized policing of enslaved Black people. Historically, gun laws that govern who can possess and carry firearms have been used as “cudgels of white supremacy and to limit the exercise of civil rights among Black communities” (Cruickshank). In an interview, Trethewey explains how she is concerned with having “control over the narrative” as someone who comes from the troubled history of the American South:
I wonder if it has something to do with the nature of story. And who has the power to tell stories. When the South is presented in television or culture, there is always a story being told about us. And it rarely feels right. When that happens, I think people probably have a strong desire to tell the story themselves. To take control over the narrative. (Glock)
Trethewey is hence attempting to reclaim control on two fronts. First, by seeing the gun clearly for what it is and not through the lenses of her white father, Trethewey reclaims the control over how she sees the gun: as a site of pain and not a source of pride. Then, underlying her poetry is the sense that Trethewey is attempting to retell the story of the American South, and control the narrative over it.
As gun control becomes an increasingly politicized issue, it becomes more important to keep in mind the potential limitations of framing gun related morbidity solely as an epidemic or a public-health crisis for which policy solutions are the primary answer (Metzl 4). It is clear that the gun violence epidemic has gone beyond just a public health issue to become a grave social crisis as well. Approaching and addressing guns as symbols in Black art helps us to illustrate the complex tensions, stereotypes, and anxieties about race. In this essay, I showed how the gun is an ironic symbol of violence/protection in the works of Jericho Brown, Donika Kelly, and Natasha Trethewey. I then investigated how intersectionality in identity — e.g. having a white father, being queer and Black — affects one’s relationship to guns. Finally, I showed how these symbolic guns become a motif in the hands of these Black poets to reclaim control over a symbol of the violence that has historically been enacted against them. In the face of these guns, these Black poets are able to take control over the narrative and assert their agency where Black people have once been seen as voiceless and lacking free will. Perhaps, control even becomes metaphorical of the change these Black poets implicitly advocate for in their works: gun control. Future research into the perspectives of these poets on gun control would have added another dimension to the findings of my paper.
Works Cited
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