Mapping the Buried Self in Xandria Phillips’s Hull
by Deria M.
Today, I am 12 days into my 21-day meditation challenge. Yesterday, I read and reread my new moon horoscope from Chani Nicholas. Tonight, I will sit at my altar where a jar of dirt from the graves of my paternal grandparents sits and pull three playing cards that I hope will offer insight into my past, present, and future.
“What misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion” is a question I take to my deck often and one Xandria Phillips, author of the poetry collection, Hull, poses in their poem “Sex Dream in the Key of Aporia.” The nonbinary poet nods knowingly at my chosen isolation having traveled a similar path themselves. Phillips once lived in Accra studying the transatlantic slave trade at the University of Ghana in Legon.
Hull is the creative works of Phillips’s thesis, the title term being a direct reference to the ships that carried kidnapped Africans from their homeland to the Americas. “Hull” is also used throughout the collection to denote the body of those Africans who carry souls lost in the middle passage, buried through centuries of enslavement, and suffocated as they fought through another century of racial oppression. In the final poem, “The Fruit We Never Tasted,” “hull” alludes to the skin of fruit owed—“homeland drupe pineapple mango ripening to salt,” and the lost wealth and wholeness that descendants of those enslaved now work tirelessly to uncover and recover—“it takes gallons more water to boil the ocean we owe for swallowing yesterday water.”
Weaving their way through and out of the cosmic cannon known as Black Studies, Phillips grabs down big historical stars like Anarcha, Sara Bartman, and Edmonia Lewis, setting them in the now: a park, a laundromat, a twin bed. In comparison to the NYTimes commissioned 1619 Project, in which large structural remnants of American enslavement are highlighted in our current economic policies, infrastructural design, justice system, and electoral processes, Phillips’s interests are more tedious, digging into the daily, minute impacts of these systems.
In the opening poem, “You and I,” Phillips skillfully shapes words on the page to create three distinct poems, assembled like the natural tear of land masses bordering the Atlantic Ocean and the physical separation of peoples who once held one another. The first poem is imaginative, allowing queerness and gentleness to exist in a realm where colonialism is defeated. It’s one of the only poems in the collection where one can take refuge. The second poem is a negotiation, the lovers trying to enjoy the sweetness of life while eating the bitter fruits bore by a colonial reality. In the third, a story of heartbreak, a defeated and hopeless lover cries, “through a partition made of circumstance.”
The “You and I” is carried through as the lovers become escape artists, trying to free themselves by freeing [an]other in the Intimacy Archives. Here Phillips pens a series of two stanza poems through which they imagine lovers navigating centuries of institutional violence whether it be the medical industrial complex or the prison industrial complex. The reader is called to consider how it felt to lovingly caress the thighs of a woman who was hewn by a doctor impervious to her cries, the failure to comfort a family member incarcerated on a plantation, the task of consummating a marriage while your town is being bombed.
These poems offer another side of resistance, suggesting that so much of our fight was not just in getting free but in the forced intimacies of this voyage. Hull is a reminder of our collective endeavor to swim murky waters, shark-ridden seas, just to feel our kin, to kiss our loves, to remember our tongues, to make a life.
Still we know, a tender consensual process of lovemaking did not birth our galaxy of Blackness. Our music, our food, our dance is also a result of our bondage. We are a people from a land unknown to us labeled Black by a catastrophic bang that brought us into being. Who were we before the transatlantic slave trade? Phillips abandons this question to say, We Cosmology. We are the after and the in-between. The We, “not collective not tongued the same and not in love but all of we pressed up against we heat.” The “we” itself is forced, begging a new question: how do we love consensually in late-stage capitalism? How can one “hear the yes that’s under all that need” when our needs are still muddied by survival in a colonial state? Poems like the title poem and “Want Could Kill Me” detail our consistent failure to grant each other humanity in our present-day romances:
Here I learn my skin on hers won’t liberate us,
and I begin
to touch her
as though it will,
remembering fat to be
an unruly flesh, our uprising
lungs a cacophony of inverted
sound. Only when there was nothing
left to sing did the hull-song quiet to breath.
By the flush of a roseate moon, a ship presses
its belly into the Atlantic’s lap. At this tempo, persons
breach objectivity, and must then revert back. The objects
approach personhood. I won’t count breaths as the cargo cusps
in continuum, a salient stain on the horizon that never makes port.
In the essay Cosmic Literacies and Black Fugitivity, James Padilioni Jr. reminds us of the liberatory practice in stargazing for African-Americans. The song “Foller de Drinking Gourd,” for example, was used along the Underground Railroad to aid runaways in using the sky as a map. For this reason, I have overlaid an evening sky map with the words of Hull. Astrology, conjuring, and meditation continue to be my guide, my own map, as I take on the universal endeavor of loving in all this chaos, as I attempt to make love amidst all this violence, as I try desperately to learn love amongst all this unknowing. My head tilted toward the cosmos, my feet still running along the Accra shores, unwilling to accept captivity, unwilling to surrender to defeat.
Deria M. is a writer, educator, and astrologer living and loving in many different realms. They have creative works published in Spicy Zine, The Felt, and Desert Rose Magazine.