Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

Dark Days: Fugitive Essays
By Roger Reeves

“DARK Days: Fugitive Essays” by roger reeves

This is in the category of “books that find us.”I had never heard of Roger Reeves before, nor this book. I think it was the “Fugitive” in the subtitle that caught my eye. It found the fugitive scaffolding in my brain from Fred Moten and Stefan Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and Fugitive Pedagogy; Carter G. Woodson and The Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens.  Dark Days is one of the best essay collections I’ve read. His contextual juxtapositions are stunning. They become portals into new ways of thinking about our collective and individual experience. One of the essays references the Chilean opera singer, Ayleen Jovita Romero,  singing out into the Santiago night as the city was on a silence curfew imposed as a result of protests against governmental oppression. She sang El derecho de vivir en paz — or “The right to live in peace”  by Victor Jara. Victor Jara was a Chilean singer/songwriter known for songs of protest during the Pinochet years in Chile. Those of us in the U.S. could pay attention to these reference points as we enter a new regime. The book is a protest that arcs through beauty and solidarity as protest through art, this includes reading poetry aloud with his daughter and the prefigurative imagination of a Sun Ra poem from 1969 commemorating the Apollo 11 landing on the moon:

Reality has touched against myth
Humanity can move to achieve the impossible
Because when you’ve achieved one impossible the others
Come together to be with their brother, the first impossible
Borrowed from the rim of myth
Happy Space Age to You. . . .

I found the entire book to be a response to the idea of “the first impossible borrowed from the rim of myth.” I hear a lot about the idea of “pre-figurative imagination” and it’s a theme that Reeves weaves through this book and it’s in his rendering of it that I have found it to be most tangible. It’s a beautiful, haunting book that has stayed with me over the year.

-Michael McMahon