Seraphim
Angelique Zobitz’s debut poetry collection Seraphim is a singing, searing book. It centers on the experience of Black women in the US, weaving an intergenerational text of suffering transformed, of survival, and of sanctity. In a white supremacist society bent on regulating and subjugating women’s bodies, especially Black women’s bodies, Zobitz affirms that what is deemed profane has been sacred all along: Black women’s lives, their words, their desires, their sexuality, their spirituality. Her work actively combats Misogynoir, a word coined by Black feminist Moya Bailey in 2010 to describe the combination of misogyny and racism aimed at tearing down Black women. Zobitz’s poems dismantle Misogynoir by depicting, again and again, the complexity and multidimensionality of Black women, and by following bell hooks’ proclamation that self-love and loving Blackness are radical, revolutionary acts. Zobitz gives her readers the gift of a poetics of love and praise for Blackness, particularly the Black women who raised her and whom she is in the process of raising (i.e., her daughter, a.k.a. “The Revolution”).
The collection is divided into four sections, following a loose chronology, from the birth of the central speaker in these poems, through her childhood, young adulthood, and into adulthood and motherhood. The first three poems, “Sister/Seraphim, Inextinguishable Light,” “Angelique, an Origin Story,” and “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 1,” introduce readers to the main characters of the collection: the seraphim, the central speaker’s mother, the speaker herself, and the speaker’s daughter, “The Revolution.” We also get a sense of the questions at the heart of this book: who/ what is holy, and who gets to decide?
The first poem readers encounter seals the notion that Black women are the seraphim to whom this book is devoted. In “Sister/Seraphim, Inextinguishable Light,” the speaker describes “Black Barbies backlit by gas station fluorescence // stunning—singing holy, holy, holy.” Here we see Zobitz unifying the ordinary—or what has been labeled ordinary or profane—with the holy. The speaker in the poem not only describes the gas station seraphim as sacred as they dance in a sensual way, but also her own desire. She observes:
She—her—they—they blazing.
This could be worship.
Loud and exuberant as every light-
leached club where I once got hot and sweaty
to reggae, rubbed underneath some body
as vigorously as kindling before catching fire.
It could be easy to forget how
good adoration feels (I can’t forget),
what good feels like (paradise).
They so flame and I see it.
In this first poem, not only do readers meet the seraphim, but we’re given to understand that the “elevative” purifying fire they bear is exuberant, joyous, musical, and sexual. Their fire is powerful enough to spark a reaction in the speaker, but also bears destructive potential. The speaker continues:
It could be heaven.
This lot of half-leveled bumpy concrete
glittering full jeweled with bottle shards and
wrapping paper confetti.
They could burn it all down.
But—Glory.
They invite us to join the chorus.
We as readers are invited to join the chorus, too, invited into this maybe “heaven,” this potential “worship.” We’re invited into Zobitz’s enactment of Black love and anti-misogynoir.
Subsequent poems “Angelique, an Origin Story” and “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 1,” introduce the reader to the central speaker, “Angelique,” and the speaker’s daughter, grounding the collection in the speaker’s literal and figurative ancestry. In “Angelique, an Origin Story,” there is a sort of Black Mary in the speaker’s mother, but this Mary “didn’t need divine / messenger to convince her of what she carried, knew immediately // that I didn’t need to be brought into this world by virgin or conceived // as sacrifice. Didn’t need a sign—she knew a good thing coming.” Even though the mother is a teen “nearly as young as Mary,” she recognizes divinity in her child: “My mama said, a punk // girl can dream of angels and know when one manifests. / She said she looked into an angel’s eyes and claimed it as her own.” Thus, we have a central speaker named after angels in a book about angels. Her young mother’s fierce love and act of naming and claiming holiness reverberates in numerous poems in which Zobitz names, claims, and pronounces holiness: from family members to memories of former lovers, from pop culture icons like Wendy Williams and Whitney Houston to the ambrosial delight of Big Ma’s buttermilk biscuits.
Another crucial figure in this poetry collection is the speaker’s daughter, “The Revolution.” In “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 1,” and in a companion poem that appears at the end of the collection, “Love Letters to The Revolution No. 2,” Zobitz establishes a literary ancestry for herself and her daughter (and, by extension, all Black women). In both poems, she braids together, cento-style, the words of Black feminist writers and thinkers into what reads as advice letters to a young Black woman, representative of a future generation of Black women. Zobitz draws lines from poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Toi Derricotte, Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, bell hooks, Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde—powerhouse matriarchs. These poems remind us that, in the words of Rita Dove, “If you don’t look back, // the future never happens.” Zobitz affirms, by looking back herself, that she is built on the words and ideas and love and community that came before her, and she extends that love and community to her readers.
Throughout Seraphim, Zobitz offers poems of Black love, including self-love. In “Sermon: On the Sanctity of the Beauty Shop,” the speaker declares:
I’m a whole broken woman. And just because I came in one way
don’t mean I’m not God-made woman, don’t mean I can’t be
transformed, don’t
mean I don’t sit at the right hand of the Father—look at this
crown on my head.
In “Aide-Memoire,” the speaker echoes this same affirmation of worthiness, of sacredness: “the body is flesh imperfect yet unbroken / here now made for slow soft worship, good and worthy as gospel / resilient as negro spirituals sung next to the one you love.”
As a white woman reading Zobitz’s work, I acknowledge that I will never fully understand what it’s like to be a Black woman, especially in the US in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, where police violence and brutality disproportionately affect Black people; where hate speech and discrimination are common, even celebrated in some parts of our country. That said, reading and rereading the poems in Seraphim move me closer to empathy and compassion, and help deconstruct my received notions of divinity and the sacred. Through the pyrotechnics of her poetic voice, combined with her wisdom to name, claim, and pronounce holy numerous aspects of her life and history, Zobitz invites readers into revolutionary/revelatory Black love.
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