Aerik Francis

Review: an identity polyptych by Tameca L Coleman (Meca’Ayo Cole)
[The Elephants, 2021]

Polyptych. I say the word out loud everytime I see it. I linger on it, on the many ways I could pronounce it.  Polyptych.

The word polyptych has its etymological origins in the Greek language: “poly-” meaning many, like polygon for shapes with many sides; and “-ptych” from “ptyche” meaning “fold”. The literal translation: many folds. an identity polyptych: a many folded identity.

Though I have a degree of familiarity with diptychs and triptychs, the word and concept of polyptych feels uncanny to me. Depending on how I pronounce polyptych, I can’t help but hear politic. Reading the book it becomes very evident that this is a deliberate homophone.

an identity polyptych by Tameca L Coleman (who has, since [and perhaps because of] publishing the book, changed their name to Meca’Ayo Cole. I will be referring to them via the last name Cole) folds and unfolds– folds and unfolds into itself, folds and unfolds before the audience, folds and unfolds the audience ourselves. This collection of lyric memoirs eludes neat classification. The poetry and prose of the collection crash fantastically into each other, making pages into framed images that hinge into one another.

The book asserts a politic in this exploration of identities through its compassion and consideration. The very first poem is titled “I Do Not Know When Reconciliation Comes.” Here, the speaker meditates on reconciliation in the wake of many complex and specific aftermaths of violent abuses. In this poem and throughout the book, the speaker is constantly confronted with impossibly possible predicaments. They are asked to forgive a rapist. They are constantly demanded to prove their Blackness. It is all a messy politic: what does one’s individual reactions to situations reflect about one’s commitment to community? How do all these small interactions compile over time within ourselves?

The book entreats us not only to complicate our understanding of how we create identities for the author/speaker and ourselves, but also how we consider the process of identity construction altogether. Each transgression encountered in the text forces further questions about how one– the speaker, another person, ourselves– will react in these scenarios. Any interaction potentially impacts all intersecting identities, often in lasting ways. The book exemplifies how even a random encounter has the ability to throw identity into flux with a single pointed question: “Where are you from?” A protective sentinel, a cat named an anti-Black slur, a pack of rabid dogs, a merry-go-round camel, Strawberry Shortcake – images depicted in the polyptych carry more images, memories, and experiments. Readers receive various ephemera interspersed throughout the book like a child-drawn comic and old pictures of Cole and their family, as if to implore us– “See?”

A central term and focus of the collection, identity is a loaded concept for Cole, seemingly omnipresent but also constantly changing. Etymologically the term refers to sameness with a close proximity to identical. Cole’s exploration of identity, however, invites questions of difference, specificity, and multiplicity. I’m reminded of poet Layli Long Soldier’s work in Whereas that similarly observes “the linguistic impossibility of identity, as if any of us can be identical ever. To whom, to what? Perhaps to Not.” I hear Cole’s speaker knocking on this not, see them tying and untying this knot.

an identity polyptych critically positions the work in juxtaposition with “identity politics”. While there are many active interpretations of what “identity politics” means, I take Cole to be invoking the work and words of the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement that declares identity politics as central to the expression and freedom of particularly Black women. I want to excerpt a section from the document in full:

“We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”

The book celebrates a kind of specificity that allows for a patterned multiplicity. The section “The Story of My Name” particularly insists on this dynamic of specificity and plurality. Cole explores their own name as a site for their manifoldness. The speaker with the name Tameca becomes connected by name to all iterations and spellings of Tameca that exist in the world. Some Tameca’s have a blank awareness of other Tameca’s. One Tameca congratulates a Tameca’s accomplishment on Facebook, while another Tameca blocks each Tameca they encounter on social media.

That “an” in an identity polyptych gestures toward a nuance of naming, simultaneously specialized and general. That space is indefinite. Unknown – as general as humans, animals, or beings; as specific as a name, a book, or a life. The titles of specific poems and pieces in the book, neither bolded, centered, or italicized, slip seamlessly into and across each other as if stitched together. The table of contents itself reads as a poem. The ordering of the book denies linear time. Rather, readers are constantly folding and unfolding into the portals of an identity polyptch. Identities of youth appear in the middle of the text. Blackness appears primarily and always.

Cole’s speaker describes their identity, specifically their race, in many ways, but what remains both in constant question and as explicitly clear: they are Black. That fact affects every other component of their identity. The voices of friends, strangers, and scholars are invited into an ongoing conversation about Blackness, and ultimately, invited into the chorus of the speaker’s whole identity. Even as Cole checks multiple races on a census survey or chooses to identify as “brown”, they are confronted by another voice knowing that there is “a privilege that undercuts this question of Blackness” for their decisions. Critically, the speaker’s own politics are interrogated alongside other people who appear in the text, both affected by and perpetrating abuse. The audience, in turn, bears witness to the work of identity as a site of contestation toward ending oppressions.

I find myself returning often to consider the sentinel character in the book. The speaker recounts a moment attempting to purchase cowrie shells and being prevented from doing so, presumably because the sentinel character doubted the speaker’s Blackness. All the ways I related to the speaker in this moment that I’ve never seen depicted in literature before: the need to justify my own Blackness [to a stranger], the experience of being denied one’s own identity from another who shares it, and the frustration of the aftermath of the encounter. For the speaker, this was finding out that the cowries shells were all broken. And yet, I’m struck also thinking about the times I’ve been the stubborn sentinel, gatekeeping something I ultimately could not control.

I felt both held and held accountable by an identity polyptych. What does it mean for me as a multiracial light skinned queer person to be always Black in the context of the USA and always in flux– what privileges does this grant me, even within the harsh complexities of navigating the flux?

In a worldly constellation of moving images, rather than purely consume the art or empathize with the speaker, an identity polyptych asks readers to deeply question our personal relationships to identity and reconciliation. We are asked to resolve a critical paradox: If “reconciliation is dead” how might we resurrect it? Is it worth trying? In the last portrait of the polyptych, the text ends with an image of a tensioned face, appearing to either be “crying/ or shitting.”

Reconciliation, then, must attend to the constant shifting of the body and each of the identities it holds and releases. While Cole’s speaker responds, “I do not know when reconciliation comes,” this does not stop them from delving further to find it. I am now folded and unfolded into this journey toward social reconciliation; and an identity polyptych now unfolds and folds into my own.

Aerik Francis is a Queer Black & Latinx poet based in Denver, CO. They are the author of the poetry chapbook MISEDUCATION (NDR 2023), named the winner of the 2022 New Delta Review Chapbook Prize, and poetry chapbook BODYELECTRONIC (Trouble Department 2022). Check out their website phaentompoet.com for more fun poetry stuff & things.