Wow. Just. Wow. 

So many thoughts, but one thing that Lillian does so powerfully and hauntingly so, is portray the voice of so many Black Americans and enslaved ancestors through these words. Not just narratives, but brutal retellings of extremely gruesome murders … using codes and algorithms. The junctures and the splits, the replication, repetition, and skipped beats. The cadence moves or halts and you can feel the abrupt stop of the tinge of the pull as you muddle through the words. Sometimes they feel fraught with pain or too loose with hopelessness. Sometimes they feel rich with power, only to be suffocated by the history that wins out in the textbooks and the objects that are so prized in our present.

These shifts are randomly calculated through a machine to make them more mundane, but instead they gave more power to the depth of a conscripted story that has lost the weight of its telling. AI is interesting and has been proven to hold its own stereotypes about history and its people and yet, the voice of the those who battled and battle still gains traction against the tools used to oppress them. It’s a common theme in the victory song of the oppressed. 

It’s a gruesome read, but I believe that to be a necessary feeling of discomfort to truly grasp the feel of Bertram’s poetry.