Declaration

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Multiple Layers of Meaning Through History

It is challenging to capture several centuries of history in one short lyric poem. The Atlantic slave trade alone lasted over 400 years. Slavery and the domestic trade persisted after the Atlantic trade ended in 1808.

America fought a Civil War over the Southern states’ proclaimed states’ rights to traffic human beings as property. Although slavery formally ended with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the Northern states failed to uphold the promises of the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War.

In its place, Jim Crow laws bolstered segregation and racial inequality. Institutions in all states were openly racist. Generations of free Black men and women grew up under this system. Meanwhile, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan freely used terror and vigilante justice against people of color.

The mid-20th century Civil Rights Era reframed these unjust laws as human rights violations. Yet, discriminatory practices like housing segregation, redlining, the wealth gap, and the school-to-prison pipeline continue.

“Declaration” is a remarkable and chilling poem because you could set it in any era of American history, and it would resonate with the experiences of Black America. The poem is dripping with meaning from any period.

“He has plundered our–” (Line 3) could refer to the Tulsa race massacre in 1921. In the massacre, the white residents of Tulsa looted, burned the property of, and murdered Black citizens from the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood (nicknamed Black Wall Street), a travesty rarely taught in American education systems.

“Ravaged our–” (Line 4) brings to mind male enslavers, like Jefferson, sleeping with (raping) enslaved women when these women could not consent.

“Destroyed the lives of our–” (Line 5) recalls the Tuskegee Study, which studied 400 Black men over 40 years. Some of the men had latent syphilis that doctors left untreated to study the effects. One hundred of the men studied died over time, spread the disease to their wives, and infected their unborn children.

Any ellipses in “Declaration” could be filled in with similar atrocities that happened over the seven centuries since the slave trade started in the American colonies. Smith chose active verbs from the original text to evoke these unspoken brutal acts.

Rephrasing the Past

Smith turns Jefferson’s lofty, righteous, and well-reasoned prose into a lyrical poem with quiet rage. While Jefferson’s inspiration for his declaration was Enlightenment ideals, Smith questions the aim of these ideals. How can a reasonable society and government perpetuate an inhuman institution like slavery? Jefferson wanted to address slavery in the “Declaration of Independence,” but his co-authors omitted any mention of the institution. Does that make him more or less guilty?

Jefferson has the luxury of knowing the specific grievances the colonists suffered under the king; there is no physical way Smith could catalog all the grievances of the poem’s speakers.

However, by reclaiming Jefferson’s words and rephrasing them through erasure, Smith leaves spaces for the speakers to recount their experiences and remember without speaking the exact words out loud or on the page. Like Walt Whitman, Smith channels multitudes and invites them to communicate through her.

By rephrasing the founding father’s declaration so the disenfranchised can reclaim their history, Smith creates space for future poets of color to undertake similar work and inclusively rephrase all histories.

Who Tells Our Stories?

While contemporary media like Hamilton repositions the American founding fathers as people of color in a playful and interesting way, Tracy K. Smith makes a different argument about rephrasing inclusiveness. Her poem is primarily interested in the stories of the people cut out of Jefferson’s “Declaration.” She chooses not to lionize these men but position them as part of the privileged class they held before the American Revolution and in the new United States.

She leaves the “our” stories out for several reasons. Primarily, there are too many stories to tell in one poem succinctly. There are volumes of histories, memoirs, letters, and primary sources to learn more. Smith invites the reader to do this research. Second, the stories may be too traumatic to repeat. Third, enslaved people had little access to education, so the bulk of their histories were oral. Finally, preserving intact historical documents is a luxury that costs money that may not have been available to people of color in past centuries. White histories are frequently better preserved because the people preserving them had better resources.

However, there have always been writers of color who made themselves heard and preserved Black stories.

Some Black activists petitioned in “In every stage of these Oppressions” (Line 9) and fought for the people who could not represent themselves like the founding fathers. Instead of a proper response, they “have been answered only by repeated injury” (Line 12). So these grievances pile up and compound over the centuries. The poem does not answer how we can retell these stories or how society can repay these people for the injuries. Still, it suggests that these injuries will not stop unless the systems that caused the repeated injury reform.