For Black women, most facets of our language are policed, and even our silence is often a double-edged sword. In this white supremacist society, there will always be a Black woman who is too loud, who talks too much. Likewise, there will always be a Black woman expected to speak up on behalf of everyone. In Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, Khalisa Rae calls this policing what it is: a haunting. In doing so, she makes a case for exorcism and reclamation. In this text, Rae uses her poetry as source of witness and archival (particularly for Black women and Black Southern women), refusing to engage with society’s demands of silence, invisibility, and respectability.
It is clear from the first poem that Rae’s work is in conversation with griots and storytellers, that it honors lineage and archival. Evidence of this lineage is in Rae’s craft gestures—her work is heavy with alliteration, metaphor, rhyme and repetition; her poems demand to be read aloud. “Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat,” the first and title poem warns the reader against silencing themselves for the sake of others, prophesying:
And that’s what they will come
for first—the throat.
They know that be your superpower,
your furnace of rebellion.
In “Body Apology,” Rae notes, “I am often accommodating...Today I was an apology. I apologize for my presence, and no one says / thank you.” This poem's use of caesura and white space effectively mirrors her frustration at being forced to quietly accommodate white people in social spaces, often without being noticed or acknowledged in return.
In other poems, she critiques the expectation of ‘respectability’ with regards to language. For example, in “Outside the Canon: Words to Never Use,” Rae wittily lists words that academia and white supremacy view as ‘common’ and therefore invalid in an academic or professional setting. In “Making Counterfeit Again,” Rae pushes back against the co-opting of AAVE, asserting that “This dialect be discontinued, this black too high. / Out of reach.” “Livestock” declares the speaker “will be foulmouthed and crooked-necked” when they come for her, a subversion of society’s belief that Black women must be kind and docile, even in face of attack.
Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat repeatedly gives honor to the power of witness as a tool to buck against the silencing of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and misogynoir. In “Epilogue for Banned Books,” Rae asserts :
If they were to remove us and all our sullen
truths, what a vacant canon we would be without griots
preserving this strife, capturing each anguish,
freezing these pages as time capsules.
Several of Rae’s poems have epigraphs or titles that honor other poets, testifiers, and storytellers, including Maya Angelou, Mahalia Jackson, Alice Walker, and two of her grandmothers. Even the final poem leaves readers with a symbolic call to action, “I know the rocks cry out, / release a bellow that can be heard even/ after the dust has settled.”
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