According to his website, Cortney Lamar Charleston is a poet whose words “paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present.” Identity, he says, is, “functionally, a transition zone” between “race, masculinity, class, family, and faith.” In his latest collection, Dopplegangbanger, there is a conflict of the soul.
The opening poem, “The Unauthorized Biography of Jung Thug,” divides the stanzas into four sections, alluding to Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s theory of the soul: animus, shadow, persona, and self. The animus looks at gender and masculinity in the poem. Charleston writes, “the fools nearly killed me trying to make me one of them.” Later, the speaker refers to feeling shame over the way he thought of women: “a tender touch in the moonlight goes only so far for a shadow.” The shadow, according to Jung, is our personality’s dark side.
Next is Jung’s persona, a mask we wear for others, “I still shake when the wind blows,/ scary as ever, thespian as always in all ways toward the ghost/ of a threat.” And last is the self, described as both a person hiding from a cop and a cop himself: “just imagine the person coming for you/ being you every time.” According to Jung, if these four parts cannot unify, there will be psychological anguish, which is felt, pictured, and imagined throughout the rest of the collection.
There is a battle and a question in a cyclical weaving of memory, trauma, music, and violence: who will the speaker become, and will he survive?
In this rich body of work, detailing the coming of age of a boy in a country violent to Black children, we walk with the speaker as he ages, questions, and remembers. “It’s the black child’s burden,” Charleston writes, “to always know what/ they cost somebody.”
The speaker holds the past, his relationships, his community’s connection to faith, and his environment close as he experiences life in these poems. His parents and brother play a subtle role in the relationship to faith, explored most clearly in the poem “Sonic & Knuckles (1994),” writing: “I’m the firstborn, like a ghost of my father in childhood. / [My brother’s] the second-born, blessed with my mother’s mouth.” The piece ties the contrasting Saga video game characters into the life of the speaker and his brother. Later, the verses indicate a sense of grief: “Is my shadow the reason he couldn’t achieve autonomy?”
Place, environment, and community, however, are always on the speaker’s mind. The repetition of his family’s move to the majority-white suburbs from Chicago is reminiscent of an Exodus story in which there is no promised land. “Starting point: South Side,” the first of the series of poems titled “Hip-Hop Introspective,” begins, “Chicago. Mid-90s. / The glory days.” Then, later in the piece, he describes his classmates: “We are Afro-American kids…Skins we will grow into, to be killed softly.” But then, Charleston writes about the move to the suburbs: “I hide my intelligence from my new peers / as an act of protection.” This absence of belonging is represented as formative to his character through repetition. As the speaker ages, he carries displacement, and in America, this young Black boy is not a child for long: “I’m grown,” Charleston writes in the poem “Etymology of Hoochie Mama,” “grew up too fast. / As we dark ones tend to do. / As we have to. Do.”
Relationships and violence are intertwined as the speaker stumbles through his teenage years, his body requiring him to be hyper-alert. These poems reflect on drug dealing with his family’s future in mind, being surrounded with sexually violent images and language, observations on the abruptness of teenage pregnancy, and the unpredictable threat of whiteness. Here we see a reflective character look back on his ability to be harmful, to give in to his “shadow,” all the while under systems set up for him to die. “So what if I’m a ruffian,” Charleston writes in the poem “Etymology of Gangsta,” “who would only wear / a suit to my own funeral? Go on, throw that salt somewhere else. / I’m your gross, domestic product America. A lie you sold yourself.”
Friendship is also complicated for the speaker, struggling with finding peers with whom he feels he belongs. In the poem “Giving Dap,” the speaker feels out of place because of how he speaks: “I’m typecast as the Tahj Mowry who / uses phrases like muscular endurance but doesn’t have any.” However, the speaker affirms his pride in his Blackness: “Point blank: I love me some black people, black girls, and I just / want them boys to love me back.”
The institution of the church and the promises of Christianity do not provide the speaker any peace. In “Psalm for P.,” the speaker struggles with prayer: “Either I’m praying, or I’m holding my hand with my hand. / I suppose both are small beginnings for favor, simply directed / at different thrones.” Other passages, such as lines from the piece “Devotion (I Am on the Battlefield for My Lord),” criticize a church’s view of how God’s character holds up with reality:
We Baptists call this devotion, my working definition of which
is faithfulness to the light. To the extent that God is as white
as the clouds of heaven, this theory holds. To the extent these
particular men are dark, I must consider other possibilities.
Memories from childhood appear throughout the collection, most of them taking place in school. In the poem “‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Martyr,'” the speaker remembers his kindergarten teacher asking what he wants to be when he grows up, and he, as a child, admires dying for a cause:
My avidity for the kind of death that
progresses the narrative of a gentling history, because that's
the only frame for greatness I seem to find for boys my shade
and age to aspire to.
In a collection where everything is said, but nothing is obvious, where life and hip-hop intersect in both joy and tragedy, Charleston uses wit, music, history, and non-linear memory to show the knitting of character at the level of the soul. Neither romanticized nor exceptionalized, the reader emerges from Charleston’s multifaceted work with a feeling of intimacy, horror, and wonder.
Dopplegangbanger was published by Haymarket Books in 2021. It is available for purchase here.
Cortney Lamar Charleston’s poems have appeared in a range of publications, including POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Granta and The Nation. A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, Charleston has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His debut full-length poetry collection, Telepathologies, was selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and released in March 2017. His second full-length collection, Doppelgangbanger, was released in February 2021 by Haymarket Books.
