Ghetty Gospel by Isaac Harris: Reviewed by Pippa Sterk
Isaac Harris’ Ghetty Gospel is a poetry pamphlet which follows five Black male characters in the US, through three separate but interconnected stories. In their experimental linguistic and visual style, Harris manages to weave characters’ individual experiences of racism, homophobia and capitalism into broader social commentary, into a vision of the everyday that borders on a science fiction-like dystopia.
The first part follows the character Slim, as his desperate hunger drives him to enquire about a job that would demand him to perform a racist caricature of himself to a white audience. Slim talks to a manager who appears white, but reveals that he is also part Black himself, and attempts to use this to relate to Slim. The manager brags about all that he has gained by playing the game of respectability, while Slim’s internal monologue shows us that the manager is really sitting in a leaky, underground office. While Slim’s skepticism remains unchanged, his simple need for money eventually convinces him to take the job.
Despite being omniscient, the narrator is not a stable entity, and this is something that is toyed with particularly in the first part of the triptych. Before Slim meets the manager he speaks in AAVE, and this continues outside the dialogue into the narration. The manager himself speaks Standard American English (the only character in this story to do so), although with a tendency to overuse polysyllabic words - in essence standard manager-speak. Similarly, the narration here starts leaning more and more towards Standard American English as well. However, in one moment, the manager accidentally burns himself, and in his rage he “let[s] some heritage out” in the form of returning to AAVE. Both the diegetic and non-diegetic language code-switches, seemingly caught between different worlds with different rules of propriety.
The second part follows Luis, Black and Maurice: three young Black boys riling each other up to steal snacks from a grocery store. Again, young male bravado is the performance they give each other. However, here too it is really hunger that drives the action. They consume their treasure while drinking and gambling when they are suddenly attacked by the police. The police are described as sadistic and demonic, the stuff of cautionary tales, while our protagonists lose their earlier machismo and we see them for the young children they really are: children who act tough on the outside but still call for their mothers when in peril.
The last part follows Blud, who is intoxicated in a gay club. We see Blud constantly teetering on the edge of acknowledging the desperation he feels in his life, and constantly chasing the high of sex, drugs and music, to drown out this feeling. Blud ends up having a bad trip, and the various constraints on his life start collapsing in on each other. Blud tries to escape the club before being sucked in forever. The vision that closes the pamphlet is one of pre-slavery Blackness, and an intergenerational imperative not to forget.
Ghetty Gospel is a physically challenging read. The raw descriptions of bodily sensations reverberate long after these descriptions end, permeating the narrative and teasing the evocation of a mirrored response in the reader. Particularly the emphasis on hunger hits hard as we read descriptions of characters eating themselves out of desperation. Inanimate objects start digesting the characters that interact with them, stomachs turn in on themselves and spit out bile. Characters become undone (socially, emotionally, physically) through the desperation of needing to fill their stomachs. At many points, the links that the text makes between sexual acts and the act of eating or being eaten, become all the more poignant because of this. This questions where exactly we draw the line between indulgence and force, pleasure and discomfort.
The pamphlet is at times difficult to understand, without becoming needlessly spectacular or self-indulgent. The harshness of the casual slurs and the subject material described make for a reading experience that is necessarily uncomfortable. This is combined with an experimental writing style, with many typographical variations throughout the text, and it isn’t always clear exactly what the effect of these variations is supposed to be. The experience of trying to decipher a difficult poem feels much like the experience of trying to fix a world that is so wrong in so many ways. The physical responses of intrigue, curiosity, frustration and fatigue will be familiar to anyone who finds themselves oscillating between excitement at the possibilities of a kind and just society, and the sense of overwhelm when it becomes clear just how much there is to be done to get there.
This oscillation seems to be the final ‘gospel’ preached by the pamphlet, the faith that Luis (understandably) seems to lose when he is brought to the police station. There is spirituality and religiosity outside of the narrow USAmerican ways of interpreting what this could be. There is Black joy and laughter and kinship that exists even in the living dystopia that the USA currently is. There is a possibility for intimacy without exploitation. However, at the moment, there is still a long way to go.