God Says I Hear the Blood of your Brother

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From the always excellent “The Pause” from Krista Tippett’s The On Being Project comes this unique perspective on the murder of George Floyd [my emphasis added below]:

“The first murder depicted in the Hebrew Bible is that of Abel. He is murdered by his brother Cain. They are the sons of Eve and Adam. The world is young in this story, but not naïve. One of the brothers wishes to be superior, and because he feels the other has outdone him, he kills him. It was evening and it was morning. The awful day.

In the few weeks after the murder of George Floyd, his pastor, Patrick ‘P.T.’ Ngwolo of Resurrection Houston in Texas, used the narrative of Cain and Abel to speak about his murder. After Cain murdered Abel, Pastor Ngwolo said, ‘Everyone thinks that that’s the end of Abel, not only did he die, but he died silently. But God says I hear the blood of your brother.‘

There is so much in this short reference to religious literature: the story of a murder, the story of the rage and superiority that consumed the murderer, the desire for the murder to be kept silent, and the assertion — in literature thousands of years old — that the writers did not wish to let the dead be silenced.

This week for On Being, Krista is in conversation with poets Tracy K. Smith and Michael Kleber-Diggs. Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017-2019, has been a guest on the show before. Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist and literary critic who recently won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Their contributions to a new book — There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis — moves from topics of burden to joy; pleasure to pluralities; the past and the present, which is present in this episode.

Michael speaks about listening to Big-Boi’s song, ‘Chocolate,’ while walking his dog and breaking out into dance, a particular form of its own revolution. For Michael, a Black man, to dance — in public — to the music is to assert a claim of home, of safety. Tracy follows up Michael’s story by highlighting that ‘the burden is not Blackness. It’s the gaze that’s directed towards Blackness.’

In many ways, this is a conversation between Tracy and Michael, a conversation into which Krista listens; and in light of that, their conversation is an intimate insight into multiplicities of Black experiences of the past year. Critiquing the idea of singularities in the Black community, Michael speaks about the pronoun we: ‘we are a complex and dynamic people; there is no monolithic Black experience.’ And Tracy builds on this to demonstrate how anyone who is not White in America knows what it feels like to be the unintended audience of something. ‘If we is all of us,’ Tracy says, ‘it’s not what you’ve thought it was all this time.’ The conversation between both of these writers is one that starts in the artistry of their work and includes questions about the imagination, and power, and about what constitutes liberative transformation. And the scope of history they focus on is wide: ‘These threats we live subject to… are the grotesque and perverse ends to which a nation founded in shame has gone in order to avoid atoning for its crimes.‘”