Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Review: A People's History of Chicago

A People's History of Chicago A People's History of Chicago by Kevin Coval
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a wonderfully ambitious book, and I couldn’t help feeling as if it had my name on it. It’s an alternative history of Chicago – and I suppose I can call myself an alternative historian of Chicago – yet it’s also a book of poetry, and I write (rarely) and teach (more frequently) poetry.

I realize this takes its name and theme from Howard Zinn’s famous People’s History of the United States, but I see this in many ways as a particular person’s history of the city. Coval is pushing throughout against the idea that Chicago grew because of its industrial leaders. We don’t get Marshall Fields or Col. McCormick – which is great; they’re both overrated in any case. Absent the standard parameters of the city, though, we get Coval’s vision of how to draw a line from the city’s origins to its status today.

And the line he draws is a pretty straight one: it is, throughout, a story of displacement, of the disenfranchised fighting against – and generally losing to – the powerful. We begin with the group of ‘X’-signing Native chiefs who had the land of the city swindled from them (a story, to my embarrassment, I don’t really know). We early on get a poem about Jean Baptiste DuSable, the African-American man acknowledged as the city’s founder, and the way he has no streets named for him while Kinzie, the man who purchased his original homestead, dots the map with his namesake streets and landmarks.

Coval does a good job of noting others who are dispossessed in the city. We get Haymarket, the victims of the Eastland disaster, the residents who aren’t served by the opening of the ‘L.’ Selfishly, I was sorry not to see a reference to the Lazarus Averbuch affair – that’s the one Walter Roth, Aleksandar Hemon, and I have all written about – but Averbuch is there in spirit.

The second half of this becomes increasingly personal, and we see Coval identifying with those dispossessed. One late poem talks about the night the Cubs finally won the World Series, but he speaks of his inability to join in the celebration. He’s too aware of how the performance of North Side joy would be impossible on the West or South Side, and he implies that it mimics the sort of violence that the police and mayor use to justify cracking down on those neighborhoods.

In the final one, “Chicago Has My Heart,” he talks of wanting to love the whole of the city, of wanting to find a way – and I paraphrase – to re-possess (not repossess) all of it. He wants, as he says, for it to belong to the entire “body politic.”

It’s only fairly late in this that Coval begins to identify himself as Jewish, and, for me, that provides a fascinating complementary perspective to the Native- and African-American perspective he works to push into the foreground. Throughout, he celebrates – directly and indirectly through the language of his poems – the role Chicago has played in developing hip-hop culture. By writing as a Jew, Coval both acknowledges himself as on the periphery of the crucible that formed that culture and shows its pliability. Hip-hop and slam poetry may be the language of African-American youth, but it’s also a vocabulary that can be put into the service of a project like this – a project that reframes the history of a city that celebrates itself as a matter of policy.

In that light, one of the most intriguing poems for me is the late, “Atoning for the Neoliberal in All, or rahm Emanuel as the Chicken on Kapparot.” To begin with, even the title reference is obscure. How many non-Jews (for that matter, how many contemporary Jews) know what Kapparot is? (It’s a ceremony of repentance in which a chicken serves as a scapegoat – and yes, I did look that up to be sure I had it right.) More subtly, the insistent repetitions of the final page read with a rhythm reminiscent of the closing prayers of Yom Kippur (at least in the Reform and Conservative siddurim I’ve known). This is, in other words, a kind of Jewish prayer in which our subtly Jewish narrator condemns our overtly Jewish mayor for selling out half the city. The comparisons to Israel as a place that enforces apartheid on its Arab citizens seems to me to lessen some of the effect, but the point is clear: Emanuel’s Jewishness opens him up for even more condemnation from a Jewish writer wanting the city to be all it promised it would be.

And, to take that a step further, I’m struck by the degree to which this book is also a subtle homage to the great Yiddish poets from between the World Wars, poets whom Coval’s grandparents likely knew as well as mine did. (That is, they probably overheard them at Bughouse Square or in various Jewish restaurants.) For all that these poems are hip-hop inflected, they are also engaged with the contemporary world in the way someone like Yaakov Glatstein was. They take for granted (as hip-hop does) that the material of the newspaper is more fit for poetry than are references to Greek mythology or towering historical figures. They enter into conversation like opinionated old men, throwing their opinions and their anger at the world without apology and with – if you listen for it beneath the growls – a fierce and humorous joy.

The proof of a project like this has to be in the quality of the poems, of course. I’m drawn to many, though not all. I especially liked “The L Gets Open,” “The Great Migration,” “Muddy Waters Goes Electric,” “Sun Ra Becomes a Synthesizer,” and “mayor byrne Moves Into & Out of Cabrini Green.”

More impressive to me, though – and perhaps this is a hip-hop device – are the many memorable and tight lines that Coval fires off. Here are a few of my favorites:

“City of long cons [,] fire & fine print.”

“City of scraps & sausage”

“Jane Addams…originated in loot & leisure”

“the city builds heaven for a few, tenements for most.”

“the acoustic guiatr’s an impotent whisper in the throat of the war machines”

“shtetls grew ghettos”

“patronage is a Chicago word for family”

“I witness…until America is haunted by the spirits of those it says never happened”

“this is how Black boys are bar-mitzvahed in Chicago/America, by boot and brick”

So, yeah, I admire what Coval is doing here, and I’m glad he’s in the city to do it. I’ll keep this one on the shelf, and I imagine I’ll pick it up again every now and then when I want to be reminded how much of the city’s history has never quite made it into the city’s history.


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