Issue 4.3
Fall 2024
Dontay M. Givens II
Reflection
"DELUSIONZ OF THE BLOOZ 6: A LIL CARGO RAP" plays with the sonic and phonetic aspects of black English, my narrative dialect. The dialect itself is indebted to the Mississipian background of my family, who migrated to Chicago in the 60s, is how I talk back at home (apparently black folk living in Chicago elongate, or elide, their vowels and certain syllables). In this delusion my dialect finds a Spielraum (play-room), where I write a verse fit for 'Mystic Stylez' by Three 6 Mafia. I am not my own; sumtimes im my granny, others sum ancestor I aint met yet. The verse within dis delusion hinges around 2 questions:
What is the Klang (noise) and Bild (image) of blackness ? How do I understand the mimetic instantiation of its Gestalt (shape, appearance)?
The staging of these nightmarish (read spirits of the night) questions is within the hull of a schip, where we find a type of new Anfang (beginning), where one bodee bleeds into a hunnid. In the hull of the schip u will knot find Körper (bodies), since dat wud assume autonomy or agency among spirits of the night, or homme de corp, bcuz who really cud be dependent on sumbodee so much that dey lose their bodees, but un/heimlich (un/familiar) beings winding 2gether as they wander in dream. If I told u dat poems can enchant the listener, twisting & unraveling bodees, wud u beleave me? Playa Fly wud:
"Bustas get so dazed and amazed as Lil Fly enchants/ Memories of 'Smoked Out, Loced Out'/bumped out as them demons dance"- Three 6 Mafia, Mystic Stylez
DELUSIONZ OF THE BLOOZ 6:
A LIL CARGO RAP
-after Three 6 Mafia’s “Mystic Stylez”
​
∞
eye have heard squirmin’ massez
of movment,
bent flesh toward contort’d matere
twistin’ bodee turnz
push’d thru
nu-thangness
eye’m nu-thang,
no bodee—
da terrifyin’ enfleshment offerz meh a name,
fearfull eye draw baq from da abyssal laughter
iz dat nu-thang empty?
knot eye or thou
knot sanctified,
do eye no how dreamz begin?
b’hin da wissfull slumbur
eye heard ah verse bouta lil cargo rap,
pantz saggin, teef shynin
hand me dat spade b4 u
ask meh how it be n dis nu-thangness,
fantasyz bout a homely void
sumwear hidden beneef da hull
of a schip, dreamz of dyin
wit ah mystic azz style—
knot quite livin’, not wholly ded.
Dontay M. Givens II (they/he)—the child of Batavia and Shaylese Givens, daughters of Charlotte and Larry Washington, daughter of Flossie-Mae and Tommie Lee Givens—is a poet from the West Side of Chicago, currently living in Harlem, NYC. They, imag(in)ing anachronisms for their ancestors, rap/write poems which, lingering in the un/broken poetics of black English (Ebonics), hope to ward off the blues. They are currently pursuing an English PhD at New York University with focuses in black studies, medieval and early modern studies, poetics, and aesthetics with particular interests in German- and Dutch-speaking regions.