Not an Elegy for Mike Brown

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Danez Smith’s “not an elegy for Mike Brown” is a 24-line, free verse poem, meaning that there are no consistent patterns of rhyme, rhythm, or meter throughout the entirety of the piece. The poem is divided into three distinct sections, marked by two backslashes. Each section is composed of a specific number of stanzas, or groupings of lines. Traditionally, stanzas form the paragraph-like divides within a poem. However, by utilizing stand-alone backslashes, Smith is able to group stanzas of similar tone and thematic content together, giving readers pause at the end of each section to digest the information before transitioning into a new topic or tone.

Section 1 (Stanzas 1-5) discusses Blackness as a lived experience, an experience of exhaustion and loss characterized through the speaker’s immediate tone of defeat. Section 2 (Stanzas 6-12) shifts, focusing on Blackness in relation to whiteness, and finally, Section 3 (Stanza 13) provides a small amount of circularity, calling back to the title with the inclusion of “Missouri” in the very last line, ending the poem on a somber note (Line 24).

The poem’s careful construction not only gives readers time to process new ideas as they are introduced, but it also mimics the cadence of the poem as it originally existed as a spoken word piece. Short breaths and other verbal pauses translate onto the page in the form of line breaks: “bring him & we will mourn / until we forget what we are mourning,” (Lines 4-5) while larger pauses are signified by the section divisions. The use of multiple question marks throughout the poem—in moments such as “& isn’t that what being black is about?” (Line 6)—create an overarching tone of uncertainty and frustration on the page that can be heard in Smith’s live performance.

While “not an elegy for Mike Brown” is written in free verse, it is not without careful construction, as Smith considers how every line break and punctuation mark affects the whole.

Capitalization

Capital letters denote the start of a new sentence or idea. They draw attention to proper nouns, adding specificity to written content. However, by purposefully avoiding capitalization throughout the majority of “not an elegy for Mike Brown,” Smith enables the form of their poem to speak directly to the content.

Smith’s consistent use of lowercase letters within each line, even after a punctuation mark or line break, causes the words on the page to blend together. There are only five instances of capitalization within the 24-line poem, one of which appears in the title. The victim’s first and last names, Mike Brown, and the “I” (Line 1) in the first line are the only capitalized words until Line 13. Lines 1-12 therefore become muddled with no clear indication of where one idea starts and the next begins within Section 1. Smith uses these writing mechanics to underscore how, in the same way that every word starts to look just like every other word in the poem, every Black boy who is murdered becomes just another boy within society, with “his new name / his same old body. ordinary, black / dead thing” (Lines 2-4), indistinguishable from the rest.

Mike Brown’s name, as well as the name of the state he lived and died in, are capitalized, placing emphasis on his story at the beginning and end of the poem so readers remember Mike as an individual with a distinct story.

Diction

Diction in its simplest form is word choice, the intentional selection of vocabulary that is most effective, appropriate, or clear in relation to a text’s deeper meaning. Smith’s diction throughout “not an elegy for Mike Brown” works to convey the internal feelings of the speaker as well as the external reality that they face.

Smith is purposefully vague about the description of the dead boy in Stanzas 1-5. The language is extremely plain and imprecise. Instead of characterizing the death of a human being as traumatic through emotionally expressive language, the boy’s corpse is merely labeled as “his same old body” (Line 3).

Smith’s descriptions render death, specifically the death of Black boys, as “ordinary” (Line 3), an experience so commonplace within modern society that it appears normal and therefore remains unquestioned. The starkness of these stanzas leaves no language to hide behind, revealing how desensitized society is to the murder of Black people; so desensitized that any “feeling” (Lines 7, 11) associated with death is just that: a nondescript, unspecified feeling.

However, the diction becomes hyper specific in Stanzas 6-12 with the introduction of the “white girl” (Line 12). Smith exposes how pervasive societal racial inequality is by shifting their diction, not only naming the type of harm done to the white girl (“kidnapped” [Line 13]), but also by aligning the white struggle with “the Trojan war” (Line13), a named and known mythological event. The white body is never unexplainably dead like the Black body, and the shifting language suggests that a person’s life is commonly valued differently based largely (and unfairly) on the color of their skin.