Concentrate Navigates the Tricky Line Between Material and Memory
“Latasha could avoid some stalkings, but avoid them all? / Avoiding them all could mean a mean vitamin C deficiency.”
Courtney Taylor, “Concentrate”
During the early spring of 1991, Latasha Harlins walked into a Los Angeles convenience store for an orange juice. Suspected of stealing, Harlins, a fifteen-year-old Black girl, was shot in the back of the head by one of the store owners, Soon Ja Du, a fifty-one-year-old Korean woman. At trial, Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but instead of serving her initial sentence of ten years, Judge Joyce Karlin sentenced Du to five years of probation, ten years of suspended prison, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine, suggesting that there were “mitigating circumstances” in Harlins’s murder. A week after the California Court of Appeal upheld the decision, the LA riots began. Du’s reduced sentence exacerbated already present tensions between Black and Asian communities in South Central Los Angeles; sixty-five percent of stores vandalized during the riots were Korean owned.
In Concentrate, author and visual artist Courtney Faye Taylor retraces the events leading up to Harlins’s murder and the aftermath through personal anecdotes, impressive collage, and an astounding capacity for experimentation and excavation. Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Taylor is simultaneously an archivist and world builder, sifting through the horrors that are allowed to flourish under racial capitalism, and dissecting patriarchy’s violent dismissal of Black girlhood and innocence. As a storyteller, Taylor centers Black girlhood in a world that constantly seeks to deny them their youth. Concentrate is a time-bending, hybrid debut with deliberate references to Black literary ancestors such as Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Cade Bambara who wrote extensively on what it means to heal and be well. While Taylor’s work is a masterful veneration of a legacy of critical thinkers, it serves as a sobering engagement of how little progress America has made when it comes to addressing the plight of Black women.
Throughout the text, the word “concentrate” emerges in numerous forms and meanings. It is, after all, the mainspring through which all subsequent action materializes. There is the juice from concentrate, its dense body sticky with flavor; there is the observant eye that concentrates, for better or for worse; there is the lack of concentration as the result of racial otherization, trauma, pain, and distorted focus which lends itself to further alienation. Taylor demands what it means to concentrate when so much of our focus is fragmented and we are surrounded by interchangeable tragedies begging our brief attention and numb forgetfulness. Yet despite our lack of it, so much energy is spent trying to concentrate, to make meaning and understanding of a cruel world so dependent on the erasability of Black life.
No one concentration is alike: Taylor shows us the plasticity of this word by braiding language together, just as her auntie spins gold from her scalp. Later, Taylor questions how this ability to focus is weaponized by non-Black peoples’ insistence on surveilling Black people. Or how Black people are focused to concentrate on how they present, navigate through space in order to mitigate others’ sense of unease: “Did that deaconess teach you the longest meaning of concentrate… A strong, hard focus. Not at all / like when I’m talking safety and you stuck on sweets.” Presentability equals a prayer for peace and safety, some desperately desired form of control. We hurt ourselves in the end.
Turning to the natural poetry of auntie wisdom, Taylor’s words drip with both forewarning and grief. “Each time Auntie pancaked a centipede to beige for scaring me, / she’d go Mean ol’ centipede, you bleed like me!” Invoking elements of Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Allowables” and Lucille Clifton’s poem “cruelty,” the reader wonders, for a moment, what it means to crush something underfoot that bears no threat other than its presence. Through both the centipede, the cyclical timeline, and concentration, Taylor reminds us of how intracommunal violence emerges, is enacted and then erased as the cycle repeats itself once more: “A Korean woman kills like / a Korean woman.” Though not white, Du’s violence and the subsequent erasure of Harlins’s memory is seen as yet another head of the mythical hydra that is white supremacy.
Concentrate is a shining study in Black literature legacies writing against cultural hegemony and a masterful invocation of multimedia storytelling. Humble in its approach to gendered trauma, the poems are alive with desire, rife with memory, critical in their approach to the complexities of violence between women of color. Under Taylor’s keen, observant eye, Black women are so often made examples of because they are a physical manifestation of non-Black, particularly white fear. Yet they are so relied upon as caregivers (sometimes of their own accord, but often because tragedy strikes so close to home they are required to step up to avoid further tragedy) in an uncaring society. Denise Harlins, Latasha’s aunt who helped raise her, died shortly after leading protests against Du’s sentencing and demanding that Empire Market, the place where Harlins was shot, be torn down and rebuilt as a children’s center. Instead, Numero Uno Market (under new management) emerged a few years later. This condition, colloquially dubbed “John Henry-ism,” weighs heavy on the soul and has long-lasting damaging effects: “And such resistance menaces the body… Aunt Denise died of congestive heart failure.” Through a generous mixture of written word and collage visuals, Taylor laments the physical trauma and mental exhaustion of constantly being a caregiver as someone who also desperately needs care.
Taylor is an expert at concentration; rarely deterred, though heavyhearted in her pursuit of truth, her poems are precise, crisp. “Normalcy devastates. Stillness lies to me,” she writes as the author is once again reminded, and here to remind us how purposefully memory can be erased, the way life goes on despite its wounds, that we are just filling the holes with sand until once again, it erodes. Concentrate begs us to do just that for our insured survival.
In order to best do justice to Latasha Harlins’s memory, Taylor visits Los Angeles, retracing the last few days of the girl’s life, revealing what was and what could’ve been Harlins's life. Taylor attempts to visit her grave site, ironically placed in Paradise Memorial Park, only to learn her grave has been unearthed and there is no way to tell where Harlins's bones rest. There is no memorial, no balloons, no headstone: “The lifeless go wherever there’s space.”
And while these mediums, though painful, can be reconstructed in order to tell an important story, memory and memorial remains a powerful, necessary tool for cultural preservation. Mug shots are used for missing persons posters, yelp reviews reveal racist sentiments across racial and business lines. Photos, old and new, create a timeline of erasure. Graffiti spray-paints reclamation of space in a society that commodifies our every interaction. Despite these graphic symbols of neglect, or perhaps because of them, Taylor approaches concentration through an expansive analysis of what is left to dust and what is quietly rewritten. Even the ground remembers what took place.
Courtney Faye Taylor (@thecourtcase) is a writer and visual artist. She is the winner of the Discover/Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work can be found in Poetry, The Nation, Best New Poets 2020, and elsewhere.
Ashia Ajani (they/them) (@ashiainbloom) is a Black storyteller hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, Comanche and Arapahoe peoples. They are a Bay Area environmental justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network and co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine. Ajani is a freelance book reviewer, 2022 Just Buffalo Literary Fellow, and imperfect plant parent. Their words have been published in Sierra Magazine, Atmos Magazine, Apogee Lit, Lumiere Review, and EcoTheo Review, among others. Ajani’s debut poetry collection, Heirloom, is forthcoming Spring 2023 with Write Bloody Publishing.