December 12, 2025
Thanks to Ibrahim Nureni, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
In Margo Natalie Crawford’s Black Post-Blackness, tidalectics is characterized by “nonlinear” or “back-and-forth” black radical tradition of continuity in that the experiences of black people from the era of slavery to the contemporary days do not follow a parallel path but adopt a circular schema (3). English, in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, argues that blackness is performative and can best be understood within social contexts and interaction. The theatrical nature of blackness creates a non-linear experience, and the social context connects the past, present, and future simultaneously rather than sequentially. Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Praise Song for the Day” beautifully expresses the cyclical nature of time by intertwining the past, present, and future. The title of the poem, which can be syntactically divided into “praise song” and “for the day,” conveys a pivotal theme: that is, the past cannot be erased because of its relevance to the modern days. “Praise song,” which is manifested in the title and repeated throughout the poem, communicates that Alexander’s ceremonial-poetic object is rooted in traditional African panegyrics to honor and recognize the sacrifice of the ancestors. The second component of the title, “For the Day,” signifies the realization of the long-overdue aspirations of their ancestors. The approach employed by the poet to embody the past and present struggle shows the seriality of the poem in that the challenge of the past is a feeling of “failed advance,” which drives the zeal for the “utopic appetite” of success of today. This does not imply that there is a parallel connection between the past and the present; far from it, it simply means the present operates on the model of recursiveness.
Alexander’s poem begins with seriality, the everyday activities of the common man, thus: “Each day we go about our business,/ walking past each other, catching each other’s/ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking// All about us is noise. All about us is/ noise and bramble, thorn and din, each/ one of our ancestors on our tongues” (lines 1-6). The serial buzzwords in the lines— “walking,” “catching,” and “speaking”—suggest the theme of freedom in African American society. This privilege enjoyed by twenty-first-century black people was unavailable in the previous centuries, especially during the slavery era. Even after slavery was abolished in 1865, there persisted a systemic mode of socio-political and economic oppressions for many centuries. The poetic speaker thus uses the first-person pronoun, “we,” to invite the poem’s intended audience—the African Americans. The essence of this stylistic technique is to call the audience’s attention to the era where freedom had once been out of reach, and enjoying it now was a result of the sacrifices made by past generations. To the poetic speaker, the “everyday” ritual is a transformation of the past, which results from the struggle of earlier generations. This acknowledgment of ancestors leads to the tidalectic movement of history in stanza nine and ten, thus: “that many have died for this day/ Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,/ who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,/ picked the cotton and the lettuce, built/ brick by brick the glittering edifices/ they would then keep clean and work inside of” (lines 25-30). The images— “the cotton and the lettuce” and “brick by brick”— point out how the black people were enslaved to build the American society.
The metaphorical expression “singing the names of the dead” conveys the poetic speaker’s intent that Obama’s inauguration as the President of the United States signifies an end to racial discrimination. It also signifies the erroneous assumption that the contemporary generation has contributed to the Black Arts Movement by ensuring that racial concerns unburden future generations. The poetic speaker proceeds with the use of symbolism to state how the ancestors worked hard for the success of modern America. In the poem, “train” symbolizes infrastructural and physical labor, “cotton and lettuce” depicts the labor-intensive nature of farming, and “brick by brick” represents the careful and persistent efforts of the ancestors toward building the society. These symbols are employed to arrive at a universal truth: black people were enslaved but they contributed largely to the development of the United States. The implied message in the lines is that despite the collective efforts of the black people in building America, they were treated as subaltern subjects. In the poem, Obama’s tenure in office is therefore considered the end of the subaltern position in that black people not only have a voice, but their words are heard.
It is important to note that the prosaic line, “say it plain: that many have died for this day” historicizes the issue of death in African American literature, starting from the slavery era, Jim Crow politics, and police brutality in the twenty-first century. Crawford’s argument between “blackness” and post-blackness” as a process of iteration is more apt in the poem, as the poet-persona juxtaposes the past and present conditions, thus: “Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day/ Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,/ the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables” (lines 31-33). The repetition of the words “praise song” in the poem reflects the idea of seriality: a cyclical movement that demonstrates how the past historical actions birth the present and urge forward movement. The poet-persona stresses the efforts of ancestors in building the modern United States, and Barrack Obama, being the 44th president, is a victory and celebration for the black community. Critically speaking, the speaker revels in the joy of a praise song due to her view that having a black president is an abrupt end to racial injustice in the United States. However, the display of racial egalitarianism in the highest political office of the United States did, as Abdur-Rahman argues, “little to eradicate racism or to improve the psychological, material, and political conditions under which black lives are lived” (4). Abdur-Rahman’s textual articulation unveils the psychological and complex nature of racism in the United States. It shows that the political success of black people is just a mere milestone of accomplishments among the black community but is never an end to the systemic issues of racism. In the discourse of blackness, the danger of black political success, like Obama, provides a feigned post-racial narrative that diminishes the perceived legitimacy of existing black movements and obscures the structural nature of racism in the contemporary world.
In the poem, Alexander attests that the black post-blackness movement is not a linear or predictable path but obscure, complex, and cyclical: “We walk into that which we cannot yet see.” This poetic line signifies that the future of black studies in academic discourse is a continuous construction and reconstruction of black identity based on societal demands. The seriality of the poetic line emphasizes the recurrence of historical injustice; this injustice does not result in failure but creates a sense of resilience and forward mindset among the black community. The recurring representation of walking forward in the poem, especially as used in the last line, shows that black post-blackness is about the recurrence of struggles, but this time, with the hope of eventual transcendence. In other words, the last line of the poem shows that “the most radical black aesthetic movements are always anticipating the next step ‘beyond blackness’ and shaping whatever blackness is around the impulse to imagine the unimaginable” (Crawford 3). The way in which the hope of the black people remained unfilled despite Obama’s regime demonstrates that blackness is a fluid movement—the type that cannot be pigeonholed or given a mathematical framework of analysis. As Crawford rightly puts it: “blackness ‘just grows’ into what comes after it; blackness cannot stop moving until it gains its own afterlife” (139). From the perspective of English: “we simply cannot see black artists’ work until we throw it into relief against the transformations it undergoes in our inevitably social involvement with it” (20).
Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day” is used in this essay as poetic object to unravel how the critical tools of tidalectics and seriality help understand the discourse of black post-blackness. In the poem, Alexander deeply explores, using “praise song” as a serial expression, the history of the black race in the United States and the current communal stories in a tide-like approach. The critical tools of tidalectics and seriality demonstrate that black post-blackness is a non-linear process that will continue to evolve with the experiences of the black community. This evolution makes it challenging to provide a clear or standardized definition of post-blackness. As English rightly puts it: “black art resists the distinctness critics aver on its behalf” (5). Crawford’s post-blackness cannot be pigeonholed within a single literary tradition but continues to expand its scope as black communities progress in the United States.
Works Cited
Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture. Duke University Press, 2024.
Alexander, Elizabeth. Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration. Graywolf Press, 2009.
Crawford, Margo Natalie. Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. University of Illinois Press, 2017.
English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. The MIT Press, 2010.
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