American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight ...”]

In his volume American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes pursues the central American problem of racial violence and inequity through 70 interlinked poems that share form, tone, and subject. Hayes adopts poet Wanda Coleman’s American sonnet model for his poetry, using 14 pentameter lines that reflect traditional English sonnet form, but replacing end rhymes with repetition, internal rhyme, and alliteration. The resulting percussive echoes make the poem, part of a long conversation that runs through the entire series, in which the speaker returns to questions of personal identity and historical context. In these poems, the trauma of Blackness in America unfolds as personal and public. The speaker challenges readers and entreats them to consider the unanswerable question of how a human being can live in a cultural context that negates his existence culturally, spiritually, and physically. Above all, Hayes’s American sonnets envelop the contradiction of being Black and being American, an identity in which one part seeks the annihilation of the other.

The sonnet “Probably twilight…” conducts a one-sided conversation between the speaker and his imagined assassin. Because this would-be murderer cannot answer back verbally, the speaker attempts—with sarcasm, bitter humor, and frequent asides—to imagine the faulty thought process that would cause this person to take violent action against the speaker. The speaker projects onto the assassin a series of conditional statements beginning with the word “probably”—a specifically chosen word that leaves little room for doubt that the speaker's guesses about the assassin's thoughts are right (compare the relative confidence behind the word "probably" to the less sure connotation of the otherwise similar "possibly," for instance).

The first lines of the poem assume that the assassin makes decisions only through the lens of racial bias. Read through the enjambment (a poetic technique in which the end of a line doesn't mark a grammatical stopping point), the first thought the speaker attributes to the assassin is: "Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous / Darkness" (Lines 1-2). The imagery offers a sliding gradation of shadow, from the gray twilight, which carries little qualitative judgment; to the even less lit "blackness," which connects nighttime to a racial category; to the judgment-heavy and threatening obscurity of "darkness," with its connotation of the scary unknown and of monsters. Because the assassin conflates the absence of light with “dangerous/Darkness,” nightfall is a physically hazardous time to be Black in America.

The speaker now turns his rhetorical questions inward as he realizes that “Probably all my encounters/Are existential jambalaya” (Lines 2-3), referring to a dish of disparate elements invented out of European and African culinary traditions. The line has many possible interpretations. Jambalaya originated when resourceful cooks improvised a meal from ingredients on hand; the metaphor thus refers to American mixed heritage, as well as to the potentially genius results of dire necessity. Encounters with Black Americans may offer cultural benefits. A gloomier potential reading focuses on the word "existential"—the speaker has no way to identify which of his interactions will be the one that threatens his existence—the assassin is just one ingredient in the mélange of life, but this murderer's presence makes every encounter possibly suspect. Still, It is possible to "survive," the speaker presumes in line 4, directing at himself the softened n-word epithet that implies community within his marginalized brotherhood.

The mismatch between perceived danger, which is how the assassin experiences night, and the actual danger that befalls Black people is evidenced by the events listed in the next lines of the poem. “Something happened,” the speaker repeats in lines 4 through 6 without elaboration, assuming common knowledge between the speaker, the reader, and the assassin. Sanford, Ferguson, Brooklyn, Charleston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Baltimore all represent locations where specific cases of violence against Black Americans made headlines, but these cities all have legacies of violence beyond the recent stories as well. The euphemism “something” suggests that the events are so obscene as to be unspeakable, either due to their horrible nature or in the unspoken tension between Americans who avoid the topic of race out of fear and shame. In line 7, the phrase recurs again, this time with the verb in the present tense. This shift in time implies that the unnamed horrors continue today and will continue in the future, a bitter prediction that points to the collective title of Hayes's sonnets: the assassin is always there, in the past, present, or future.

As the assassination cycle repeats, the speaker lives in the daily proximity and certainty of his own death. To make this clear, the speaker again returns to the confusing, possible existence-ending interactions in his life: "Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters" (Line 9). This line clarifies the palpable fear that underlies face-to-face meetings, but exactly who is afraid of whom is left ambiguous. The line's interpretation depends on the group claimed by that slippery "our." This "we" could consist of Black people—the group the speaker earlier referred to with the fraternal n-word—in which case, the line echoes the speaker's belief that "Almost everywhere in this country every day" (Line 8) a Black person falls victim to racist violence. But the "we" could also refer to the speaker and the assassin—the racist who sees himself as the victim in any interaction with the Black person who frightens him with "dangerous / Darkness" (Lines 1-2).

The speaker dares his would-be assassin (and, by dint of the second person, his readers) to deny the reality of violence against Black Americans, though that denial runs through the center of our culture. The speaker rues the American inability to confront the truths of the country’s racial past and his statement “You won’t admit it” (Line 10) constitutes the only unqualified certainty in the poem, beginning the sonnet’s traditional thematic turn. Here, the speaker shifts from the topic of violence against Black Americans to another: white Americans' perception of Black Americans. In their fear, white Americans view Black lives as undifferentiated darkness. For them, the names of living Black people are the same as “the names / In graves” (Lines 10-11); whites see “dark blue skin” (Lines 12-13) as a homogenous mass, letting racism and bigotry define each successive generation of Black people as “one twilight matches another” (Line 14).

The first lines of the sonnet repeat almost verbatim: “Probably twilight makes blackness / Darkness” (Lines 11-12), removing the earlier word “dangerous” to emphasize the meaning of “darkness” that refers to occlusion, opacity, and ignorance. In the physical darkness, blackness becomes inscrutable and undifferentiated, but also in a middle space like twilight, the would-be assassin assumes that blackness is unknowable, and his worst assumptions prevail. Blackness becomes “a gate” (Line 12), an analogy that carries connotations of fenced-in protection and also an entryway or portal to an unknown place offering a path to a broader understanding. As long as the reader or the assassin asks no questions of the encounter, the gate remains closed.