A Review of Airea D. Matthew's Bread and Circus — August 12, 2024 by Beth Brown Preston
As I was privileged to attend the Class of 1974 fiftieth reunion at Bryn Mawr College, my alma mater, I found myself considering a Black woman poet’s sojourn on that gorgeous suburban campus. As I recalled old times with former classmates, the poet whose name came to my mind was Airea D. Matthews, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr. On the same day as my reunion, I decided to purchase her recent collection of poems, Bread and Circus. I was amazed by her achievement as a scholar and poet in this, her second published volume. (Her first book of poetry, Simulacra, won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets award.)
The title of this collection is selected from the phrase “bread and circus” that appears in the Satires of the Roman poet Juvenal. In translation from the Latin, the passage reads: “Long ago they have thrown overboard all anxiety. For that sovereign people that once gave away military command, consulships, legions, and everything, now bridles its desires, and limits its anxious longings to two things only—bread and the games of the circus!” The ruling class, the people in power, can only be appeased with frivolities and pleasures.
The poet, in this brilliant and probing collection, interfaces life experience with the works of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90), who is known as “the Father of Capitalism,” and with the writings of Guy Debord (1931–94). Debord was a founding member of the Situationist International, an organization “composed of interdisciplinary libertarian Marxists, who posited that in late-stage capitalism social relations ... would deteriorate and be mediated through objects—products that one can buy, sell, or fetishize.” In her notes, Matthews writes: “Smith forwarded the invisible hand theory in which self-interest was at the heart of a thriving economy—people would help one another economically because it was in their best interest. The belief in self-interest is the basis of modern free-market capitalism.”
Matthews’ poetic achievement emerges in her timely criticism of our capitalist society, a system that depends largely upon the exchange of commodities for its economic progress. As capitalism evolves, she argues, “the body itself becomes a fetishized commodity.” Her argument is presented with and supported by the works of social theorists and our modern behaviorists (e.g., Pavlov and B.F. Skinner), and through her poems of lived experience as the child of a working-class family. Matthews gives her readers several portraits of an errant father, a man who has failed his wife and children with his frequent absence, his gambling, and heroin addiction. In a poem called “Swindle,” she describes a scene in which a father takes his child with him to a poker game to watch him lose the family's meager funds in an unlucky bet. In “The Family Room in ’79,” the poet extols a mother who is dutiful despite her bad marriage and economic circumstance: “Before there was a room, there was a family. That family had a mother. That mother’s children called her Mama.” This woman is beaten by her husband, in front of her children, when he arrives home to find the children dining on food donated to his family by a charity. These and other scenes of urban violence paint the reality of the Black working-class family as victims of the greed-oriented capitalist system that preys on their neighborhoods with indecent housing, poor schools, and illegal drugs. Black bodies and minds are pictured as commodified by marriage, debt, eviction, and by a series of common urban tragedies and deaths.
This second collection has been called by other reviewers “ardently interactive,” by exploring canonical texts by Adam Smith and Guy Debord “to critique the impact of capitalism beyond the theoretical.” In a poem titled “The Troubles,” Matthews describes the horrific scene of a political revolution in Europe while paralleling this event with the troubled occasion of a child’s birth, perhaps her own birth, to a reluctant mother who
thousands of miles away on a different continent, wailing on her bedroom floor, arms flailed across her belly, mourning an unwanted who spine-swims against her backbone's curve holding vigil for blood that will not come and me who surely will.
Matthews predicts the coming of a new class of poet-revolutionaries, the youth of her generation, whose birth heralds a time for change.
