A Review of Cheswayo Mphanza’s The Rhinehart Frames — June 15, 2021 by Beatrice Szymkowiak
The Rinehart Frames is the debut collection of American Zambian poet Cheswayo Mphanza, for which he was awarded the Sillerman First Book Prize for African poets. The cover of the collection, a haunting mosaic figure, alludes to the inextricable content and form of Mphanza’s project. The Rinehart Frames is explicitly inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man and its protagonist Rinehart, as well as by Abbas Kiarostami’s movie 24 Frames. The quilted body frame represents for the invisible man his fulfilment towards visibility. The silhouette speaks to the re-composing and re-storying of Black and Brown identities and bodies at work in the collection—identities and bodies, that settler colonialism has endeavored to subsume into its still frames, to erasure.
The poem Frame One introduces the collection, as well as the question of invisibility and identity that pervades it. The first line of Frame One comes from Terrence Hayes’s poem “How to Draw an Invisible Man,” which also refers to Ellison’s novel: “And because I mean to live transparently, I am here, bear with me, describing the contents.”
This line echoes Édouard Glissant’s notion of transparency. The Martinican thinker affirms that “if we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency” (Poetics of Relation, 189-190). Western thought forces the “other” into invisibility through the pressure of its rigid frames, included whiteness. The irreducibility of Black and Brown bodies thus becomes problematic to the settler colonial order. The speaker in Mphanza’s collection senses the implications of Glissant’s words:
Reading Glissant makes me anxious of the body’s properties.
The speaker explains further in “Notes toward a Biography of Henry Talayi”: “my anxiety was that I saw the body as Western. I was trying to get away from myself so I turned to the abstract.”
Throughout the whole collection, the settler colonial frame constantly threatens Black and Brown bodies of dissolution, indirectly or directly, representatively or literally, as the poem “Open Casket Body Double for Patrice Lumumba’s Funeral” also points to: “No one was to know of the firing squad, the axes gnashing though cartilage, cracking like drywood, and the acidic bath to dissolve me.”
The colonial power vowed to erase both the story and the body of the African leader. The speaker draws a parallel with the unmarked grave of his father in the poem “At Livingstone’s Statue.” Like Pauline Lumumba, he has only “left to mourn / the imagination of him,” while a monument erected to the European colonizer Livingstone still stands.
Against the menace of transparency, Glissant revendicates “the right to opacity for everyone” (Poetics of Relation 194). This claim seems to be one of the tenants of The Rinehart Frames, as the author works at bringing Black and Brown bodies and identities back to visibility, by re-framing and re-storying them within their own intellectual and cultural histories. To do so, Mphanza uses poetic forms that invite other poetic and critical works, and engage with visual and cinematic arts.
For example, most of the Frame poems (ten out of twelve) are centos, poems that borrow all their lines from other writings. A lot of other poems in the collection also contain a few borrowed words or lines. These borrowings participate in the re-composition and re-storying of Black and Brown histories and identities. Their extensive use and the span of their sources express the complexity of these histories and identities, against the reducing frames of settler colonialism. They can also be seen, as Kwame Dawes notes in his foreword to the collection, “as a physical enactment of a spirit of intellectual generosity and gratitude.”
Other poems involve cinematic arts or visual arts that are set in motion through an ekphrastic process, which allows, as in Kiarostami’s 24 Frames, the incorporation of the story outside the frames into the frames, and thus to create new narratives. For example, “Amrita Sher-Gil Introductory Wall Texts,” is a series of ekphrastic poems based on the paintings of the Hungarian-Indian woman painter. The ekphrastic poems animate the paintings with the voices and stories of their Brown models and of the painter, creating a new narrative of Brown identities. This narrative becomes a reflection on the self-representation of Brown and Black bodies under settler colonialism, as the speaker’s question denotes: “The painting beckons the viewer to ask whether this is in fact a composition or a decomposition?”
Mphanza extends this question into a meditation throughout the collection, as the speaker ponders in “A Stack of Shovels” the tyranny of frames and the advantage of “that peculiar dispossession that becomes a form of freedom.” In the following poem, “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure,” the speaker even claims:
I want to be amorphous. To linger in my body and not be held by it.
The Rinehart Frames are frames in motion that tell the complex story of Black and Brown individuals. These frames do not circumscribe bodies and identities. Rather, as the cento poems and the multiple artistic, cultural and historical references evidence, they are generated by them, in relation. “Relation” is a notion that Glissant defines as “a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry” (Poetics of Relation 34).
Mphanza’s debut collection is both challenging and exciting. His poetic meditation and documentation encompass the experience of Black and Brown bodies and recreate narratives of their identities within their own intellectual and cultural histories. At a time when Black and Brown bodies still face the violence of the settler colonial order, The Rinehart Frames is an essential account and reflection towards a more hopeful future for people of color, as the speaker of the last frame, Frame Twelve, wishes:
To forget the impossible weight of being human; to settle into the flesh of our futures.
