“The Yonder Is Burnt Orange”: A Review of Santee Frazier’s Aurum — December 21, 2019 by Beatrice Szymkowiak
Aurum is the second book written by Santee Frazier, member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. His first collection, Dark Thirty (2009), introduced us to his poetic work and to the fictional, almost allegorical character Mangled Creekbed. Frazier defines Mangled as “embod[ying] the struggle of Indigenous people who were left without a sense of identity, or a sense of culture and a sense of belonging to American society and culture” (Journal of Working-Class Studies, 2018). While still featuring Mangled—and indebted to Frazier’s mastery of sound and diction—Aurum departs from the narrative prose poems of his first collection to offer a radiant and lyrical poetic movement into “the afterworld,” the world in which Indigenous people have been thrown by colonization and settler colonialism. Aurum unfolds like the bellows of an accordion. The poet, at times pressing words together, at times loosening stanzas, transforms breath into sound. This sound carries three different voices, defining three successive movements in the collection. The first movement evokes the speaker’s world and story, through his eyes as a child and as a father; the second is about Mangled “who attempts to reconcile his history of violence through performance akin to vaudeville,” and the third one, more fragmented, offers a lyrical impression of “the afterworld” (University of Arizona Press, 2019). If lines and poems vary in form, the precision and intensity of diction shape the exoskeleton of a world, where bodies and lives literally become visceral, “socked in the gut.” In the collection, bodies mainly appear damaged and skeletal, reduced to ribs, knuckles, clavicles, collarbone, jaw, elbows, nails—all body parts that hunger and fight make salient. The multiple portraits drawn by Indigenous artists featured in the book, as well as the first poem of the collection, titled “lactification,” suggest that these bodies belong to Indigenous people. The term lactification was introduced by the Martinican thinker Frantz Fanon in Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) to explain the psychological and nefarious effects of colonization that defines darker skins as inferior and alienates non-white people into desiring whiteness. The poet seems to denounce the perpetuation of this notion under settler colonialism. Specifically, his avoidance of common Indigenous signifiers marks his resistance to any racial tropes. Throughout the collection, the reader encounters individuals with “charred skin,” “grease-shined mug,” “dust-caked ankles,” or “crust in [their] eyes.” The darkness of their bodies is the darkness of “ore body” (the title of one poem)—the body of people subjected to socio-economical exploitation, with skin “cooked thick from slogging.” Allegorically and pervasively characters gnaw, scrape flesh or grime, flay skin from fish, potato or apple (food becomes here a signifier of community). Their dark bodies gnaw at the darkening crust of “the afterworld.” The poet thus subverts lactification and affirms the right of Indigenous people to define their own bodies beyond race, to define their own “version of the tale,” in which Indigenous people would not be anymore “the slide on the wall, / model of the human skeleton.” Aurum is the scientific Latin name for gold. Aurum is not gold. Aurum is what will be labeled gold—the gold promised by Columbus and that will drive the genocide of Indigenous people. If gold is the “sun gnawing at the stars,” Aurum is the star before it was named sun. Aurum is brass knuckles and the beaming bellows of Mangled’s accordion. Santee Frazier, through an amazing soundscape, evokes a community in “the afterworld.” A collection delivered in magnificent language that defies labels, this is an extraordinary poetic movement.
