Speaker 1: There is growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, but there are conflicting reports about what led up to the shooting. NBC's John Yang has the details.
John Yang: One of the police killings that became a huge national story in the years before George Floyd's death happened in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. An officer shot an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, after a petty theft report, and the officer was never charged. Eventually, the Department of Justice investigated, producing 100 page report. That report covered not only Brown's killing, but a culture of discrimination and corruption in the Ferguson Police Department. There was copious evidence of disproportionate arrests and ticketing of Black residents, as well as viciously racist emails shared among officers.
Nicole Sealey: Like everyone else, I was following the case. I was disturbed. I was so many things, angry.
John Yang: Nicole Sealey is a poet, and she dealt with the Ferguson report in a way that was entirely unique.
Nicole Sealey: While I did not come to the report to erase it, I was just very taken with everything, with the story, with Michael Brown, with the murder. I wanted to understand to some degree how these things could happen and could continually happen. I was just following following my spirit.
Speaker 1: Sealey spoke to The New Yorker's poetry editor, Kevin Young.
Kevin Young: Such a great pleasure to talk with you about the Ferguson report and erasure. I want to talk a little bit about the process of making the book. What is exactly an erasure?
Nicole Sealey: An erasure is a reconsideration of a text. I reimagined the Ferguson report by erasing it, and I erased whole sections, whole blocks of text. What is left then is a wholly new creative document. I was reading it, the printed version, and when I found that I was striking through, I was like, "Oh, this is something that I'm doing. I don't know why I am doing it."
I don't know if it was to try to undo whatever harm, but I just instinctively began to erase and highlighting words that moved me and making various phrases different colors, maybe I would come back to them, but it was really difficult, once I realized what I was doing, to find the lyrical leaps and lyrical narratives, the images, it was difficult to find those things in a document that is so formal and so filled with pure fact. I think that's why it was so important for me to circle and highlight letters within words to create the lyric where the lyric was hiding.
Kevin Young: I love the way you're putting it, that it was hiding, because I think when I knew that you were doing this, and then when I saw the end result, the lifted poems, I don't think I imagined that you were doing this from word-to-word, that you were taking two Ss and ES from a word. You don't rearrange them. They're all in order that you find them. You might find an H here, I'm looking at one of the first poems, an OR here, an S there.
Nicole Sealey: True.
Kevin Young: You have neigh which I think was neighborhood, and it becomes neighing. You're finding these connections that are visual, but also as you put it, lyrical and sonic. How much was the sound leading you through this process?
Nicole Sealey: The sound was very much leading me through. As I said, I was trying to find lyric where there was none. Often, sound would be the driving force in trying to find the lyric. Repetition, assonance, alliteration, these things would drive the poem because there was no story. There are stories, but not any that are inspiring. There are no surreal images. I had to really create these things and especially one movement. I'm forgetting now the page numbers, but the section with the repetition of force, force, force, force. It wasn't until pages after all these forces that I had read that I realized that there was a repetition within the document of the word force. That repetition too was the engine that drove that movement in the collection.
Kevin Young: Well, I think I have it here. You say, "Use of force, force of habit, of nature, force feed, force down, force his hand, force in line, full force."
Nicole Sealey: Force in line, full force, by force, show of force, brute force, blunt force to be reckoned with. Force a smile as law enforcement turns out in force to force open your door.
Kevin Young: It really highlights the force and maybe the force is that lie behind the report, which I think is so powerful because it's a damning report of a time and a place even in its initial form. It really lays out case after case, and I wonder if you think people will go back to the report after they come to you.
Nicole Sealey: I hope so. That's one of the goals for this work. I think the erasure is just as important as what it has erased. I'm thinking now of the initial impulse to erase. I think I did so partly because I wanted more eyes on the report. I wanted more people to read it to see what was going on in Ferguson. I'm thinking that Ferguson is not the exception, but the rule that this occurs in any city USA.
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Nicole Sealey: Horses, hundreds, neighing, part reflex, part reason, part particular, urge, at gunpoint among them, you are less likely to live into the wild, go the captive born, home in the high grass. A barking dog chokes itself against the pull of a tight leash. Its neck extending farther than cries for help. A kind of headlight echoing, increasing in reach, the forecast read, the city read, diminishing to the proportion of whoever said death comes in threes is an optimist.
I didn't walk away from the completing of this project knowing more than I did going in. I have many more questions wanting to know how for so many years, these things are allowed to happen and allowed to happen to folks that look like me. There's just so much more I want to say and so much that is left unsaid. I think my editors were so-- they got a bit angry with me towards the end because I kept changing things, but I kept changing things because as you know, Kevin, there's infinite possibilities with an erasure. I just want to show those possibilities beyond the words, the possibility for justice. I don't even know what that looks like. I don't even know what that looks like.
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John Yang: Nicole Sealey's book, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, was published this summer. You can find some of the poems at newyorker.com. Sealey spoke with Kevin Young, the poetry editor of The New Yorker.
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