Execution Poems by George Elliot Essay

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This is seen in entitled "Negation," which is a play on words of the French word for 'Negro" and the English word meaning absence: "Le negre negated, meager, c'est moi:...My black face must preface murder for you." Clarke thus creates his own language as a medium of expressing his message over the course of Execution Poems, a blend of English, slang, African French patter. As well as clearly delineating the voices of his own and his cousins' voices, Clark also occasionally blurs them, as when he notes the fiction of the Geo and Rue he is creating in the poetic cycle, and the question remains as to whose "black face" he is referring to that is assumed to be a murderer -- his own face, or the face of his cousins.

Clarke strives to use the language of the street to give the reader a sense of 'place' and the location of his cousins through the use of multiple and metaphorical languages as well. For example, the poem "Haligonian Market Cry" creates the bustling atmosphere of wandering down a marketplace by blending voices: "I got hallelujah watermelons! - virginal pears! - virtuous corn! Munit haec altera vincit!" The cry of the venders becomes increasingly sexualized as the poem spirals on: "Luscious, fat-ass watermelons! - plump pears! - big-butt corn! Le gusta este jardin!" As the language of food, sexuality and virtue becomes intermixed, the voices of the sellers take on a character of their own, even though they are minor, nameless participants, and even Clarke blends other languages and high culture to suggest the enthusiasm, eloquence, and vigor with which they sell (along with the permeation of white culture): "Good God cucumbers! -- righteous pears! -- golden Baptist corn / Die Reue ist doch nur ein leuchter Kauf! / I got sluttish watermelons! -- sinful cucumbers! -- jail-bait pears! -- / Planted by Big-Mouth Chaucer and picked by Evil Shakespeare!"

These different voices -- that of society, the killers, and his own, as well as the different languages heard about his world helps Clarke understand, but not excuse the murders: This is most poignantly seen in as outlined in "Original Pain," talking about the boys' abused childhoods.

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They say that their father's "love iced over our hearts." Clarke suggests in his poems on the actual trial "Malignant English" and "Prosecution" that his cousins may also have been more 'sinned against than sinning' because of the prejudices of the prosecution but he never comes to a final determination as to what they did was right or wrong, and his technique is a writer is to unsettle through creative uses of language, not come to a final conclusion. What are unequivocally wrong are racism, and the ways in which the judicial system is harsher against Blacks, and its lack of compassion to all. Geo says "The laws preach Christ, but teach crucifixion," and the bitterness of this truth is….....

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