‘Time Travel Blues’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
‘Time Travel Blues: An Ode to Black Sci-fi Movies That Can’t Exist,’ by Herve Comeau in Birdfeast, is a matter-of-fact prose poem that lays out an unavoidable thesis: time travel isn’t really an option for black people in America. Comeau thinks through a scenario where he travels back in time with “spray-on-white-face or temporary-Caucasian-gene-therapy” where he’ll “mask everyone.”
Then Rodney King, Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till will wake up with white faces, and the world will watch how beautifully safe and soft it can be to wake up with a cotton expression. I'll likely find that Elvis wasn't a thief but a fellow black time traveler.
Danez Smith’s ‘Dinosaurs in the Hood’ comes to mind, and along with it the difficult fact that imagination itself—time travel, dinosaurs, heroes, masterminds—is as entangled in systemic racism’s root system as anything else. Nothing is innocuous, nothing is given. When the poem wonders what it’d be like to travel back in time and “find a George Wallace or a Pat Robertson, put a black face on them,” the answer is itself a question with an answer that travels backwards and forwards in time.