Ben Kingsley? Isn’t he the actor who played Moses or Ghandi or some other religious figure? Does that Ben Kingsley write poetry? The first line on the author page answers, “Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley is not the Ben Kingsley best known for his Academy Award-winning role as Mahatma Gandhi.” So, who IS Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley? And why was the ardent-knifed work of painter Salman Khoshroo the chosen cover art for this particular book, Dēmos: An American Multitude?
“American Multitude,” echoing Whitman’s “I contain multitudes,” is also the title of this collection’s opening poem:
From the languages of my Haudenosaunee: Onondaga Nation
as every thing begins with the heart beat of horses
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published Date: 03/09/2021
Paperback, pp. 96
ISBN: 978-1-57131-525-0
Kingsley begins Dēmos with heart. Prior to this opening poem and after a memorial page, there is a “Before Anything” acknowledgment page that includes a photograph of Kingsley’s grandmother behind the “exactness” of prison bars. Bars that held his great-grandfather under the authoritarian rule of Emperor Hirohito for having written a “defiant” political poem. Kingsley continues his multi-cultured lineage of thanks. His is an Onondagan, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian lineage. Within these first pages the answer to Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s identity begins to form. The canvas is primed, clearly gessoed. And a primed canvas holds promise as well as questions. A primed canvas awaits a search.
Kingsley is that artist searching. With language as his pigment, with poetic form as his palette knives, Kingsley creates layer upon intimate layer as he uncovers multitudinous selves, simultaneously exploring just who is this WE in this “We the People.” The layering is dense, but not inaccessible. If I wrote an essay on each layer, each possible theme, of Dēmos, it would be a multitude of essays (or, at least eleven.) Yes, “multitude” is key here.
Questions are more important than answers in this poet’s conversation with identity. Questions of connection and fitting in when intersectional categories are more fuzzy than clear. Questions of what remains when ancestors are slaughtered away.
From “Nantucket Sleighride”:
[ . . .] know that my people
weren’t neatly arked by America two by two, white boys named
Noah harpooned our asses, by the tens, by the thousands,
collared our necks with barbs and slugged lead
“In the Coffin Meant for Chief Little Horse, Archeologists Instead Find Two Others,” is a poem about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first of many assimilation boarding schools formed with one goal, to eradicate Indian culture, colonize. Kingsley writes that, “…European English / paper WASPs, yellow jackets …” ask in a chorus of “frenzied debate”:
In whose home will we build our next nest?
In whose home will we build our next nest?
In whose home will we build our next nest?
Kingsley questions home when you’re not welcome home, as in “Home/boy,” a poem about his Harrisburg, Pennsylvania homecoming, maced for looking too close at “over a dozen police” arresting a “smaller than five foot” woman. “I guess I got too close / to the other.” It’s a found poem made up of comments from newspaper readers following police version of the macing. One verse, a comment from “Rangerider,” reads:
Thank you / officers / for your fine work. It’s a shame
there are some in the city / who would try / to interfere
in your great work and make good work / look
bad. Don’t / forget / to replenish your mace
for the next bunch / of immigrants!
Dēmos is lyrical and storied. It is layered with violent political and personal history, from the atrocity of genocide to not being able to kill a deer on a hunting trip. Kingsley questions and confronts masculinity. “Fire, you little pussy. / Your skin softer than split sausage?” With red colored-pencil, I underlined every violent word and image. From what I’ve told you, you won’t be surprised to learn that my copy of Dēmos, loud-and-clearly, turned red. Then I took a blue pencil because what I have yet to mention is the depth of beauty within Kingsley’s poetry. I highlighted that beauty and every bit of beautiful language.
From “Out My Apartment Window, West Baltimore: August, 2 A.M.,” a poem wherein the speaker is witnessing the vandalistic attempt to remove the hood ornament from his car:
[…] hope
within an anvil of heart
that one boy will
free the silver:
And to him
it will be
Excalibur:
Beauty. Single words are outlined in blue: kci-coqols, obaasan, ghosted, crescentic, eyelets, akakagachi. Particulars are outlined in blue: crepuscular twilight, hammy down, Haudenosaunee tongue, glossy fractals of fishhooks, watermelon bodies, twisting like Quetzalcoatl’s tail. Beauty. Entire lines and poems are outlined in blue.
From “An Old Song, a Frog’s Song: Sing-Along”:
with your whole body
sing
for all who are to come
sing
Blue for beauty became as abundant as red. My copy became a visual aid illustrating Kingsley’s poetic tension between beauty and violence. The pain disrupts and challenges the beauty while the beauty softens the blow. Notice the proximity of pain and beauty in this excerpt from “Get Out of the Goddamn Car”:
buoy me to safety restart my world with a rainbow
like Noah’s magic boat never dreamt it could.
I added green pencil for fresh language and innovation which I quickly realized would overlap what I had already underlined. Green also outlines entire poems such as Kingsley’s reworking of a Punnett Square. Remember that diagram from biology class used to predict genotypes? Kingsley’s version is more about genocide than genotypes. It’s a series of Punnett Squares that includes 18th century Massachusetts Lieutenant-Governor Spencer Phips’s proclamation, one of a multitude of such bountied proclamations: “Twenty-five Pounds ... For Every SCALP of such Female Indian or Male Indian under the Age of Twelve Years, that shall be killed and brought in”
Color coding and penciled notes by Jo Freehand.
From Dēmos by Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org
As green and innovative as Kingsley is, this is not sterile poetry written for the sake of experiment or form. His experimentation and form feels secondary to a primary drive to connect, to write or paint humanity.
I had two colors left in my color-coding experiment. Gold for place, and there is much gold to be found in Dēmos from a Friday night around a campfire to Somerset Kitchen to Conodoguinet Creek to Pulse Night Club to a Boy Scout flag burning ceremony to an uncle’s razed orchard to East Jesus, PA. Dēmos is deeply rooted in place. Identity is deeply rooted in place.
As Dēmos is poetry of identity, why then did I include purple for identity as a final color? Why not simply color every page purple? I used it anyhow and listed Kingsley’s (and/or speaker of the poem’s) many selves. The list was long. To name a few, poet as: descendent of a political prisoner, torch carrier, biologist poet, obedient son, skeptic, historian, storyteller, political poet, language keeper, mixed-race, young witness, racist’s target, lyricist, disrupter, descendent of artists, middle-finger, connected to and part of Nature, father, white man’s myth dispeller, truth teller, “left-over ingredients,” year-of-the-Uma baby, and rule follower. The choice of purple for identity was not consciously planned, but somehow it was right. Purple is the blending of red and blue, identity emerging out of violence and beauty.
Like the portraiture art of Salman Khoshroo, Dēmos is not a search for answers; it’s for engaging with these textured layers, layering and uncovering, layering and connecting, layering and revealing. In Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’sDēmos, it is the search that matters.
Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at: jfreehand@verizon.net