Speaker
The speaker of this poem is inextricably linked to the author, Tracy K. Smith. The poet is a Black woman who has established herself as a literary force to be reckoned with and a name to be recognized. Tracy K. Smith is the 2012 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Tracy K. Smith was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2017. The seemingly unnecessary repetition of the poet’s name is purposeful because it underscores the significance of attaching the author of this poem to its speaker.
The title of this poem is unusual in that it is also the name of the very idiosyncratic form of the verse. One of the defining features of a ghazal poem is that it is constructed as a series of couplets in which the second line always ends with the same word. In this case, that word is “name” and that word defines the premise of the poem. The speaker is a Black woman who is bemoaning the erasure from the history of all those other Black women before her who were not fortunate enough to be recognized by name. This history is presented metaphorically with the loss of identity compared to stolen crops which thereby links identity to an essential necessity of existence.
The speaker is a person viscerally connected to this lost history and is not just bemoaning the erasure, but imagining reclamation. She can create a fantasy that imagines a moment of resurrection producing an unimaginable sound of joy at hearing their names finally acknowledged. She also entertains a more pragmatic perspective which finds satisfaction, not in the explosive thunder of mass acknowledgment, but in the quiet whisper of an epiphany passed from one individual to another. This is a portrait of the speaker as the essence of optimism that the correction of history is a slow process that always begins with the acknowledgment that corrections are required.
