Belly, 1998 Dir. Hype Williams, and: Deep cover, 1992 dir. Bill Duke, and: Us, 2019 Dir. Jordan Peele

Abstract

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• Belly, 1998 Dir. Hype Williams, and: Deep cover, 1992 dir. Bill Duke, and: Us, 2019 Dir. Jordan Peele
• Robert Fernandez (bio)

A deal with the devil doesn’t go rite. A deal with the devil stipulates a child. A poem burns like a dollar bill held by a child over a pentagram and red candles. Smoke attracts the gods. The gods bleed money. A spell is a key, like a protein activates a gene, like money opens an age of ore. Like a poem is a door unlocked with a key held by a child in the belly of a dragon. Get back to what you war. Akin is a space; home is a family. The world is a margin; a dancehall is a universe. A poem stands out like coral against the dark. Run your fingers across it, wet as film, reel as a beginning. Red as a sunrise and start again. [End Page 21]

DEEP COVER, 1992 DIR. BILL DUKE

Robert Fernandez

A blast of crack smoke pours from the throat. Christ is here. What is money? A pelican on a seven-dollar bill. Counterfeit possibility. Reality kills; I would master it. What am I? A strung-out father. A criminal son. I go down, go under; I come up, a master. I multiply the sacrament, break profane bread. Dirty flames streak meat with soot. A poem ends in money. Billions groan in the furnace. The walls of the house are poison. Addiction is idolatry, counterfeit prayer. Hypocrisy is the law; the living convict the dead. The world is addiction, life reduced to money. I search for a father, expose every corruption. Truth pours from me like smoke. Truth is impossible; reality intrudes. The world transforms; the impossible enters. The devil is a pattern, a roving flame. [End Page 22]

US, 2019 DIR. JORDAN PEELE

Robert Fernandez

Do you answer to the past? Are you master of the past? Does the past master you? The possibility of recreation, like a stroll edging everything from its path, is the possibility of seeing you and forgetting what brought you here. Here you are. You are you. You are here. You are a family—in it together. Where colonialism produces the bourgeois family, you carry others with you like a shadow. A shadow knots a mirror. A mirror, a tissue, the stencil of a family. A voice cries from the depths: WHAT IS NOT ME IS ME. A zombie Seurat paints the picture of an afternoon in the park with five billion screaming dots of roe. A debt comes due. You to you. Me to me. Us. Look in the mirror. Grab yourself by the throat and make a choice. [End Page 23]

Robert Fernandez

Robert Fernandez is the author of Scarecrow (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), as well as Pink Reef (2013) and We Are Pharaoh (2011), both published by Canarium Books. He is also co-translator of Azure (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), a translation of the work of Stéphane Mallarmé.

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