South Somewhere Else - Nana Grizol

It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place

Somewhere else

We grew up in a town that our parents just found

On a job search and liked it quite well

Who had so many friends who arrived just like them

So their kids were our kin for a spell

It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place

Somewhere else

Like the feeling of home was a book on a loan

From a college town private school shelf

We took in every chapter with interest and laughter

But never quite a sense of ourselves

A dangerous narrative, haunting imperative

Led us little kids to believe

That the place we were from shed a sheen we should shun

Like the salt of the sweat dripping down from our sleeves

Was assumed that the South was a thing that took place

Somewhere else

Like the sun that went down on the edge of my town

Progressed no further west as it fell

And on visits to relatives, couldn’t quite tell

'Cause his pounding heart sank as they swelled

It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place

Somewhere else

As if Jim Crow geographies didn’t haunt all of the

Streetscapes we’d come to know well

Not just the old neoclassical mansions we passed

Or the high school had stories to tell

I mean the segregate sound of that old college town

Rings so loud to me now, I must say

As we worked all-white restaurants, trash-talking debutantes

Our nascent class conscience, obnoxious displays

Was assumed that the South was a thing that took place

Somewhere else

And maybe it was, which I say just because

We weren’t noticing where power was held

Captivated, the capitol’s capitacratical

White liberal logics prevailed

It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place

Somewhere else

Multiracial resistance to greedful ambitions

Cast out in revisionist spells

Power concedes 'bout as much as it leads

As we started to see for ourselves

It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place

In a retrograde rendering of absolute space

As though everything left in the world wasn’t traced

By production, subjection, resistance, escape

Seen squarely through this disidentified gaze

And through textbooks and TVs, our modernist ways

Could never quite focus, our participating

Renewing, rejecting, affirming, negating