An Identity Polyptych by Meca'Ayo Cole
Meca’Ayo Cole (Tameca L. Coleman)
The Elephants, 2021
A polyptych is a painting divided into connected sections. When I go to the internet to confirm this, I’m reminded that polyptychs are often altarpieces. This image grounds the abstraction of intersection in a clear material image of a hinge. Furthermore, the religious connotation prompts the question: what becomes possible if we consider ourselves and our pasts as worthy of witness? I have a theory about Meca’Ayo Cole’s An Identity Polyptych. I think that their polyptych is also a fractal. Look closely at one of its panels and you’ll find that that panel called forgiveness, the possibility of reconciliation, considering the past, Blackness, names, photography, memory, place, houses, class, childhood, violence, or the sacred, is itself not singular but multiple. Polyptychs within polyptychs, constructed in service to reconciliation and, as Cole writes in their acknowledgments, restoration.
In the poem, “They Were Made For Us,” Cole describes an Oakland shopkeeper as a “sentinel” standing watch over cowries they are trying to buy.
I tell the sentinel, “Because they are the mouths of the Orishas.”
I want him to see I know they are powerful.
I want him to see I know they are the mouths
from which everything is born.
It is Cole’s friend Asante who obtains permission—with what her appearance signifies? “Her head is wrapped. / She wears bead and bone.” Or with what she shouts, “Because they were made for us!”? Ultimately, they are granted access, only to find:
the cowries,
all of them,
are broken
at the teeth.
Cowries move Cole, or move with Cole, into the next poem, called, “Am I Black?” along with a scan or photograph of some governmental or institutional survey question, “What is Person’s 1st race?” There are the typical boxes for “White,” “Black, African Am., or Negro,” and “American Indian or Alaska Native,” all of which are checked. Cole considers the question of their own racial identity from many angles (polyptych), through culture, color, genealogy, and an impossible constant contradictory cacophony of opinions from family, friends, lovers, and strangers.
One of the things I like best about this book is the way that Cole embeds their childhood confusion—those mysteries or ambiguous moments that lodge in our consciousnesses—into the adult project of trying to put the pieces together. This encompasses everything from why the person who was supposed to paint a mural in their room never returned to what led their mother to move them and their brother away from their father. I have a lot of respect for the way Cole presents violence within their family without casting their father as a villain. Villains are fun in fiction, but Cole knows in this world we just have people, shaped by history; that even the ones who’ve done terrible things, have also done neutral and good things, too. That the good they’ve done doesn’t let them off the hook for the bad, but that the act of stepping back and witnessing people and their histories with them is part of the work of reconciliation and restoration.
The work of reconciliation and restoration, as Cole knows, is ultimately plural. Writing this book is a generous, open-hearted invitation to readers. The polyptych is, or can be, us.