BLACK CHAMELEON

Houston’s first Black poet laureate weaves mythology and magic into a genre-bending memoir.

Mouton remembers sitting on the porch of the Poetry Foundation when a butterfly perched on a fellow poet’s skin. When the poet smiled and said that Mexican mythology identifies butterflies as visiting ancestors, Mouton thought about her enslaved ancestors’ separation from African mythology, which should have been her birthright. “When have Black people in the Americas,” she asks, “had the time to create a history outside the one they were just trying to survive? And in the few moments we get to dream aloud, who is there to record our origins beyond a whitewashed dictation?” These questions drive Mouton’s memoir, in which she uses incidents from her personal history to create a new Black, female mythology. For example, in one chapter, a memory of sexual harassment leads to the myth of Acirema, a god of White supremacism whom Mouton kills but ultimately cannot vanquish. After the author chronicles how her weight prevented her from enjoying multiple amusement park rides, she writes an alternative reality in which her body is too powerful for the park to contain, which she follows with a myth she tells her daughter about how the graceful movement of her female ancestors’ curvy bodies allowed them to save the children of a plantation from hungry alligators: “The waves were rising and falling to the motion of their hips. This hypnotism was the perfect way to stop the gators.” At best, the book is lyrical, tender, and generous, celebrating the beauty of the oppressed with wildly imaginative and artfully rendered prose. Some of the devices—such as referring to the writer’s past homes with mythical names, like the Empire, the City of Angels, and Space City, instead of their actual names—feel overly dramatic. Overall, though, this innovative mix of myth and nonfiction is a pleasure to read.

A formally inventive celebration of Black womanhood.