“Not that we even had a word for it”: On Harmony Holiday’s Maafa

Grundy, D., (2026) ““Not that we even had a word for it”: On Harmony Holiday’s Maafa”, The Hythe Review 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/thr.29436

First published in the US by Fence Books in 2022, and now in an expanded UK edition from the 87 Press, Harmony Holiday’s Maafa is a broken epic of fragment and fracture that speaks to a moment where collective possibility seems to daily flare, dim, then die. It is a powerful addition to Holiday’s ongoing project to work through the complex and often contradictory legacies of her own family history, the subject of much of her previous work; the history of what her Substack names ‘Black Music and Black Muses’; and the overshadowing history of the Atlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage, the maafa itself.

The Kiswahili word maafa (the plural of afa, a loanword from Arabic: “catastrophe”, “calamity”, “disaster”) first began to be used as an equivalent to the Hebrew “Shoah” or “Holocaust” in Afrocentric circles in the late 1980s.¹ It is still not widely used in common discourse. As a word, maafa is a stand-in—“the only word we have”, Holiday notes, but one that can never fully comprehend the horror of what happened and how it continued.

Lacking a word has not stopped African American authors from trying to write this catastrophe. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), both as novel and TV series, remains perhaps the most famous depiction, holding, in part, to the belief that collective trauma can be narrated as history of individual survival. Amiri Baraka chose instead a collective route, in the “historical pageant” Slave Ship (1967), a theatrical work which stages confrontations between archetypal figures, culminating in a collective appeal to the audience to rise up, and in the book-length poem Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song Djeli Ya (1995), where the griot channels collective history into pun, aphorism, and dialectal/dialectical double meaning, motivated by a belief in the “motion of history”, the movement of the people, the path to revolution.² More recently, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! presents itself in the ghostly gaps of archival erasure: a dictated, collective subject that does not exist, dictated to the author from ancestral ghosts.

Holiday’s Maafa differs from these texts in that it boldly personalizes the maafa itself. Here, its antecedents include countercultural feminist epics, generally by white poets: Diane di Prima’s Loba, Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, Judy Grahn and Anne Waldman’s rewritings of the Inana legend. Yet, writes Holiday, “I couldn’t think of one explicit black female epic hero in the western canon”.³

In the first poem in the book, the character is introduced on the auction block, framed by the language of economics and dehumanisation.⁴ In the second, she is named as both victim and witness, who “cannot tell [….] if she committed if she is always committing the crimes she is / witnessing”.⁵ Holiday’s Maafa is also a perpetrator, shackled to the corpse of her father, whom, it seems, she has killed. Maafa is a figure who, at times, confounds moral judgement, a hustler who does what she has to do in order to survive. For surviving does not necessarily make one exemplary, or noble, and this demand for “innocence”, as Jackie Wang has argued, often perpetuates the dehumanisation it purports to challenge.⁶

Say her name: The title to the first section immediately brings us to politics: the practice of speaking the names of the dead as revolutionary remembrance. Such naming cannot help but seem haunted by the movement for Black Lives of 2014 and the more militant, open rebellion of 2020, along with the deaths of Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Eric Garner, and all the others that spurred them, even if they are not explicitly referenced. This is not, however, a text about specific events about police violence or uprising. And the prophetic language of the Bible, so long a reference in Black liberation struggles, is negated: “Go forth and tell no one”.

“Maafa can’t breathe the boat to shore / Maafa don’t study war no more”, writes Holiday, the truncated last words of George Floyd and of countless others sandwiched between fragments rhyming across two traditional songs: ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’—Georgia Sea Islands spiritual, sea shanty, work song of resilience and endurance—and ‘Down by the Riverside’—song of the bringing of peace, the end of war—their hopes alike shattered by the continuing reality of police violence.⁷ “she’s onto the banality of horror”, Holiday continues, alluding to Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Finally, there is a biographical allusion to the infant Holiday’s refusal of food in reaction to her parents’ abusive relationship—a story told in her 2023 multimedia text Love is War for Miles: “I was choking / So I ate only soft things no chewing choking on the softening seed of a loose bullet impaling me / from my mother’s throat”.⁸ These swirling allusions don’t so much add as problematise meaning: they have become, like the unassimilable seed-bullets on which Maafa chokes, things which cannot be assimilated or acted upon.

***

Maafa keeps trying to tell stories that collapse half way, then determinedly come back. Poems perpetually rewrite each other, spin riffs on the same idea. The second part of the book, Duat, introduces its mythic element: the ancient Egyptian mythological system in which the sun god Ra must descend on a barge to duat— the underworld, the realm of night—and, in its underground river, fight Apep—serpent, Lord of Chaos, the eater of souls.

In the Black Arts era, Kemetic / Egyptian mythology found its way into the poetry of Sun Ra, of Baraka, Reed, Thomas, Touré, Dumas, and into a work like N.J. Loftis’s Black Anima, an extraordinary epic poem which offers a kind of Afrocentric version of Eliot’s The Waste Land, borrowing heavily from Frazer’s Golden Bough.⁹ For these poets, Egyptian references were fragments of a mythic wholeness that might be reconstituted in different ways: for Baraka, in the “Black Value System” of Kawaida, for Reed, in a signifyin(g) syncretic mythology, for Touré, in a pan-African utopian vision.¹⁰ They signal the future as much as the past: a world of possible futures, of social and political resurrection. In Maafa, myth offers not so much wholeness as another irreparable fragment, one that can’t be incorporated or restored. Noting the similarity of Egyptian diagrams depicting this world with diagrams of slave ship holds, Holiday sees Duat and Maafa as “one / interminable event, a crisis family linked in perpetual death and rebirth until they turn their fate around. The West is / that underworld, that chaos, hostile to good destiny—that land of cannibals and madmen we enter to unravel”.¹¹ As night follows day, though Ra triumphs and escapes, he must again be killed, in order to battle his way through again to resurrection. The cyclical pattern that myth offers in its structure, refusing closure, maps onto the compulsion to repeat trauma, and the way economic cycles continue their entrapment: from sharecropping to redlining to foreclosure, from slave catcher to cop.

In Maafa, myth’s search for origins and unifying tropes can deceive, divert. ‘The alienation of labor is almost complete’ cites, then negates, a startling claim:

we  are  the  first  fascists

The claim is Marcus Garvey’s. When Mussolini invaded what was then Abyssinia in 1935, triggering an outpouring of Black anti-fascism, Garvey condemned the act of aggression and unsuccessfully lobbied the US government to intervene. Yet he also reputedly boasted to a friend of his UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association): “We were the first Fascists. When we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.”¹³ Combining mythic heritage, military display, and self-invention, Garvey cited “extreme nationalism” as the only salvation for African Americans. The contradictions cannot easily be resolved. Did Garvey’s nationalism challenge the idea of the nation state, of empire, or merely invert it? What of the African American colonial experiment of Liberia, hymned by Melvin B. Tolson, and the civil wars that followed?¹⁴

***

Garvey’s is one version of leaving: Back to Africa on the Black Star line, or the deal for land reportedly mooted by Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam with the Ku Klux Klan. Another myth, its opposite, is to stay. Integration: the encouragement to identify with a regime that, beginning its empire at home and then expanding worlwide, genocided ancestors, and continues to be complicit in global genocide.

Holiday’s Maafa chooses neither. The book’s third section, ‘Leitmotif (Run)’ loosely relates, Holiday tells Lauren Mackler, to the aimlessness felt when one reaches new territory: the false promise of post-bellum freedom—sharecropping, the ghetto, the great Migration, failed reconstruction. “My dad was a sharecropper,” she notes. “Freedom was what you were chasing, and then you just end[ed] up another laborer trapped on the same land. […] [T]hat section was about this fugitivity that’s always undermining itself.”¹⁵ For the fact is that Reconstruction never really, never fully happened, and freedom’s name is still constantly being betrayed. No wonder, then, that the grammatical and rhetorical fulcrum of Holiday’s lines is, very often, negation: definition both defined and voided by its opposite. “Not that we even had a word for it”; “Not that struggle became a home a form we could trust”; “Not that you can attack a disaster”.¹⁶

Maafa believes, both in the literal practice of marronage, and the notion of fugitivity as trope in Black culture influentially developed by Nathaniel Mackey, crossing over literal and metaphorical levels.¹⁷ It believes in a practice of opacity, of refusing to be read. “No Discernable Radical Politics, Run”; “I promise to disappear again”.¹⁸ At the same time, it sees in this a pathology: “as madness laughing comes out catatonic screams”.¹⁹ An extension of the Maafa project, Holiday’s multimedia piece ‘The Black Catatonic Scream’ (2023) writes of “elective muteness” as suppressed scream. For Holiday, both silence and the scream exist beyond language. They are both the result of victimisation and refusals of enforced systems of meaning.²⁰ Meanwhile, language is “is a ruin and music reigns and overcomes this.” Think Miles Davis yelling after an operation so that his vocal cords were permanently damaged and he spoke in a whisper. Think the silence of Thelonious Monk, of Bob Kaufman during the Vietnam War.

Holiday’s father, the Soul singer Jimmy Holiday, she recalls, “stopped speaking in intervals throughout his life, after times of heartache, seizures, music industry trauma, marital unrest, racial profiling, nervous breakdowns”.²¹ When he met her mother, he was recovering from institutionalization and electric shock treatment after “strapping on some of his guns, running through his mostly Jewish Beverlywood, Los Angeles, neighborhood, and informing everyone who would listen that the Nazis were coming […] and […] that he would protect them”, before going silent. For Holiday, this “paranoiac hope for community and connection”, in a world which refuses it—and in which the Nazis might be closer to home than one might think—contains within it something utopian, a promise betrayed. Yells or sudden silences become acts of exorcism and refusal: refusal to be reconciled to a world that says that things are OK; refusal to be OK. Not that we even had a name…

***

‘Leitmotif’ ends with the speaker having apparently escaped the underworld, even if the world itself seems to have been destroyed in the meantime.²² “It was so traumatic all over but it’s all over now / I’m feeling like myself / I feel like coming up / Like a clean black subject” (78); “Allegiance inks the fray to shreds and I wake up” (80).²³

Maafa wakes up into what the book’s final section calls “a paradise of ruins”. Images pile up in contained black-and-white boxes spread across the page: Lonnie Holley, Duke Ellington, Kendrick Lamar, Prince meditating, runaway slave advertisements. “Through the existential absurdity of the accumulation of these images”, summarizes Holiday, “[Maafa] exorcises her own haunts, and […] is healed into complete being […] a kind of rebirth of feminine consciousness and cultural consciousness that was trapped in patriac[h]y and erasure.”²⁴

The paradisal ruins here seem to exceed mythic definition. Ruins are rarely fully recognisable as what they were, though sometimes, they are all we have in which to identify the bodies, the remains of what was loved. If nothing else, Holiday writes, “the ruins mention that we were here” (95), “[a]nd it occurs to me […] we might even love [these ruins] & ourselves” (92). Maafa as book proposes a messiness that won’t separate desire and destruction, trauma and love. The ruins of Maafa as person passing through the ruins of Maafa as catastrophe—this aestheticized, paradisal ruin, one that knows its own absurdity; that, as ruin, knows that it can never be complete.

Ruins, from Romanticism to their Modernist, post-war variants, are all too easily aestheticized: the romantic traveller gazing on the ruined temple, castle, or chapel, the experience of the sublime, a tourism of desolation and devastation. “Ruins”, write Haytham el-Wardany and Lama El Khatib, “[w]here the past is reduced to mere memory. Settler colonial reveries.”²⁵ Perhaps, then, what Maafa seeks in this bitter paradise is the ruination of ruin itself. In the book’s ‘afterword’, the five new poems written since its first publication and in the wake of the catastrophic, genocidal ruination of Gaza, Holiday writes: “I told you to save the ruins […] If the genocide won’t end my love of pain has to be ruined”.²⁶

***

In the fourth issue of The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, Larry Neal wrote a prose poem-review of Pharoah Sanders’ 1969 record Karma. “The temple had a round spiraling dome and I stood with my father’s spirit listening to Pharoah cascade through alcoves and spectrums of light […] Your brothers and sisters are there; it is sunday church picnic time in Mali or Dakar; or alabama talk, revival time perhaps. Saw you in Timbuctoo, remember? Or Chicago on 72 street”.²⁷ It’s a utopia, a pan-African gathering established in sound, where the distance between two continents vanishes like a multiphonic which holds two notes at once. The second poem in Maafa’s new final section, ‘Fear Not Man,’ doubles as tale of mid-passage and elegy for Sanders on his passing.²⁸

• […] I estimate he’ll plant a seed in me and I’ll be asked again and again to bring a soul forth. And month after month, I’ll toss them overboard a ship I’m riding, my ships, faces shivering

• just beneath me in the water just beneath me—fleeting, fleeting archipeggio bloat and roam of this thinned-out approach to dying.²⁹

Neal evinces something like a Black patrilineage, the nation rewritten in the gendered language of brotherhood. Holiday’s poem, in which a woman is forced to give birth, again and again, and resists by killing her offspring, disrupts that line of succession, questions what it can mean: the de-gendering of the Mid-Passage articulated by Hortense Spillers, the constantly broken notion of a family broken and sutured as establishing order of a two-faced moral code exported around the world as the American way.³⁰ Not lullaby but violence of infanticide, archipelago of land become “archipeggio”, arpeggio of sound, where the notes of a chord are played in sequence rather than at the same time—a “broken chord”, harp-like flow.

As a poem, Maafa can choose its family in sound—its father figures, its mother figures. Maafa becomes at several points Ma: ma, the mother, Ma, the Egyptian goddess of truth whose weighs the souls of humans on the scales of justice to see if they’re lighter than a feather; mama, dada, Black maafa Nihilismus. But chained in the hold, one cannot choose.

•          […] Here I come with my ships and my submission, pedigreed in song/obsession with what cannot

•          be said, what you are forbidden to say, what you must say anyways

•          to his picture

•                              on fire and thin with leaving³¹

‘My ships’ alludes to ‘My Ship’—the wistful Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin Broadway song most famously covered on Miles Davis’ and Gil Evans’ Miles Ahead—used here, with bitter, sinking realisation, to refer to the slave ship.³² Bruce McClung suggests that the song is based on the English children’s nursery rhyme ‘I saw a ship a-sailing’, in which the sailors on the ship are mice “with chains about their necks”.³³ It’s also been speculated that this rhyme refers to Francis Drake, bringing back plundered treasures to the British crown, that the chained mice are slaves. Slavery as material for child’s play or lullaby: this is how the traumas of history get sublimated, internalised, displaced, at every level.

In this world, any word is ready to slip into the denied reminder of a genocide that is, nonetheless, as Aldon Nielsen writes, “everywhere inscribed within the archives of our thought”.³⁴ Maafa often works across what the preface calls the “haggle and hobble” of vowels, associations in sound that link “crop” to “cop”, “laughter” to “slaughter”, “cane” to “chain”: the arbitrariness of sign and signifier in a vertiginous improvisation that generates movement and that skirts the edge of meaning, like casting for signs within language’s scattered grains.³⁵ Sometimes we call this poetic work, released and entrained within form, and we give it names like “truth” or “beauty”. But what does negative capability mean within genocide?

***

The book in its original printing ends with Maafa as suicide or suicide bomber, terrorist or execution victim, liberating herself or being destroyed by the state and trying to take it down with her. “Suicide as confession”.³⁶ And then, in a final stanza that edges further and further over to the right-hand side of the page, Maafa goes to her death and seems to be reborn:

• So Maafa made herself up

• Then blew herself up  to  survive

•                    Every now and then the humor is a knife     turning

•                        Or the newest fetish object                 a guillotine

•                                        The last black radical neck    neck    sky

•                                               and now I have this perfect life³⁷

On her Substack, Holiday writes of this “glib but insistent mood”, in which, despite knowing that history is “in many ways […] measurable in intervals of mass death or not at all”, one “find[s] an internal clock that chooses ridiculous optimism against whatever odds come up, until the bitter end of humanity’s tragedy fetish”.³⁸ She seeks, she tells Lauren Mackler, to be “the kind of inexplicably mutant human who can see all sides of life and still choose her own private sense of peace and witnessing.”³⁹ To reconcile oneself to an irreconcilable world is, perhaps (following Adorno), to live the wrong life that cannot be rightly lived (following Berlant), a cruel optimism. And yet this sense of a personal reckoning, of being able to keep living, without which, how could one survive at all?

What, then, is left? In the poem, if nowhere else, the jump cut between the severed neck and the perfect life—the cut that is the moment of death, the guillotine’s blade, the bomb’s blast—becomes a moment of possibility, tiger’s leap or break; the space where life must enter the space between the lines of the poem, the tabs on the page, all the filled and blanks spaces of the book, its ruins and redactions and voids. To “get back”, as Holiday writes, “to worshiping life and not death”.⁴⁰

Notes

1. One of the earliest—and perhaps the earliest use of the term—is in Marimba Ani (as Dona Richards), ‘Let The Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African-American Spirituality’, Présence Africaine, Nouvelle série, No. 117/118: 247–292. ⮭
2. Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song Djeli Ya (Chicago: Third World Press, 1995). Sections of the poem first appeared in print in 1985 in Campus Exchange Forum, Southern Review, and Forward: A Journal of Socialist Thought. “The Motion of History” is a reference to Baraka’s 1978 play of the same name, the first major theatrical work following his adoption of Marxism-Leninism, and collected, along with Slave Ship, in The Motion of History and Other Plays (New York: William Morrow, 1978). ⮭
3. Quoted in publisher marketing from Fence Books. ⮭
4. Holiday, Maafa, 1–2 ⮭
5. Ibid, 3. ⮭
6. Jackie Wang, ‘Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety’, Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018), 260–295. ⮭
7. Maafa, 6 ⮭
8. Ibid. See also Holiday, ‘Love is War for Miles’, Triple Canopy, Issue 28 (2023), https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/love-is-war-for-miles ⮭
9. N.J. Loftis, Black Anima (New York: Liveright, 1973) ⮭
10. See Amiri Baraka, A Black Value System (Newark, NJ: Jihad Publications, 1970) and It’s Nation Time (book, Chicago: Third World Press, 1970, and album, Black Forum, 1972), Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Doubleday, 1972), Askia Touré, Songhai! (Songhai Press, 1972; London, Materials, 2024) and Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Touré (Chicago: Third World Press, 1999). For signifyin(g), see Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). ⮭
11. Maafa, 21. ⮭
12. Maafa, 40. ⮭
13. On Garvey’s shifting positions towards Mussolini and Hitler, see Francine M. King, Proceedings and Papers of the Georgia Association of Historians, 1989: 26–36 (https://omowalebooks.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/garvey-hitler.pdf) ⮭
14. Melvin B. Tolson, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1953). ⮭
15. Lauren Mackler, ‘Pathological Aliveness: A Conversation with Harmony Holiday’, Los Angeles Review of Books, October 14, 2022, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pathological-aliveness-a-conversation-with-harmony-holiday/ ⮭
16. Maafa, 23, 25 ⮭
17. Nathaniel Mackey, Paracritical Hinge: Essay, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 187. ⮭
18. Maafa, 56, 55 ⮭
19. Ibid, 69 ⮭
20. Holiday, ‘The Black Catatonic Scream’, Triple Canopy, Issue 39 (2020), https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the-black-catatonic-scream ⮭
21. Ibid and passim. ⮭
22. “Here’s a myth that destroys that whole world” (Maafa, 79). ⮭
23. Maafa, 78, 80. ⮭
24. Holiday, quoted in Fence Books publicity. ⮭
25. Haytham el-Wardany & Lama El Khatib, ‘The thread that slips through our hands’, Tripwire 21 (2025): 5–14. ⮭
26. Maafa,117 ⮭
27. Larry Neal, ‘karma/Pharoah Sanders’ (1969), The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution (New York: Blank Forms Editions, 2022), 124–126 (124) ⮭
28. It first appeared on Holiday’s Substack as ‘An Elegy for Pharaoh Sanders’ (Black Music and Black Muses, September 26, 2022, https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/an-elegy-for-pharoah-sanders/) ⮭
29. Maafa, 111 ⮭
30. See Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1987):. 64–81 ⮭
31. Maafa, 111 ⮭
32. Holiday also alludes to the song in a Substack post about the Global Sumud Flotilla which attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in August-October 2025. Holiday, ‘The Stranger, The Dreamer, The Golden Dream’, Black Music and Black Muses, October 02, 2025, https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/the-stranger-the-dreamer-the-golden. ⮭
33. Brian McLung ⮭
34. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 102 ⮭
35. Maafa, iii, 54, 46, 56 ⮭
36. Maafa, 107 ⮭
37. Ibid ⮭
38. Holiday, ‘This Perfect Life’, Black Music and Black Muses, December 04, 2024, https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/this-perfect-life ⮭
39. Mackler, Op. Cit. ⮭
40. Maafa, 21 ⮭