Quote: “I’d spirit/ his knives and cut out his black heart, / seal it with science fluid inside/ a bell jar, place it on a low/ shelf in a white man’s museum/ so the whole world could see/ it was so shriveled and hard, / geometric, deformed, unnatural.” 

Comment: These lines, in particular, made me think about the expectations and assumptions being addressed here with the knowledge that we are in the early 1800s with the industrial revolution, and this I am also assuming black woman is navigating the realities of the racist and oppressive nature of all these scientific advancements and technology. Compared to these jarring last lines, the beginning of this poem stood out to me as well; I almost imagined all the fanciful and high culture scientific exhibitions in front of a curtain where behind it lies the human suffering and exploitation of certain people to make it possible. 

Question: I wondered how this poem might fit into Marxism theory in more of a social way concerning the idea of how we can become conscious about certain powerful or dominant ideologies and pick up on the forms of resistance. This poem seems like an intersection of resistance from the structural racism that we know influenced innovation and industrializing, a feminist critique on what women’s place was during this time, and a Marxist take on this poem’s social and material history.