Connection and Disconnection: The Aporia of Belonging in Jericho Brown’s The Tradition

Abstract

This paper addresses the themes of connection and disconnection in Jericho Brown’s poetry, with a special emphasis on the aporia of belonging. Brown’s poems reflect a dialectic of emotions oscillating between the profound sense of connection to origins and the excruciating pain of separation, particularly in association with race and sexual identity. The paper explores how Brown’s poetry expresses a paradoxical sense of belonging, in which case home, family, and community are at once sources of consolation and spaces of alienation. Using close textual analysis as a critical method, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Brown poeticizes the dichotomy of union and separation in selected poems from The Tradition , while foregrounding the aporia of belonging in its personal and sociohistorical dimensions. It also argues that Brown’s resourceful use of tailored poetic forms, including the duplex , furnishes a poetic structure through which identity and self-worth, endurance and resilience, love and intimacy, family relationships, as well as faith and religion are subtly expressed.