Description
Belle Brock Adelman-Cannon
Every Time They Call Me She
ISBN 978-1-956921-26-7 (paperback)
110 pages: $19.95
April, 2024
Belle Brock Adelman-Cannon was born February 10, 2006, in New Orleans. Over the course of their seventeen years, they excelled at a variety of pursuits, including languages (French, Hebrew, German), dance, fashion design, gardening, and writing. They attended International School of Louisiana, Benjamin Franklin High School, and the pre-professional program at the New Orleans Ballet Association. They worked at Touro Synagogue, Grow Dat Youth Farm, and Henry S. Jacobs Camp. Their spiritual cornerstones were queer identity, Judaism, and their beloved hometown, especially their Faubourg Marigny neighborhood. They were exceptionally charismatic, attracting a huge number of devoted friends. These poems are their first and only publication.
They died on June 3, 2023, after which their mother discovered these poems on their phone.
Afterword
by C.W. Cannon
This is the first publication with my name on it that I’m not happy about. I would much rather these poems remained buried on Belle’s iphone while the child still lived. Fate had other plans. If Belle has to be dead, then I suppose it is a relative blessing that their mom discovered this treasure trove of Belle’s consciousness. It is deeply personal stuff. If Belle were living, they would be pissed to discover that I read what’s here, and perhaps embarrassed if I chose to share it with the world. But dead people have few options, and no time to perfect their craft and come to the exhilarating but scary determination to expose their deepest fears, struggles, and joys to friends as well as strangers. I have no doubt that given the only available choice—dead with no record of their consciousness, or dead with a public record of that consciousness—Belle would have chosen the latter. I’m not going to get into a litany of reasons I loved my child here, but I will say that Belle had the expressive and performative spark of the artist, and that, whatever they chose to do as an emancipated adult, some form of public expression was on the to-do list.
These poems are both sad and triumphant. Their concerns are germane to the life-stage of the adolescent person who wrote them. We find in them grief over the loss of childhood and productive confusion at the onset of adulthood. At their most prescient, they demonstrate a precocious apprehension of impending death, which is all the more weird since that death came much more suddenly than Belle surely would have imagined even in their most angsty moods. Belle possessed the key element identified by Romantic aesthetics as the source of poetic genius: a profound sense of the sublime, well beyond their years, coupled with an appreciation of beauty as the saving grace of an otherwise brutish and unforgiving universe. Belle was a natural intellectual, analyzing and questioning everything, wondering about the purpose of things. This quest for truth inevitably led to the knowledge of the sublime (the sense of our ultimate meaninglessness in the vastness of time and space). This fundamentally tragic apprehension was tempered by the joy Belle took in beauty, in appreciating it as well as in creating it in a variety of ways. B was always making things. The poems are the most abstract of all the things Belle made. When we lived in Dakar, Sénégal, four-year old Belle, perhaps inspired by local crafting traditions, made objects out of refuse, most commonly by lashing a couple of plastic water containers together and decorating them with tape, ribbons, or whatever was at hand. B called these creations “Woops,” and was heartbroken when we announced that the closet full of them would not be coming back with us to the States. Later on, B cut cans into interesting shapes, sometimes mimetic (generally cats and dogs) and coated them in colorful tape. As they aged, they learned to knit, crochet, and sew, and became renowned among peers as a visionary fashion designer. We honored Belle the first Mardi Gras after their death by wearing many of Belle’s fanciful designs on the streets of their beloved Marigny neighborhood (if ever a child was a Marigny child, it was Belle).
Belle took music lessons, too, but their main other artistic pursuit, besides crafting with fabrics (and plants, as a talented gardener), was dance. As the poems make clear, their commitment to dance (in the pre-professional program of the New Orleans Ballet Association) became a double-edged sword. It initiated a struggle with their developing body that sparked the fascinating interrogation of gender that is probably the most interesting objective feature of these poems. Many of the poems address a “you” that at first confused me. Was Belle addressing me (Dad), or their Mom? Or some friend? I soon came to the conclusion that the ‘you’ addressed in the poems is actually her, and, more rarely, himself. I noticed long ago that the liberation of gender, the radical freedom to choose and shape one’s own distinctive gender identity, is the unique contribution of Gen-Z to the free world’s ongoing commitment to individual self-determination. Belle was very much a part of this Gen-Z Zeitgeist, as the poems attest. Belle’s gender-fluid identity included different genders under the same consciousness. Belle was not trans, or cis, but gender-fluid. When asked in public about preferred gender pronouns, Belle said she, he, and they. The interplay between these different selves within the unitary whole is at work in many of the poems in this collection.
These poems are often the scene of acute emotional struggle. Belle used poetry as personal therapy, and also to explain things to peers that could not be said in other ways. The poems in this collection track Belle’s evolving relationship with the world within and without. What they show is not so much a child mired in depression and anxiety, but, at the end, a young adult learning to accept and master the distinct set of emotional challenges allotted to them. Few people outside Belle’s immediate family and closest friends knew of Belle’s inner turmoil, since B was always good at performing. Belle’s mom was a devoted member for many years of one of New Orleans’ many amateur dance troupes, Les ReBelles. The young Belle attended many rehearsals and was informally adopted by the group, so much so that B, too, earned a stage name, like the other ReBelles. They called Belle “Secret Agent Sparkle,” which is a good description of the infectious and joyful energy that characterized Belle’s public persona.
After the worst day of my life, June 3, 2023, when Belle died in what can only be described as a freak accident (hit by a bus), many eulogies praised the kid’s ability to brighten any room, to comfort and bring joy to people. These eulogies were not misplaced: Belle did have a zest for life, for fun, and loved nothing more than uproarious laughter with their many beloved friends. These poems don’t negate that side of B, but they show that a serious wrestling match with oneself, and a mature encounter with the facts of our mortal existence, are the best reasons to embrace beauty, love, and play wherever they can be found.
—C.W.Cannon
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