Punching the Air: Teen Poet Imprisoned

Writer Ibi Zoboi and poet-activist Dr. Yusef Salaam collaborated on a young adult novel in poetry, Punching the Air, drawing on Salaam's experience. In 1989, he was one of the five black males in their early teens arrested for the rape and near-fatal beating of "the Central Park Jogger." I remember reading with incredulity -- not enough! -- that bands of feral black boys roamed the city nights looking for white people to assault; "wilding," they supposedly called it. "Wilding" turns out to have been just a reporter's extrapolation from a misunderstanding of one remark by one boy.

Recent movies - a documentary and a drama - tell the story how police jumped to conclusions, how prosecutors bullied the boys into confessions, how the press hyped the crime. During the trial, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad to call for a public lynching. But after more than ten years in prison, all the young men were exonerated and the true culprit, a white man, was imprisoned.

Zoboi and Salaam have refracted the first part of that story, updating it, universalizing it. The protagonist named Amal ("hope" in Arabic) is well-loved, well-read, an artist, but guilty of fighting back when white teens attack him and his friends. A white teenaged boy lies in a coma, and Amal lands in prison. The story is how Amal learns to fight back against the external walls of the prison system and the internal walls of doubt that suffocate his spirit.

Each chapter is a poem with enough in it to reward re-readings, but you don't have to read Punching the Air twice to get the story and the feelings. Sometimes you feel angry, sometimes you ache, sometimes you smile at the sweetness. Often a word in one poem becomes the topic for the next, drawing you from page to page with no pause to look back. But as you read, you'll pick up many strands that tie disparate chapters together. To read Punching the Air a second time is like stepping back to appreciate a mural like the one that Amal wants to paint (130).

I paint with words, too Amal tells us, relating his poetry to his drawings. Many of the poems are titled after works he studied in AP Art History class -- The Thinker, The Watch, The Scream-- though he angered his art teacher by asking whether anyone outside of Europe made art, a fair question. He imagines a Black Mona Lisa and a remix of his favorite painting Guernica to be about him and his friends, with "distorted faces and bodies / in war in war in war", but, like dust in Maya Angelou's poem, "we rise we rise we rise" (353).

The rising of dust is one motif that we see in several poems. Some poems develop the analogy of Amal's prior life with friends and family as "Africa," the court process as "the Middle Passage," and his arrival at prison as the stolen African ancestors' arrival at America (61, elsewhere). He takes hope from the "butterfly effect," i.e., the theory that waves created by a butterfly's wings can have outsized influence on destiny. He longs for super-powers to withstand the bullying and intimidation he experiences in prison. The real walls around him also are a symbol. His few allies in the prison become "walls" to him, and he also makes himself a wall. So drawing his art on walls becomes more than just a pasttime; it's an image for what he can make of his life. In one short poem, one in a series titled "Brotherhood" the metaphor of a wall helps to express a development in his friendship with his "four corners":

Brotherhood VI

And maybe
there are small
cracks in our walls
and we start to see
a sliver of light
shine through

in each other.

(338)

I have a personal reason to be especially affected by another theme in the poems -- how others see him. In our school's upper division, a young black man told the Senior class advisor that only one teacher in all his years at the school had ever "seen" him; I was not that teacher. I looked back on my time with him in Middle School, how I managed his oppositional behavior, how I encouraged his talents, how I made corrections with respect -- I wondered, what does "seeing" mean? Then I heard the poet Zoboi read "Clone" from Punching the Air, about how his teachers in fifth grade "watched" him "so hard, so close" after a playground fight "that I thought I was trying to break out of prison." The poem continues

Every dumb s--- I did
they thought it was because of

trouble at home
an absent father
a tired mother
not enough books
not enough vegetables
not enough sleep

They believed those lies about me

and made themselves
a whole other boy
in their minds
and replaced me with him

(56)

Echoing what I read in those newspaper accounts at the time of Dr. Salaam's arrest, Amal develops the idea of how the media sees him and the boy in the coma: "I am ink / He is paper...I am man / He is boy... I am criminal / He is victim...I am black / He is white" (20).

In a later poem, imagining himself on the slave ship, he addresses his tormentors: What do you see when you see me? / The enemy? The inner me? (91). Truly, I don't know -- yet --what I could have done or thought differently regarding that student in my class, but I recognize myself in those teachers, and him in this character.

In Amal's story, there's the art teacher, important for what she taught him, but who also laughed when he said that he wanted to do a whole mural instead of a paper portfolio (130). "I failed the class, and she failed me" (133). But a black woman who teaches creative writing and a guest professor in African garb capture Amal's imagination.

Reading the poems weeks after George Floyd suffocated with a policeman's knee on his neck, I was chagrined to read these two lines repeatedly throughout the book: "There's a stone in my throat / and a brick on my chest" (11, 410, passim).

For all the darkness, there's light here, too. Loving family, friendship in prison, inspiration for art, and a letter from Zenobia, the cute girl he was too timid to talk to in school. He sends her his portrait of her "to let her know that / I saw her / I see her / I remember her" (176). If "time moves you away from me," he writes to her, "I will always remember / you remembering me" (177).

That acrostic poem, each line starting with a letter from Zenobia's name, inspired my kids to write acrostics of their own. Punching the Air is a beautiful book for readers of any age, of any race.

Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Punching the Air. New York: Balzer and Bray, 2020.