Nate Marshall’s ‘Finna’ Explores Relationships, Language, Race, and Culture

BY TAWNICIA ROWAN

In what seems to be an increasingly suspicious and isolating world, Nate Marshall’s new collection of poems, Finna, is a refreshingly sincere and open invitation into one Black man’s reflections on relationships, language, race, and culture. Deeply personal and culturally familiar, Marshall’s poetic sentiments are at once jarring and tender, uncensored and poignant.

Marshall’s dedication, “For my people, the ones I love &/ especially the ones I struggle to love,” summarizes the resolve of Finna exquisitely. The author offered the following description of the collection in his interview with M·I·A magazine: “One of its real thematic concerns…is what happens when we cause harm or when harm is enacted upon us and how we move forward from there. … We have to care for one another even when that caring is difficult.”

Marshall’s three-part definition of the title word “finna” is reminiscent of Alice Walker’s iconic definition of “womanist;” and like Walker, Marshall centers and celebrates Black ways of speaking and being. The poems in this collection chronicle the author’s journey through the throes of Black male adolescence, expose the often-painful tension between Black masculinity and Black femininity, and challenge the insidious influences of White

supremacist ideas and behaviors on the collective psyche of the nation and Black people in particular. Although Marshall believes Finna offers linguistic sustenance for all readers, he makes no apology for writing with a specific audience in mind.

“The goal of the book is to

Nate Marshall

have a conversation with Black folks,” Marshall said. “If you’re not writing to a specific audience, you’re not writing to anyone.” With verses that flip and change direction on the page, “Only Boy” illustrates how growing up as the lone boy in a neighborhood full of girls shaped Marshall’s early sense of

identity. “The alternating of direction reminds me of double dutch: flipping the ropes, the jumpers who are inside turning and adding little embellishments, changing direction,” Marshall explained. “It was an attempt to make the poem’s physical shape mirror that. It’s one of the early images in the poem, and it’s also a reflection on how in my neighborhood, double dutch was one of the first communal spaces I was told I couldn’t be in because I was a boy.” “Nigger Joke” is a powerful stream-of-consciousness narrative poem about a professional Black man accosted by a racist White man in a bar. The opening line —“so this nigger walks into a bar in this gentrifying neighborhood and orders fried chicken”— summons the inherent malice of every racist joke to foreshadow what comes next. “The speaker sees the train wreck that is about to happen and keeps trying to find common ground, redirect, or make something — anything — else happen. But [the racist] is locked in on saying something harmful,” Marshall said. “You can’t stop it. You’re just along for the ride. That’s the worst part about racism — it strips power from people. Whatever’s going to happen, you’re really just a subject to it.”

While poems like “Step” and “My Mother’s hands” celebrate family and pride in the midst of struggle, “Landless Acknowledgment” and “When America Writes” serve as reminders of the inequities at the root of the struggle. Relevant, timely, and earnest, Finna is a tribute to Black poetry, Black people, and Black perseverance. It is a compelling and affirming read deserving of a place on bookshelves and syllabi everywhere.

Tawnicia Ferguson Rowan, a native Floridian, is the founder of Well-Written Words, LLC and an assistant professor of English at Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens. She is an avid student of womanist thought and believes that literacy is essential to individual and collective empowerment. Follow her on social media @WomanWordsmith.