Genre Experiments: Thylias Moss's Slave Moth and the Poetic Neo-Slave Narrative

As histories of experimentation on the enslaved receive scholarly attention, so too are neo-slave narratives representing and commenting on this aspect of enslavement, in both their content and their form. This article examines Thylias Moss's genre-troubling Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (2004), a neo-slave text that depicts an enslaved woman named Varl treated as an object of psychological experimentation. Varl develops a strong subjectivity through becoming a subject performing experiments: aesthetic experiments in how she chooses to represent her narrative in stitched cloths. The subtly experimental poetic devices through which Moss crafts this representation highlight that this protagonist possesses an alternate, generative epistemology that differs meaningfully from her master's scientific worldview and thereby enables fugitive, temporary agency and freedom. By analyzing Slave Moth, I argue that the ethically problematic epistemology that generated experiments on the enslaved has certainly not dissipated and that it indirectly undergirds lyric theory's failure to engage form in texts by nonwhite poets. Through contrasting close attention to formal devices by which Moss undermines teleological narrative, this essay postulates that "lyric time" enables fleeting, yet nevertheless generative, subversions of the formal expectations readers impose on texts representing enslavement. Reading Slave Moth through such a lens suggests potential middle-ground formal alternatives to wholly rejecting either narrative or lyric as genres and to thereby asymptotically approaching adequate representation of enslavement.