Sarah Orem

Review of Leroy Franklin Moore Jr.’s Black Kripple Delivers Poetry & Lyrics (Poetic Matrix, 2015).

Leroy F. Moore Jr.’s Black Kripple Delivers Poetry and Lyrics contains so much musical energy and lyrical flow that reading it feels like attending a live rap show. This collection of poems and song lyrics contributes to the Krip Hop movement that Moore himself devised, which deploys rap, poetry, and hip-hop cultural production to explore Black disabled life in the United States. Some of the entries in Black Kripple are explicitly marked as songs and contain verses and choruses. But even the poems that aren’t explicitly labeled as songs still feel song-like because of their short, punchy lines, copious end rhyme, and repeated phrases. For instance, the poem “Disabled Profiled,” which criticizes the police’s mistreatment of Black disabled Americans, repeats the cry “Disabled profiled / And I’m tired” at the beginning of multiple stanzas. I can practically hear Moore reciting the lines into a mic. By allowing multiple creative forms to meet and meld, Moore’s volume constitutes a remix. As hip-hop scholar Quentin Williams explains, in the uniquely Black form of the remix, “cultural practices and symbols are mixed up and brought together to establish something new and fresh for an alternative future” (1). Having seen the needs of Black people overlooked in white disabled culture and noticing that hip-hop often disavows the centrality of disabled artists to its body of work, Moore remixes and comments on both in order to craft a more inclusive social justice project.

The book’s first chapter, “Black Blind Blues to Krip-Hip-Hop: Honoring Black Disabled Musicians & Black Disabled History To Be Continued,” corrects an historical record that has long elided Black disabled artists and offers valuable history lessons. Speaking of musician and producer Blind Joe Capers, who built the first accessible recording studio in San Francisco in the 1980s, Moore says that he “Didn’t get the honor that he should have got” and insists that “We will correct that very soon” (27). The poem “Black Disabled Art History 101” informs readers about Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, a Black autistic man and musical prodigy born during the era of American slavery. At the end of the poem, Moore tells readers that we should “get out our number two pencils for your final on / Black Disabled Art History” (45), and Moore makes good on his promise of a pop quiz by end of the book. The last pages of the volume contain a test titled “Twenty Black Disabled Trivia” that poses questions like: “This slave rescued other slaves and brought them to freedom. Who was she? What was her disability?” (150-151). The quiz insists that it’s not enough for readers to be aware of the gaps in their knowledge of Black disabled art history—it instructs readers that they ought to take proactive steps to educate themselves.

Chapter Two, “Black and Blue: Police, State & The Abuse of People with Disabilities” uses wordplay to express Moore’s anguish at the violence that Black and disabled people in United States experience regularly. In the poem “She’s in Danger, Black & Blue,” which protests violence against disabled women of color, the repeated phrase “Black & Blue” signifies the colors worn by the police as well as the lingering scars and bruises that disabled women of color may have after encountering them (61). The poem “Another One Dead” communicates loss, detailing the many Black disabled people who are killed by police officers. The poem also explores the excuses that community members give to justify the killings. Moore asks, “Mental illness, autism…reasons to die?” (67). Yet Moore also uses his poetry to signal insurgency. In “For Robert Johnson,” which describes the beating of a Black disabled man in Texas, Moore threatens to reflect the violence that Johnson experienced back onto the justice system itself: “The justice system we will cripple / (Do it like you do us, make it inaccessible)” (79). Police officers routinely use literal force to dole out disabling injuries to Black Americans, but Moore’s poetry plans to figuratively disable the U.S.’s inequitable legal system. If the form of the remix that Black Kripple deploys operates by taking up dominant forms and changing them to suit the author’s needs, then Moore plans to remix the entire project of U.S. democracy.

In Chapter Three, “Lyrically Speaking Krip Love: Affection, Sexuality, &… Delivered By The Black Kripple,” Moore contrasts the violence of the police state with the deep wells of love he feels for family and friends. Some poems in this chapter articulate tenderness for blood relatives, such as “Happy Birthday Sasha,” which compiles Moore’s memories of watching a beloved nephew grow from child to capable young man. Since children of color are routinely devalued in American culture (see: Jose Muñoz, especially chapter 5), Moore’s insistence on extending affection to his younger relatives feels relevant to his overall political project. Moore also gestures to his found family, including the community organizer and artist Patty Berne, with whom he founded the disability justice performance group Sins Invalid in order to create artistic spaces for disabled people of color. 

Sweetness turns sultry, however, when Moore references different forms of affection, such as eroticism. In the poem “I’m Beautiful,” Moore celebrates Black disabled women. Taking on voice of one such woman, Moore joyfully proclaims “I’m fucking gorgeous / with my brown smooth skin and my shaved head! / Oh yeah my body is slammin” (100). In the song “Krip Kissing,” Moore emphasizes the disabled body engaged in intimate acts. The chorus invites readers to “put a little limp in your walk / Some st st st st stuttering in your talk / Pucker up for a French kripple kiss” (85). The disabled body seemingly struts off the page with the chorus’ repeated references to a “little limp”: like an uneven gait, these paired words mirror each other in their shared first consonants and rhyming interior vowel sounds yet contain uneven syllables. With this chapter, Moore contests the persistent de-sexualization of disabled bodies and highlights Black disabled intimacy. Because the state continually disables Black bodies, as Moore illustrates in Chapter 2, the work of reclaiming crip sexuality constitutes an important part of Black liberation.

The volume’s final chapter, “Porgy Sings/Raps Today,” remixes well-known works by musical artists from rappers like NWA to Broadway composer George Gershwin. In “Porgy & Bess Krip-Hop Remix,” Moore wonders what life would be like if the protagonist of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – a Black disabled man living in Charleston’s tenements during the 1920s – were alive today. In his send-up of Ludacris’ song “Move B***H,” Moore criticizes the rapper for “playing step n fetch on stage” (123) in order to make money, alluding to the Black vaudeville actor Lincoln Perry, whose stage persona “Stepin Fetchit” was marketed as the “Laziest Man in the World” and played into harmful stereotypes about Black Americans as lazy and simple. Moore hopes to build on the legacy of influential rappers in order to create a hip-hop space for disabled people, as he remarks in the poem “Krip-Hop.” “Continuing in the shoes of NWA,” he states, disabled Black artists of today are “Limping & rolling to the mike / Slurring our lyrics” and “Drooling our rhythms” (145-146).

Much of Black Kripple pays homage to Black disabled musicians, artists, singers, and poets. Moore salutes early blues singers like Blind Willie Johnson, describes jamming to classic R&B artists like Teddy Pendergrass, and laments that contemporary Black disabled rappers like Roxx Da Foxx often get overlooked in popular culture. Because of this book’s citational practices, it constitutes a kind of a mix tape. While reading it, I began writing down the names of the songs and musicians mentioned in the text and ended up with a pulsing playlist of Black disabled rap and blues, from Johnnie Mae Dunson’s “Whole Lotta Woman” to Curtis Mayfield’s “All Night Long,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” and Memphis Minnie’s “Moaning the Blues,” among many others. Moore’s poems DJ Black disabled music history, spinning an awesome soundtrack for readers to enjoy. At its core, Black Kripple uses the form of the remix to insist that America value Black disabled people. Critiquing multiple cultural forms that never quite speak to his own experiences, Moore blends hip hop and poetry for the purpose of “music therapy / Healing our disabled brothers & sisters” (145).

WORKS CITED

Moore, Leroy F. Black Kripple Delivers Poetry & Lyrics. Poetic Matrix, 2015.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009. 

Williams, Quentin. Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop, Ethnography, and Performing Marginalized Voices. Bloomsbury, 2017.

[A white woman with brown hair stands in front of a gray wall. She is smiling and wearing a blue jacket.]

Dr. Sarah Orem researches at the intersection of disability, gender, and race in 20th and 21st century American literature and performance. Dr. Orem's writing appears in Modern Drama, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, African American Review, and Women & Performance, among other venues. She is currently a Mellon/Sawyer postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine.