The New Testament by Jericho Brown: Summary and Review
The New Testament is a meditation on gender roles, sexuality, Blackness—and the way all those identities intersect. Throughout the work, Brown tells tales of a brother, who beat his wife, Angel, and who eventually died at her hand. The speaker of Brown’s poems also details his encounters with men—or possibly one man, over and over—who are still married and only seeing him on the down-low. His identity isn’t fully recognized in either the Black or queer realms, and The New Testament is the speaker’s (and, perhaps, Brown’s) way of processing that grief and then, to the best of his ability, overcoming it.
The brother and sister-in-law that Brown mentions throughout The New Testament are metaphors for his societal “siblings”; the poem “Make-Believe” suggests as much when he says, “Tomorrow, I will explain the word brother / Is how we once knew black …” and then, “No, I don’t have a brother / In the world. Myth is not make-believe. My / Mother and father had only one son.” Brown is a queer Black man, justifying his sexuality to the Black community and his racial identity to the queer community. While Brown can more easily relay his sexuality to the reader through poems about being with married men who are not out of the closet, he uses the metaphor of a brother to discuss his connection to straight Black men, disenfranchised, left alone to find their own power. His sister-in-law represents every Black woman, “othered” within her own community, made to feel less than because our society is inherently hierarchical; hidden among the American dream is the notion that someone has to be on the bottom. In the myth Brown constructs, the speaker’s sister-in-law kills his brother, and while he’s saddened by this violence, he also blames himself for not intervening and putting an end to his brother’s own violent tendencies (which he knows aren’t really in his brother’s heart), evidenced in the poem “Cain” when Brown says, “My kid / Brother killed one [a lamb], but I / dug the hole.”
As an ex-Christian, my work (nearly all autobiographical, even the poetry) deals with biblical interpretation and includes biblical allusions. Many of the poems in The New Testament are allusions to The Old Testament, and most of those references are included in the last section of the collection, where the New Testament would be in the traditional layout of the Bible. Brown is creating a new ending for himself, a “New Jerusalem” or apocalyptic paradise of his own, by “rewriting” his past and justifying his sexuality and intersectional identity using a common vehicle in the Black community: the Bible. Though I’m white, I can relate to feeling erased from the Bible and from the church community I grew up in because I am also queer. In my own poetry collection, I include a poem called “Devotion,” which is an erasure poem from some devotional pages in a Teen’s Study Bible I had when I was in high school. These particular devotions are about the abomination of homosexuality and premarital sex. My rewriting of these passages is meant to symbolize an undoing of (what I call) my “religious sex guilt.” It’s my way of going back and planting this healthier education about sex and sexuality in my own past and the past of other queer folks. Brown certainly inspired me with his work.