Thoughts on Thot: Fragments, Echoes, Bullets, Hauntings 

Chanté L. Reid’s Thot, though only 80 pages, is immense. Reid jam-packs the pages of her book-length essay in scope, emotion, thought, and expression. And the expectations for her readers aren’t any less immense. From the attention her transforming language requires to the context she hopes we come to the page with surrounding literature, current events, tragedy, love, racism, violence, voice, female anger, Reid invites us to join her in the challenging work of interpretation.

A large portion of Thot is Reid making meaning of Toni Morrison’s Beloved; a lesser portion, Greek Myth; and a wider scope, the world Reid finds herself in. Reid’s rendering of Sethe, Medea, Narcissus, and individuals from her own life pursued by violence and hate, pushed me to a broader understanding of the questions and experiences embodied by those individuals—experiences quite different from my own since most experiences, though similar in type, vary in detail. And, to me, that’s one of the beauties of literature: to close the gap of experience and understanding, to grapple with a reality that is and is not our own, to share it with others so that the world explored in a text can be visited by as many as possible, so it gains a lasting and larger place in our world. It seems Reid believes just as much.  

She arranges language in fascinating ways to “offer memories / briefs / fragments / shards in exchange for peace / sound / contiguity / continuance / fortitude / rest.” Thot is a genre-bending work that feels like poetry, “Interrupted fragments / and reworked sentences like shards of glass, piercing.” Hers is a “voice—disembodied.” By experimenting with language, questioning it, and providing variations layered on top of each other, she allows words to become an independent being, separate from her, from what she is relaying, letting language exist on a level that takes my breath away, filling words with the power she argues is so often taken away from us in a world of so much violence.

Reid opens with the line, “I heard a gunshot so close I checked my body for its wounds.” The first time I read those words several months ago, the song in the coffee shop also spoke of gunshots, and as I write this now, violence is crippling countries; violence is everywhere. Reid takes up this violence in bold ways, writing about specific kinds of violence: the peculiar pain of police brutality against black bodies, like the killing of her neighbor, Danner; violence toward black women, the kind that haunts Sethe in Beloved; and the kind shown by the very title of her book, Thot, “a slang-word / epithet / (n) acronym primarily used against a woman . . . It stands for two things simultaneously . . . The Hood Owns That, That Hoe Over There.” Reid looks at how this violence repeats: “The Margaret Garner Incident happened in 1856. / Deborah Danner was killed in 2016. I’ll stop / speaking in quotes when quotes / echoes stop happening.” Lastly, Reid looks at the violence associated with black voices, “I just told you, my voice sounds like bullets, gun shots to them.” But Reid’s voice isn’t violent. Only powerful.

Reid’s writing demonstrates her “ability to / call / summon/ justice.” And reveals “Voices: / abandoned /mistreated / misused / beat / a witness.” She recognizes the ability voice has to make noise; the power her personal voice carries to say what needs to be said. But asks the important question, “Who is listening to me?” My answer: we all should. I have read this book multiple times now and am continuously enriched by her generosity of prose, passion, and questioning. Reid’s words offer an antidote to anger, grief, fear, silence; they are vigorous and unfold endlessly allowing us access to Reid’s thoughts which analyze deeply and turn preconceived notions pointing out questions that might someday, hopefully, come to answers.