Tell Me A Black Story: Controlled Narratives in Mary Prince and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Abstract: In 1831, the editors of The History of Mary Prince erased “sensitive” aspects of the narrative that, in 2012, scholar Jessica L. Allen identified as important rhetorical functions of meaning-making. Similar erasures occur today, as evidenced by the AI-generated poetry of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram. This essay uses Allen’s scholarship as a jumping-off point to trace a notion of controlled narratives through Prince and three books by Bertram, namely Travesty Generator , Negative Money , and the recently published chapbook A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content . Special attention is paid to the ways in which AI (chiefly, ChatGPT-3) is incapable of replicating certain defining characteristics of Black poetic forms such as the duplex, and instead opts to erase them in as much the same manner as Mary Prince’s editors.