“‘Diabolic’ is part of a cycle of poems I’m writing on Phillis Wheatley, concerning the complication of the slave learning their captor’s language. The quote at the top of the poem is a line from Wheatley’s poem ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America.’ In it, Wheatley challenges a common dilemma, which is still a problem today—the distance between white, ‘progressive’ Christian beliefs about race, and resistance by those same progressives to actively examine those problems in their own house. ‘Diabolic’ is such a hurtful term, a term of difference and distancing—I wonder how many times she heard it, while she sat close by in a room, and my poem tries to imagine how she turned that word in her head—a child of God, yet always to be considered a devil—certainly, always ‘less than’—before she wrote it down in one of the most American poems I think we have.”
—Cornelius Eady