Race, Hoagland's Poem, and Me [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

My recent post (which followed up this post) drew a comment that defended Tony Hoagland's poem, "The Change," and this is the response I found myself writing in the small hours of this morning. I hope you can dig it. I know that you can. To wit.

After a 130 thousand years of all human beings living in the south of Africa, some few were pressured by food shortage to head north into Europe. Far from the equatorial sun, the palest of them survived best because only their skin let in enough ultraviolet to make Vitamin D. After a long time of not much, they found that their land held the largest deposits of iron on the planet. This iron made them very powerful. It made for plows, swords, armor, and later, guns. That happened in the past 10 thousand years.

Only a few hundred years ago, the pale ones “discovered” the continent they had left ages ago. In Europe they were used to fighting each other for land, metal, money, and workers, and here they found these goods undefended by swords, guns, or horsemen. The people they found had very different markers of culture, such that each seemed uncultured to the other. The pale ones wanted to steal the land, metal, money, and workers and not much was stopping them beyond morality. They got past the morality by using their own pale skin as a marker for quality, which they backed up by lamenting the absence of salad forks on the African continent, and then they stole everything they wanted. They treated the human beings there as animals. The palies did not have the gall to drag the humans back to Europe and treat them like animals right in the towns where they had preached equality to the rich and powerful. They only did it in places without a history of preaching equality because they had no history other than the extermination of the people who had lived their until recently. There, or rather, here, in America, they set up an institution that now disgusts anyone who learns of it. Its cruelties were unthinkable.

It was only abolished about 150 years ago. The only thing that we have lost in losing the idea of pale skin as a marker for superiority is a childish delusion not worthy of humanity. Physically, biologically, there is no such thing as race. Scott and Bob differ as much in their DNA as do Bob and Darnell. A hundred years ago, in New York, Italian and Irish immigrants fought each other on street corners and disowned Vincenzo for falling in love with Meghan. Cartoonists drew the Irish as if their race was as far removed from white America as an albino baboon, all large-browed, stub-nosed, and stupid. But economics changed and populations changed and the fact that these two groups were both largely Catholic and immigrated in the same era soon made them allies and eventually no racial difference was seen between these two “peoples.” When race difference disappears it disappears so completely that we forget that it was ever there, and therefore we also forget that race difference disappears.

To watch a tennis match between a man from Elizabethan England and a man from today’s Chicago would likely make a woman from Old England groan with despair. Her man would be short and riddled with disease, wearing stiff woven clothes that don’t breath, and hard little shoes. So goes the glory of the world, she might say, but what would she be lamenting? It might comfort her to know that the hunk from North Central studied the Magna Carta in pre-law and played Ariel in a regional staging of The Tempest.

For a white American man to watch a tennis match between a pale European woman and an dark American woman and bemoan the strength of the American is sad. What loss could he be lamenting other than that for a short time people like him wore an unearned badge of superiority that had been used to viciously oppress everybody else, to steal from them, beat them, rape them, and sell their children away from them, naked in the town square?

That is weak and bad, wrong-headed and childish. Group identities change all the time and something good gets handed down anyway. When the ancient Hebrews came back from the Babylonian Captivity they forced conversion on the peoples living around ancient Judea. Nobody worried about mixing up the blood. The markers of value change. If you want what is good about your history to somehow persist all you have to do is not make it repugnant to the next generation. In some way it will survive.

If you miss the age where your particular type of face used to get special treatment, you probably have something missing in your life and should seek counseling. We shall not lament the loss of the swastika, Catholics shoving Protestants into Iron Maidens, or the Early Modern European custom of allowing aristocratic men to rape women of the lower classes. Those things are disgusting.

You can write about missing them, but if a Jew or a Protestant or a woman stands up and says that piece you wrote made me feel awful, and when I talked to you about it you didn’t seem to care, and then a brouhaha breaks out about it, with lots of people rushing to defend that they appreciate this person bringing their inner struggle to the public forum, you can damn well expect this human being to stand up and say that it is time to learn some history and rethink some values. Protestant children should not have to hear about how you miss being able to keep them out of your party. Missing white culture or white power (or whatever is being lamented in Hoagland's poem) is missing hate and narcissism and winning when you don’t deserve it. Because that’s the only thing that has been lost. We still have everything else, plus a tan. And if your New England grandchildren are brown, don't worry, there is Vitamin D in the milk. Drink your milk. Have also maybe a cookie, you look thin. We shall get through this together. We overcome when we see hate and narcissism for what they are, which is fear and isolation and useless competition. We overcome when we turn away from that and start enjoying one another. Some of us have already overcome. We shall give you a cookie when you join us.

-

So there you go. I wish we could hug it out, I'm exceedingly squeezable. Anyway, bleaders, I love you. Don't kill yourselves. Don't text and drive, but do keep writing to me with compliments and solidarity. You are the wind...and so on.

Love,

Jennifer

To read more me here on BAP click here or on the Sidebar where it says Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Lion and the Honeycomb and scroll down past the ones you've read. Or buy a book! Happiness or Doubt or Funny or Soul or Ancient.

Comments

[Leslie McGrath]

Hi Jennifer,
I've followed a number of discussions on the Hoagland- Rankine issue, including your posts here about the poem itself. I, too, have held off, though reading this latest post is enough to make me comment.

There were a number of interesting issues in what happened during the AWP panel in which one highly-regarded poet wrote a critical response to a provocative poem by another highly-regarded poet. Questions about the privacy of correspondence, the appropriateness of the steps Rankine followed in bringing this issue to her peers, Hoagland's reported "this poem is for white people" response to Rankine's question about his intended audience-- all of these are meaty issues I could roll around in all the live-long day.
So are questions of the relative usefulness of varying critical lenses which might be used in examining the poem in question. Laura McCullough has probably spent hours on both Facebook and Contrary Magazine trying to move the conversation forward in this way. http://blog.contrarymagazine.com/2011/03/antinomy-the-great-ladder-of-inferences-and-the-burning/

I think your writing style is breathtaking and you clearly know history, but I don't believe you're moving the argument along by focusing on racism per se. Racism stinks. Every thinking person knows it; every sentient person, regardless of her own race, understands how it diminishes all of us.

The poem is what's in question. It features a speaker (of unclear gender; half my students thought the speaker was female) and the speaker's friend. The speaker rooted for the thin-lipped Eastern European blonde (ouch!) and appears to be both awed and intimidated by the Vondella Aphrodite character. There is talk of change all through the poem. This is a poem of a time and a place. A great discussion can be had about the speaker's racial biases and the tone of the poem in general.

But I'd argue that by using this poem to make any inferences about the poet is time wasted at the least, and beneath us at the most. This sentence is what I'm talking about:
"For a white American man to watch a tennis match between a pale European woman and an dark American woman and bemoan the strength of the American is sad."

I'd also argue that not one of us has any more credibility than the other when it comes to racism. And this includes education.

Last, I appreciate your bringing Irish and Irish-American history into the discussion. I'm the product of an Irish Catholic great grandfather and an Irish Protestant great grandmother. The two sides of the family didn't speak. When I go to visit my ancestors' graves, I go to separate cemeteries on opposite ends of New Haven. Upon marrying my grandfather, my grandmother gladly left her maiden name, and all the connotations of an Irish surname, behind. These stories were painful to hear, but they're my history and I think I'd be a little less empathetic if I never knew them. It's why I took my grandmother's maiden name, McGrath, for my own. It's why Hoagland's poem is being so widely discussed. There is reason to remember not such the facts but the feelings around racism.

[jmh]

Hi Leslie,

Thanks for your response. Maybe you think when I say that that I am saying he shouldn't be allowed to write that poem or publish it.
But I'm not. It's just that if he does write it and publish it, it
calls for this response from me. I wish no one wanted to publish it. I wouldn't publish it. But if it is there, it sits there as a mean wound
for some of the people that read it, many even, and I feel a
responsibility to tend that wound when I hear someone say "ow," right in my own home genre, so to speak. I am answering the wounded and also the speaker of the poem, who I see as wounded in another way and to whom I hope to be of assistance.
Jennifer

[Peter Harter]

The most offensive thing in poetry is dishonesty. When Hoagland admits that he is rooting for the pale tennis player because she is of his tribe--basically verifying that he experiences a racist impulse--that seems extraordinarily honest to me. I don't see how that in itself can be offensive.

However, he uses insensitive terms to describe the girl from Alabama. If something in a poem is aesthetically offensive to its audience, then the audience is right and the poem is wrong. Finally, the audience chooses the poems that it likes. If a poet refuses to conform to his audience then he looses the audience.

[Shinkendelfenix.wordpress.com]

Ms.Hecht, you have pretty much hit the proverbial nail upon it's aching head. To lament for times long past is the sign of a mind seduced by prejudice and privilege. Ironically, as a poet of color (whatever that really means) I am criticized for putting my humanity first and this is seen by some in the Latino and American Black community as sacrilege. In short, I see the same useless tribalism as you did in that troglodyte's poem. I hope we all one day realize that we are all human...

[Jennifer Michael Hecht]

I've learned something from each of these responses and I want to thank you all deeply for taking the time to write on this difficult and fascinating subject. I'm still giving thought to what each of you said and it is helping me to understand things I very much want to understand better. Thanks again.

Jennifer

[Nordette_verite]

Hi, Jennifer. Thank you for telling me about your post. It caused me to finish my thoughts because, as I said in my original post, I had not written fully what I thought yet. I'm only posting in part here what came to mind as I read your commentary tonight because I don't like to leave essays on other people's blogs. :-) However, I do have a link to the rest of my commentary below the following introduction.

---- If Tony Hoagland chooses to elevate the voice of those in white America who fear the kind of change that makes the U.S.A. a nation struggling to live up to its ideals, if he wants to echo the hysteria of some white people who lament little losses of their great power over people of color and a passing away of ideologies that equate "only-white culture" with "American culture" (and we learn from another of his poems, "Food Court," discussed on another blog that "The Change" is not the only poem he's written that echoes this fear or concern), then I gladly leave him to his own devices. One published poem on this topic is a comment; more than one is a timbre of his authentic voice emerging. But do we need his poem to hear this kind of American voice?

To be clear, I don't think that's really what Hoagland wanted to do with the poem. I think ... more ... ---

[Kathryn Levy]

I think it's an awful verse on many levels. But although I think the poem perpetuates racism rather than exploring or criticizing it, it is not the poem itself that gives me pause about Hoagland. It's his dismissive reaction to Rankine's response. At the very least, he should have asked himself some hard questions about what he wrote. Isn't that what each of should do about anything we write? And on this subject, which is so fraught, that should be particularly true. I am disturbed by the impulses behind the poem, disturbed that it was published, but amazed that Rankine's criticism didn't cause Hoagland to challenge himself. That's what tells me a great deal about him personally. And the remarkable statement, "This poem is for white people." Huh? Since when does one write serious poetry just for one set of people? In any case, I think this piece cuts through the dross and makes an important statement about race, and I'm grateful for it.

[James Dyson]

If you are talking about the Williams sisters I do have to say that they aren't enjoyable to watch. They just whack the heck out of it. I do miss Martina Hingis' style of play where there was more footwork, more dropshots, and more nuance to the game. It has little to do with race. It's just that it is boring to watch two women in a back-n-forth slugfest.

[Sarah Sarai]

It's not "beneath" us to consider the poet and racism, the poem and racism, or racism in and of itself. (Addressed to Leslie.) Blithely said that racism stinks. No kidding. But it prevails and I don't know how you separate fact and feeling when both are real and in this case connected. My father's side of the family had its feuds (as you mention your, also white, relatives) but they were nothing --NOTHING-- compared to the rancor of hate via racism. We stopped using the term somewhere along the line, but institutionalized racism is very real and very alive and why a car with my great-nephew in it gets stopped by the L.A.P.D. and not a car with me alone. Racism is well alive in the poetry "community." I go to reading after reading at local NEW YORK CITY institutions and the room is all white, or 99 percent so. It sucks. It's ugly. But we move forward, we do. I stay in the open mic community because it's not separatist.