Dichoto-myelitis [by Ailish Hopper]

 

Something that's fun to do sometimes is talk with white people about reparations for slavery. Well, it's fun---like a German Expressionist play. Fun---like an absurdist novel.

Or, like Groundhog Day: the same show, over and over, with all of us seemingly unaware that we’ve been fed our script or our lines. Fun like ---the abyss.

 

Here is Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert writing about the abyss, relating his older brother’s appearance, when home after the war:

                nothing was left him

                but touch…

 

                we walk together in the streets

                and he recites to me

                improbable tales

                touching my face

                with blind fingers of rain

Because we’re not really talking about race, or writing about it, if the abyss, or the absurd, is not somehow nearby, even if it is not in the words, the tone, or the subject. Or, at least, if not, we risk writing about, and probably for, whiteness. Robert Lowell’s Colonel Shaw, in “For the Union Dead,” is “out of bounds” once he leads a “Negro infantry.” He is along the abyss:

                Riding on his bubble. He waits

                For the blessed

                Break….

 

                Space is nearer.

It’s always present, of course, but not always noticed, as Kevin Young’s riff on Lowell points out, in “For the Confederate Dead:”

                below sea-

 

                and eye-level a mural runs

                the wall, flaking, a plantation

                scene most do not see---

Young’s scene represents the closed spaces, in the present and the past, around which we all walk. They hold the unspeakable, the untouchable, the backed-up-in-the-body dichotomy, a dichoto-myelitis that courses through most of our interactions around race—including art. Below, John Lucas shows us an image, an embodiment of this ailment, from Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let me be Lonely.

Kate Daniels’ “Autobiography of a White Girl Raised in the South,” acutely illuminates this experience, of whiteness, a “profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is,” as Toni Morrison says:

                 From the beginning, then, there were always two: me and not-me.

                The one I was, white and skinny, straight brown hair. And the one

                I wasn’t, but could’ve been---that black or brown girl, hair coarser…

                I didn’t even know where she lived, only saw her in public.

Daniels reveals this sense of the color line (“me and not-me”), but, since she’s white, without the structural oppression, she has the option to stay only within her world (“I didn’t even know where she lived”), instead of having to understand and negotiate two worlds, as her black counterparts likely did, to stay safe.

Part of the absurdity in a reparations conversation with many white people, or the illness of whiteness, or white power, is a “But I didn’t know!” or “I’m just saying…” phenomenon, a euphemistic disguise designed to keep the closed spaces closed, and the people who benefit from having to open up their metaphorical “wallet” by expanding their knowledge, or by including, publishing, hiring people who may not look, think, or be like they be.

This is all known, written about in “diversity” conversations, whose own euphemisms are often polished to a high gloss (It’s Not Race It’s Class). None of the actions, or poems, will mean anything if they do not emerge from the real work: for white people to look and see how their own racialized experience, our own internalization of the structures and power of race. Our own use of these euphemisms to defend or avoid, or otherwise let ourselves off the hook.  Here are some examples of recent euphemistic disguises, some, my own pet peeves, some, others have pointed out.

In Marjorie Perloff’s recent essay, “Poetry on the Brink,” she critiques the heavy machinery that the creative-writing-education world has become, for its effect on poetry. Like Vendler, she critiques Dove’s anthology for its ignorance of established or agreed-upon aesthetics, saying that “one evidently wants to read her anthology to learn not about American poetry of the twentieth century but about her likes or dislikes.” It is, of course, an interesting charge, since that must be true of every anthology---that it reflects the editor’s likes and dislikes. So, underneath this, stated, accusation seems to be some familiar whiteness-disguises: that it is not really trying to consolidate or hold on to its aesthetic---or material---power; it is “just saying” that that poet, who “happens to be black” isn’t “objective” enough.

This reminded me of a piece that Poets House sent out to all of its members, brought to my attention by Evie Shockley. A humor piece from The New Yorker, it satirically relates news of Poets House’s new building by stringing together faux verse from a collection of poets. Ian Frazier, the writer, is as far as I know a humorist, not a poet, so can be forgiven for not knowing his poetry. But, Poets House, which then sent the piece out to all of its members, probably should know.

The New Yorker’s Poets House piece happened to mention Countee Cullen in one of its faux verses, as follows: “When that evening sun go down/ And come shinin’ right straight in,/ Some special scientific glazing-type thing on the windows---/ ”Rejects solar heat gain.”

Now, there are black poets who used, and use, dialect, and do so proudly. But Countee Cullen, pictured here, (BA, New York University 1925; MA, Harvard University 1926), is the opposite of that poet. And not only do the faux verses use dialect, they depict the black speaker as having a “golly-duh!” attitude about the new solar technology. A lot of us, white and black, might actually feel that way about solar technology, but choosing the black poet to express that plays very unfortunately on longstanding, painful stereotypes. So satirizing Cullen’s verse this way, as sort of a dialect-using bumpkin, is a little like taking this photo of him, and photoshopping onto it rags and a watermelon. 

Of course, a “But I didn’t know!” quality of whiteness can be seen in many other kinds of social privilege, when one is so used to one’s advantage, or majority, or basic acceptance by others, that one assumes that one’s audience is generally either comprised of people like oneself, or sympathetic to one’s own ideas.  And it appeared in one of the most infamous of the recent race-based Poetry World conflicts, the public letter that Claudia Rankine wrote to Tony Hoagland, and his public letter in response. Here’s a little of the poem that started it, by Hoagland:

            some tough little European blonde
            pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
            cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
            some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite—…

            and I,
            I couldn't help wanting
            the white girl to come out on top,

            because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
            with her pale eyes and thin lips

            and because the black girl was so big
            and so black,
            so unintimidated,

            hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
            down Abraham Lincoln's throat…

Hoagland is, of course, consciously playing with and on stereotypes. But while he knows that’s risky, he doesn’t seem aware (or willing to admit to?) the ways he fails. For one thing, like it or not, we all “speak-as,” and he speaks as a white man, not a black man, or a black woman, which are, of course, very different positions from his. As he announces in his own letter, he clearly knows a lot about the “conditions” of race (euphemism alert: read: “outside of me and my actions”). And though it is understandable that he rejects the stereotype that could be put on him, as white liberal, he ends up enacting that very privilege when he rejects critique, saying, “I want some of my poems to alarm people with their subjects and attitudes. I think poems can be too careful. A poem is not a teddy bear.” Because this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And pretending that it does expresses the worst kind of white liberal privilege---the opposite, I assume, of what he intended---because it risks implying that there is a Level  Playing Field, or, worse, that We are One, when, in fact, we are not one. We are different, and we pay, in life, differently.

However, if different, we are also interconnected, interrelated. And it is this relationship that is the real boldness, the real work, for any poet writing about race. Hoagland’s particular project, which writes in a register that might be called High Sarcastic, and which actively seeks out risky subjects, thus requires an audience’s trust. But, like any other trust, it is something that the poet must earn. As in, acknowledge, and submit himself for the work of, a real relationship. And he refused.

Here’s a line from that same poem that he backgrounded, that I think he should have foregrounded:

            Sometimes I think that nothing really changes—

In this lines, and in some other poems from his most recent book, he expresses, however briefly, his own experiences of the abyss. His own bitterness, resignation, his own unanswerable questions. And here’s a word from Rankine’s original letter, which he ignored, but which may be the only one he should have heard:

             Please.

Had Hoagland engaged in actual dialogue---hearing Rankine’s “please,” acknowledging his own failures---instead of debate about “ideas” like “race” or “complicit with everything” or “America,” we might have glimpsed the real unthinkable, the real undiscovered country.

Since it’s in the body---our physical bodies and our language bodies---how shall a poet rewrite, and not just write, race? How shall we intervene and not merely chronicle, or, worse, end up another player on Race’s bandstand?

What does this undiscovered country look like, when we engage with those gestures, the mysterious gestures of the free?

(Image at the post's beginning: Howardena Pindell, "Separate but Equal: Genocide AIDS, Part 1 & 2")

 

Comments

[Laura Orem]

This is interesting and uncomfortable-making. It made me think of something, too - what expectations/constraints/rules/whatever-you-want-to-call-them do we put on poets, that we don't seem to on writers of fiction? Hoagland says he wrote the poem as a persona, a character if you will - but nobody seems to be buying that. Yet we allow without question fiction writers the liberty of creating narrators ("speakers") who are clearly not meant to be the author. For example, Flannery O'Connor (take your pick of any of her stories), or even more to the point, a story like Eudora Welty's masterpiece, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" Why do we have different expectations from a poem than we do from a story - that the speaker must be in some way the author, even if disguised? I don't know the answer to this, but I think it's worth talking about. And I'm very interested to hear what your take on this is.

[Ailish Hopper]

Yes, I sidestepped the persona issue with Hoagland, along with a lot of other important points. Because the point stands: persona or no, our art plays in the world, in real people's lives. And there are consequences. I think there is a difference in our responses to, and expectations of, poetry and fiction, certainly. But when it comes to race....I don't know that we let fiction off the hook. In fact, in Major Jackson's great APR essay about race, he begins by relating a difficult experience he had listening to Barry Hannah read in the voice of one of his particularly racist characters. The whole formal question, though, of /how/ we bring that poison into the world, "how to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling?" as Toni Morrison put it----that's tomorrow's post. :-)

[Laura Orem]

I have lots of thoughts on this, but I'll wait until I see your post tomorrow to post them.

Thank you for making us think!

[Kyle Dargan]

"How shall a poet rewrite, and not just write, race?"

When I was teaching at Indiana University, there was one Caucasian student in particular whose writing I was trying to push towards greater depth. One day, this student just says to me "I'm just a white kid. I don't have anything to write about." And I was so thankful for his honesty because his admission gave me the opportunity to identify and address the ways in which having his identity crafted by race was limiting his thinking and, therefore, his writing.

But my response to that student was not to tell him to "rewrite [. . .] race." If anything, I had to push him to start thinking of himself as the sum of his social and cultural and genealogical parts as opposed to the undefined anti-otherness of "whiteness." What I'm suggesting is that rather than looking to remodel race for him, we needed to leave it behind, put him back in touch with the complexity of his own humanity.

I LOVE discussing Hoagland's poem "The Change" with my predominantly Caucasian and predominantly privileged students because they often have to pause and ask themselves "Is that me?" "Is that what I'm supposed to have an allegiance with?" "Do I want to be ostensibly 'white' in my poems if that is what it sounds like?" "What does it sound like, if anything at all?"

I think the push to put poets back in touch with the true voices they are too comfortably distanced from has to start with getting race out of the way. Too many Americans, writers, don't know who they are because they understand themselves first and foremost by these useless constructs of racial identity. Yes, there is a history of racial violence in this country and, yes, we should understand that history as well as how we have allowed that construct (race) to psychologically enable violence against each other and ourselves (racism), but, going forward, I'm not confident that rewriting it will prove as fruitful as invalidating it and forcing us to own up to the underlying greed and anxiety that find a convenient hiding place in racism.

I've always thought DuBois was right about double-consciousness, but a little off regarding the veil. Negroes have always been able to see themselves for themselves as well as for how the "white" world sees them. "Whites," people who understand themselves as such, only see that "white" vision. That's the veil I'm trying to lift. I don't think I can leave it on and turn it into a more functional accessory.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/170651-1

[Ailish Hopper]

Kyle,

Thanks for this. I'm glad that you're having these conversations with your students! And, we're actually mostly in agreement, in that we're talking about a poetics of freedom. But I mean something different by "rewriting" than what you caught here. And I think that the process of naming, of seeing, difference is important. At least, as long as it's important to the structures in the US that still use it to oppress and ignore some, while giving a pass (and goodies) to others. And as long as whiteness is still predicated on my /not/ seeing, and naming, it. But neither do we have to make it all we see about someone. In other words, even in those solutions---more dichoto-myelitis! Only way out is through.

Ailish