I always wanted to be a sad white girl. I wanted to be sad like Lana Del Rey. I wanted a sadness that could be so universal, that it’d move everyone to tears. A sadness that everyone could relate to. “I want a summertime, summertime sadness.” … Yes, I’ve experienced that before. I know where that’s coming from.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the contextualization of POC sadness. My sadness is viewed in terms of all that is surrounding it. My sadness is about domestic violence, homelessness, queerness, gender dysphoria, intergenerational trauma passed down from the Salvadorean civil war, etc., ETC…My sadness is something to observe, consume, sympathize with BUT NOT EMPATHIZE WITH (not to mobilize for). Most people do not know how to interact with my sadness. My sadness is so multifaceted, it speaks twenty languages.
This past year, Citizen by Claudia Rankine was released and white people all across the literary world discovered racism. The sadness in Claudia Rankine’s book was eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinnertime. Everyone was talking about Citizen and micro-agressions and feelings. But I didn’t see any of the white people in my MFA program marching next to me when Mike Brown was killed by the police in Ferguson, when Erica Garner was killed by NYPD. I didn’t see any of them working to dismantle the systems of oppression which created my sadness / my community’s sadness. Yet everyone raved about how revolutionary that book was. REVOLUTIONARY FOR WHOM???!!!
There was this article that I was reading a while ago (which I cannot currently find) which discussed sadness in terms of the medical industrial complex. The article was talking about the over-diagnosis of depression in the United States and ways that other parts of the world interact with deep sadness… Thinking about sadness in terms of regional / systematic pain faced by particular groups of people. For example, PTSD faced by the communities attacked by US imperialism… Okay, I don’t want to stray too far from topic.
Here’s what I want to say… I want people to act, I want people to mobilize around POC sadness. Don’t just feel bad about our stories, consume us, and spit us out… I don’t care if my stories make you feel bad about queer youth homelessness. I don’t care if you read my work and talk about it with your friends at brunch. That doesn’t matter. I want you to give your money to the Ali Forney Center and make the problems stop. I want you to donate your money to Black & Pink to support queer folks in prisons.
Right now, everyone knows that brown folks are killing it in the poetry scene. It feels like the mid 90’s when Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, and Shakira were all on MTV. And white girls were getting spray tans all over the country. It was a moment of Latino pop splendor that had seldom been seen before… Felt like that moment was going to last forever (but it didn’t). This is what happened—white people got tired of publicizing us and found a newer trend. They got tired of consuming us.
This is what I’m scared about— Lately, I’ve been working on this UNDOCUPOETS CAMPAIGN (with Javier Zamora and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo). We were protesting first book discrimination against undocumented poets (who were not allowed to apply to contests without proof of US citizenship)… In mobilizing for this contest, we noticed one reoccurent theme— WHITENESS (11 out of the 12 publishers that we worked with were white). This says a lot about why the nationalistic guidelines were there in the first place. This also should be something to worry about, for the sake of POC poetry.
If all of the publishers are white, then it doesn’t matter how many brown judges get appointed / how many brown poets those judges choose to publish (because we are still operating under a white-supremacist system). Our stories and our lives are underneath a white hand, and white people get to decide when and how our sadness, our trauma, our narrative poetry comes into / out of fashion. White people get to decide how our sadness is treated. “The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house” (Audre Lorde). If white people actually care about POC poetry then they need to do at least two things- one mobilize politically against the white supremacist power structures that are murdering our communities. Two, mobilize for our leadership in their publishing houses and support us throughout all realms of the poetry community.
A BROWN BOY GETS SHOT BY A WHITE COP. A BROWN BOY WRITES POEMS ABOUT HIS OWN DEATH. A WHITE MAN BUYS AND SELLS THE STORIES FROM THIS BROWN BOY. THE BROWN BOY SITS AT WHITE FEET AND WAITS FOR A PAYCHECK. (THE BROWN BOY GETS PAID FOR NARRATING HIS OWN DEATH TO WHITE PEOPLE). I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I WILL NOT ALLOW MY NARRATIVE / MY HURT / MY SADNESS / MY LIFE TO BE BOUGHT /SOLD /CONSUMED / SHAT OUT (& never actually addressed). I will not allow it!
(I’m such a hypocrite).
In my dream poetry-world there would be more POC leading poetry publishing houses. And there would be more support for the existing POC publishers (such as Noemi Press, Tia Chucha, and Cypher Books). There would also be no submission fees for anything. Oh, and artists would get paid for their work. Yes, artists would get paid for participating in conferences, and readings, and retreats, and everything… Damn, that’d be such a nice world… I’d be living like a KWEEN, glamorous like Lana Del Rey.
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