Poetry and race: is it really an issue?

At Poetry Foundation appears an interesting piece titled "Writing Like a White Guy: On language, race and poetry" by poet Jaswinder Bolina in which poet purposely blurs racial divides like those between language & ethnicity or cultural identity and race in order to expose possible obstacles to his own literary apprenticeship. And, if I'm not mistaken, he appears to be doing it for some sort of rhetorical effect. He can't possibly think any borderblur is a benefit to what poets do, can he? I can't quite see my way to granting any need for a language and race divide in the discussion of genuine poetic expression. I wonder if the whole matter of race & literariness isn't, after all, just critical posturing, accorded only a sort of writing class earnestness. The usual university seminar table talk.

To begin with, Bolina's claim that literary survival means assimilation can't be too easily linked to a poet's desire to preserve the integrity of his craft. To factor name, skin color and country of origin into literary biography is a regrettable fact of life, he says, since constructing a poetics as a visible minority always raises fears of the Other. And the Other to which he's referring, for presumably rhetorical effect, is the poet himself. It seems talk of the Other, taken from postcolonial critique, is still part of poetry discussion today, and surely by now it's grown stale with use. Racial tension of this sort is very palpable and very unsettling but only to this particular poet. Bolina can speak only for himself

If the racial Other aspires to equal footing on the socioeconomic playing field, he is tasked with forcing his way out of the categorical cul-de-sac that his name and appearance otherwise squeeze him into. We call the process by which he does this “assimilation.” Though the Latin root here—shared with the other word “similar”—implies that the process is one of becoming absorbed or incorporated, it is a process that relies first on the negation of one identity in order to adopt another. In this sense, assimilation is a destructive rather than constructive process. It isn’t a come-as-you-are proposition, a simple matter of being integrated into the American milieu because there exists a standing invitation to do so. Rather, assimilation first requires refuting assumptions the culture makes about the immigrant based on race, and in this sense assimilation requires the erasure of one’s preexisting cultural identity even though that identity wasn’t contingent upon race in the first place.

In a country like the US where "class and race structurally overlap", imposing very real strictures on creativity is par for the course. The Sikh Punjabi poet, like any nonwhite artist, feels necessarily condemned to working within a language & artistic milieu that must be necessarily racialized, sexualized, deracialized, etc. etc. and in the end this means being compelled to make what he calls the "pragmatic gambit" of assimilation. To write is necessarily to be restricted to any one of available (& competing?) language groups: there's in America no allegiance, as in the UK, to a benchmark King's English to which every regional dialect pays its dues still. Assimilation is not, however, a premise, even a minor one, I'm prepared to grant.

I can't in any way see the Canadian in me, for example, as having to undergo any assimilative moves in order to talk to American poets (which I regularly do online). Does the race and language divide necessarily include only visible marks of difference such as accent, skin colour, religious belief: does being white catholic Canadian, as in my case, mean the same as being Sikh Punjabi? I suspect if it did, Bolina wouldn't really have anything to say and yet there is a prima facie need to address the issue of race. Literary discourse without race just wouldn't be taken seriously these days, even though there's really no need to mention it. Bolina's own disavowal of the importance of race does strike me, to be sure, as artful or markedly disingenuous. I can't tell which.

Race is a subject I don’t offer any attention to. To do so would seem only to underscore my Otherness, which would only result in the same sorts of requisite exclusions I experienced growing up in mostly white schools and neighborhoods. Assimilation in those circumstances isn’t a choice so much political as it is necessary. Some remnant of a survival instinct kicks in, and one’s best efforts are directed at joining rather than resisting the herd. To be racialized is to be marginalized. When another Asian kid joins the playground, we unwittingly vie to out-white each other. This tactic I learned from practice but also from my immigrant family. When your numbers are few, assimilation is the pragmatic gambit

The result (and the flaw in Bolinda's argument & others that purposely conflate race and poetry) is that two 'languages' are spoken of here, and the two don't easily cohabit the same literary space: the one easily assimilable to a poetico-political discourse where language entails race and, of course, that other more problematic language of poets only an Eliot or a Mallarmé can aptly address. What results is an irreconcilable split in both language and the literary psyche, and this is in no small way attributable to the annoying writing class (MFA) chatter in the young poet's head from which, even well into a literary career, it's all but impossible to extricate himself. Writing by the book is a hard practice to shake.

To the poet, though, the first question isn’t one of class or color. The first question is a question of language. Poetry—as Stéphane Mallarmé famously tells the painter and hapless would-be poet Edgar Degas—is made of words, not ideas. However, to the poet of color or the female poet, to the gay or transgendered writer in America, and even to the white male writer born outside of socioeconomic privilege, a difficult question arises: “Whose language is it?” Where the history of academic and cultural institutions is so dominated by white men of means, “high” language necessarily comes to mean the language of whiteness and a largely wealthy, heteronormative maleness at that. The minority poet seeking entry into the academy and its canon finds that her language is deracialized/sexualized/gendered/classed at the outset.

"Poet of color" is as specious a category of the underprivileged artist as gay, transgendered, etc. There's no declassifying according to race, gender, & sexuality at the beginning of the writing project except, of course, in MFA courses. The only real Other to appear in Bolina's is 'transnormativity', the new villain in contemporary criticism personified in his article by the "kind, white-haired, white-skinned locals" of a recent poetry reading; and the only isolate self to suffer cultural alienation is of the poet's own making. Instead of paying attention to the always more interesting interplay of process and order in 'minority writing' (such as that in Aimé Césaire or Joseph Brodsky, for example) , Bolina resorts to schmaltzy Wertherian laments. And at times it does seem interminable.

In trafficking in “high” English, writers other than educated, straight, white, male ones of privilege choose to become versed in a language that doesn’t intrinsically or historically coincide with perceptions of their identities. It’s true that minority poets are permitted to bring alternative vernaculars into our work. Poets from William Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads to Frank O’Hara in his “Personism: a manifesto” demand as much by insisting that poetry incorporate language nearer to conversational speech than anything overly elevated. Such calls for expansions of literary language in conjunction with continuing experiments by recent generations of American poets are transforming the canon for sure, but this leaves me and perhaps others like me in a slightly awkward position. I don’t possess a vernacular English that’s significantly different from that of plain old Midwestern English. As such, it seems I’m able to write from a perspective that doesn’t address certain realities about myself, and this makes me queasy as anything. The voice in my head is annoyed with the voice in my writing. The voice in my head says I’m disregarding difference, and this feels like a denial of self, of reality, of a basic truth.

It isn’t exactly intentional. It’s a product of being privileged. In the 46 years since my father left Punjab, the 40 or so years since my mother left also, my parents clambered the socioeconomic ladder with a fair amount of middle-class success. We’re not exactly wealthy, but I do wind up in prep school instead of the public high school, which only isolates me further from those with a shared racial identity. Later I attend university, where I’m permitted by my parents’ successes to study the subjects I want to study rather than those that might guarantee future wealth. I don’t need to become a doctor or a lawyer to support the clan. I get to major in philosophy and later attend graduate school in creative writing. Through all of this, though I experience occasional instances of bigotry while walking down streets or in bars, and though I study in programs where I’m often one of only two or three students of color, my racial identity is generally overlooked or disregarded by those around me. I’ve become so adept in the language and culture of the academy that on more than one occasion when I bring up the fact of my race, colleagues reply with some variation of “I don’t think of you as a minority.”etc. etc

The only other writer in whom I've seen this same fashionable self-lament, every bit as disingenuous & textbookish, is Carmine Starnino. His article "Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook" is an anecdotal version of essentially the same type of literary autobiography, told in the flippant ironist style of those used to writing by government subsidies alone (but that's another matter). As I've said Bolina's case has some prima facie significance given the realities of race and the American immigrant experience. Both essays are of a piece, notwithstanding: the same sort of Poetry Foundation magazine controversy published for and by writing class poets.

"Writing Like a White Guy" is the usual identity-angst credo of contemporary poetics—usually for lack of anything better to say— and the result is bound to be a very predictable poetry. The opening few strophes of a Bolina poem entitled "Portrait of the Self", for example, come as no suprise to me. Here's writing over attentive to itself and really at a loss for significant phrasing: perhaps a case of form following the 'formlessness' of authorial voice. Lyricism always is the poorer for it.

The self wakes up extruded of whims


No tango in its Rorschach,
no mermen in its sea.

Just the self with its dull appendages,

all radial arm and ulna, no wing.

Dark face of the self in the reflective dark
of the microwave door,

the self so somber no-one would hold its hand
at a roller rink any longer than two revolutions, etc.

It wouldn't have made any difference (would it?) if a white or Sikh Punjabi or gay or transgendered person had written it. Or rather seminar theory may perhaps have served as welcome distraction from work as good, bad or indifferent as this. Who's to say? O! young sophisticate of the word the poetry you write is the person you've already become & to make them collide (as you like to do for effect) is plain disastrous. When you separate race and language, & problematize their relations, you're never going to do any better than a self's "Dark face" reflected in the "dark/of the microwave door".