Some Thoughts on Biracialism and PoetryPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2013-06-26 20:08Z by Steven |
Some Thoughts on Biracialism and Poetry
Boston Review
2013-06-13
Paisley Rekdal, Associate Professor of English
University of Utah
To be a biracial and female writer might suggest one of two things: first, that my gender and race are the subject matter of my work or, second, that the forms of my writing reflect my identity. Between these two possibilities–race and gender as theme versus race and gender as enacted form—a tension exists, perhaps arising from our current distrust of both narrative and identity politics. To write from the first position—race and gender as theme—boils a poem down to the recounting of experience, most likely the narrator’s marginalization. It is an easy poetry to identify, and it is a type whose detractors (rightfully and wrongly) criticize as an attempt to engender in the reader both sympathy with and catharsis through the personal revelations of the narrator. It is a poetry that at its worst risks becoming performative cultural “kitsch” through its manipulation of readers’ sensitivities to race and racism but, at its best, illuminates some part of the complexity currently surrounding ideas of racial authenticity and identification.
The second option—identity as enacted form—is harder to pinpoint, relying as it does as much on the writer’s stated objectives for the work, as on readers’ stereotypes about what kind of poetic form female biracialism could take. On the surface, we might expect “biracial” forms to be highly skeptical of an imaginatively coherent first person. They could be poems that rely on fragmentation, that are deeply engaged with critical theory regarding perception and language. They could be ironic, self-reflexive, suspicious of catharsis, engaged more with the playful destruction of archetypal myths of identity than in reifying them. In short, they would be hard to distinguish from much of contemporary poetry today…
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