Poetry written as a question

I knew that poetry, like any other forms of literature, would ask questions. But I didn't know that it could actually written in the form of question. Toi Derricotte's poems invited, no, dragged me into them, which doesn't happen to me all that often.



"For Black Women Who Are Afraid."

A black woman comes up to me at break in the writing
workshop and reads me her poem, but she says she
can't read it out loud because
there's a woman in a car on her way
to work and her hair is blowing in the breeze
and, since her hair is blowing, the woman must be
white, and she shouldn't write about a white woman
whose hair is blowing, because
maybe the black poets will think she wants to be
that woman and be mad at her and say she hates herself,
and maybe they won't let her explain
that she grew up in a white neighborhood
and it's not her fault, it's just what she sees.
But she has to be so careful. I tell her to write
the poem about being afraid to write,
and we stand for a long time like that,
respecting each other's silence.



The speaker, a teacher at the writing workshop, who is supposedly more experienced and probably older, understands the younger woman's concern. But at the same time, she doesn't seem to completely agree with the latter's 'excuse', that "it's just what she sees," as she, the teacher, is aware of the politics of poetry writing, or representation in general.

What is interesting to me is that both women seem to represent the poet's stance; or rather, that the poem as a whole as a question represents where Derricotte is standing regarding the issue raised by her own poem. It is about a conversation that has been going on inside her mind.

The poem ends in silence. A kind of silence what I call loud and disordered silence. For instance: you have to write a paper, so you've been reading a bunch of articles, and now you're sitting on a chair, maybe with a notepad or a computer ready at your hand, trying to make certain shapes out of hundreds of stars. You just wait, in silence, but you know your brain is working like mad, as if doing massive amount of calculation but it's so fast that you consciousness can't recognize all the numbers appearing just briefly in front of your eyes. But there comes those moments when you suddenly stop the machine, and start to write down the combination like mad, because the letters are visible only while they are still hot.

So, both the speaker's and Derricotte's suggestion, that we should first of all lay down the question in order to proceed, are very wise ones, and probably the only viable option, because we will be able to come back to this point, because we won't loose sight of our original question, the reason why we started to write at all.


And another poem of hers.


"Passing"

A professor invites me to his "Black Lit" class; they're
reading Larson's Passing. One of the black
students says, "Sometimes light-skinned blacks
think they can fool other blacks,
but I can always tell," looking
right through me.
After I tell them I am black,
I ask the class, "Was I passing
when I was just sitting here,
before I told you?" A white woman
shakes her head desperately, as if
I had deliberately deceived her.
She keeps examining my face,
then turning away
as if she hopes I'll disappear. Why presume
"passing" is based on what I leave out
and not what she fills in?
In one scene in the book, in a restaurant,
she's "passing,"
though no one checked her at the door--
"Hey, you black?"
My father, who looked white,
told me this story: every year
when he'd go to get his driver's license,
the man at the window filling
out the form would ask,
"White or black?" pencil poised, without looking up.
My father wouldn't pass, but he might
use silence to trap a devil.
When he didn't speak, the man
would look up at my father's face.
"What did he write?"
my father quizzed me.


"My father quizzed me." That's how the poem ends. A question, no doubt about that. 

And look at how Derricotte plays with the expression, "to fill in". In the first instance, where the speaker talks about passing in terms of what one leaves out and fills in, the act of filling in is tied with active lying, the act of deliberately providing someone with a false information. Then, in the second and last instance, filling in is associated with the act of defining, categorizing, 'pinning down', by means of writing down in an official document. An interesting paring, isn't it? The eye that scrutinizes and discriminates, and the pencil that fills in, both of them are in the last lines of the poem. Of course, the implied argument is that black is not just a color.

But, all the readings aside, "What did he write?" I'm curious to death.