On Compromise by Rachel Greenwald Smith

Author:Rachel Greenwald Smith [Smith, Rachel Greenwald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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I do agree with Hayes when he objects to having to choose between being read as a formalist and being read as an African-American poet. This is clearly a false distinction, and yet, for a long time, I, too, believed something along these lines. It wasn’t that I thought that non-white poets couldn’t be formally innovative, nor did I think that attending to their formal innovations required ignoring their writing about race. But I did assume that form was not in and of itself a matter of race. I believed that form was form, and racial identity, when it appeared in their work, should be read as the content shaped by that form.

I was operating on a false binary. One that, according to the literary scholars Chris Chen and Tim Kreiner, white writers have perpetuated for generations. I thought about race as a matter of content, of culture, as Hayes puts it, and dismissed its relationship to aesthetic form. Chen and Kreiner offer an important correction to this belief, pointing out something that should have been obvious, given my interest in the politics of form: “‘Race,’” they write, is not “a matter of isolable identities but a hierarchical relation: a form.”

We know that race is a hierarchical relation. We identify certain physiological properties (such as skin color) as important because we live in a society in which those properties inform power hierarchies. This is what it means to racialize. Race is also, therefore, structural: it is enforced by social boundaries, by the fact that we invest enormous power in fictional concepts such as Black and white. It is maintained economically and politically through policies that produce and support racial hierarchies. But none of this has to do with aesthetic form, at least not exclusively.

Form comes in when we consider how these hierarchies are maintained aesthetically, through the production and circulation of images and narratives, sensations and feelings. And while the strong hand of the state is certainly still a significant driver of racialization in the United States, internalized bias, microaggressions, and other more subtle drivers of racism exist as much in the domain of images and narratives as they do in the domain of official policy.

Thinking about race formally makes me think about Hayes’s box; about the lonely figure trapped inside. It makes sense that he would want to get out of that box, to prove that he is not defined or limited by it. But he isn’t alone in there, I find myself thinking. Or rather, he is alone only if the box is understood as personal, if it is his job and his job alone to push against its walls. But if the box is understood as structural, historical, political, then there are others crammed in there with him, their limbs entangled, their arms raised against its sides.

I redraw the cube in my head, imagining that there are many people stuck in that box together. And when I do that, I realize that this new image has a name: solidarity.

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