Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal

Author:Paisley Rekdal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

[s]lide[s] razors across [his] hair,

count[s] how many ways

[he] can bring blood closer to the surface of [his] skin.

Skinhead’s fascination with pain is both, he says, a “dut[y] of the righteous” but also a way of drawing my attention to his physicality. Of course, if racism depends upon appearance, it makes sense that Skinhead is obsessed with his flesh; blood for him is not only the evidence of pain but of race, and Whiteness and pain for Skinhead are merged throughout the poem. Skinhead repeatedly acknowledges he’s not a successful or particularly beautiful example of his race, his own hand ruined from when “a machine that slices leather / whack[ed] off three fingers at the root,” leading to the loss of his job and a mutilated hand with “only the baby finger left, sticking straight up.” In Smith’s poem, Skinhead’s hand becomes a symbol of his emasculation, as it leaves him both unable to work and unable to offer a proper “fuck you” to those who look at him as “some kind of freak,” because the pinky finger is of course “the wrong goddamned finger,” as Skinhead himself knows.

Skinhead’s emasculation is only reinforced when he sees working African American and Chicano men “walking like kings up and down the sidewalks in my head / walking like their fat black mamas named them freedom.” His envy of their confidence mixes with disgust for his own appearance, driving him toward grotesque acts of violence in which he can transfer his own masochistic tendencies onto the bodies of men of color.

“It’s a kick to watch their eyes get big,” he writes of his attacks, “right in that second when they know the pipe’s gonna come down.” If we read Skinhead’s “baby finger” as his unsatisfactory phallic symbol, the metal pipe he uses to beat black and Chicano men becomes its grotesque replacement, something Smith suggests in the fact that Skinhead gets an erection during his violence. “I get hard,” he says, “listening to their skin burst.” Skinhead’s racism is a combustible brew of self-hatred, envy, economic disappointment, and homoeroticism—all things he can name but can’t consider because he believes the cause of his rage is external. He won’t acknowledge that the systems of racial power he supports have made him as vulnerable as they have people of color, and he can’t imagine he won’t reap the rewards Whiteness should pay.

Skinhead’s refusal to believe in his own failure makes the end of the poem both terrifying and strangely triumphal. “I’m riding the top rung of the perfect race,” Skinhead crows, and regardless of how much I might want to see Skinhead as an American aberration who’s perverted our values, Skinhead insists he’s central to the American narrative. “I’m your baby, America,” he spits,

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