Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio

Author:Kim Addonizio [Addonizio, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Self Help, Poetry, Reference, Writing
ISBN: 9780393346992
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20

identity 2: race, class & privilege

My father was working-class. His father, who emigrated from Italy with his wife, had eleven children and was a butcher in New York City. My maternal grandmother was a single mother who supported her three children as a high school gym teacher. By the time my parents married, they had achieved much greater economic success than their parents.

I was raised in Bethesda, Maryland, in a neighborhood where the black maids stood on corners in the afternoons, waiting for the bus back to D.C. I went to good public schools. After leaving home, I earned a poverty-level income for many years. I was, as they say, “downwardly mobile,” but I had the skills to survive, to make my way in the world, and I got them early in life.

Because I am a Caucasian-American in a culture that is predominantly white, I have blind spots. Sometimes I know what they are, and I can try to see them in a side mirror. But sometimes, I think, I don’t even notice them. I can usually afford not to notice. This is the privilege of my skin color.

What does all this mean for my writing? It means I already have a whole boatload, so to speak, of cultural identities and assumptions. It means that those attitudes might be revealed in my writing, whether or not I’m aware of them.

Tony Hoagland observes that one’s cultural attitudes can also be revealed by omission. In “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People,” he writes:

Why hasn’t racial anxiety, shame and hatred—such a large presence in American life—been more a theme in poetry by Caucasian-Americans? The answer might be that Empathy is profoundly inadequate as a strategy to some subjects. To really get at the subject of race, chances are, is going to require some unattractive, tricky self-expression, something adequate to the paradoxical complexities of privilege, shame and resentment. To speak in a voice equal to reality in this case will mean the loss of observer-immunity-status, will mean admitting that one is not on the sidelines of our racial realities, but actually in the tangled middle of them, in very personal ways. Nobody is going to look good. Meanwhile, of course, American black poets have been putting the nasty topic on the table for a long time, in very personal ways.

Others who bring up the topic include Native American poets Sherman Alexie and Joy Harjo; Asian-American poets Jessica Hagedorn and Lawson Inada; and Latino poets Martin Espada and Sandra Cisneros. “In very personal ways” because, for these writers, the issue is undeniably personal, whereas if you’re Caucasian-American, denial is often part of your conditioning.

Is it true, as Hoagland says, that empathy is “profoundly inadequate as a strategy”? I wonder. Fiction writers find their way into characters vastly different from themselves. Can’t writers of poetry do the same? And if we use ourselves as characters, is it true that “nobody is going to look good” addressing the “nasty topic” of race? These are questions well worth considering.

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