Tyrice Deane - Using Color

Color Complex. How do the Poets use color their own and others.

How to use color? Before reading the assigned poetry I asked myself if it was possible not to use color. To me color is a part of the craft, like painting , you might have a pallet you prefer, one that brings out the life in your art, but you must have a pallet, how else would someone see the invisible. That is what color, hue, race does in the hands of creatives. Even Rimbaud used an African persona as a medium to create A Season in Hell, as if white paper alone would never capture what he needed to say. Color can be misused just like a painted room that gives the mind a headache, or makes you fall dizzy when you stay too long. Color can also create the dimensions of a Kaleidoscope, as Reginal Harris writes, “I grew up seeing the world as filled with hyperbole, irony, metaphor, simile, and slightly “off center” … growing up around such a kaleidoscope of words leads someone to either play with language or to seek help from a mental health professional…” Harris’ poem New Rules of the Road is color in movement. It isn’t a “Black thing” it’s a human flesh thing. He colors in the lines by using official language such as “the right to remain silent”,  “ no sudden movements”, “The profile”, and  words such as, “resist”, “rights” “arrested” “handcuffs”, to illustrate the dialogue of criminality when the confrontation is one sided, one color, BLUE. Immediately a knowing person will reflect on the police brutality that has plagued the Black community in a genocidal way, however other than the picture on the page before, Harris never once shows you the colors he is using. So who fits the profile ?... the message is anyone can… eventually it can be YOU. This use of color gives the work an omnipresent ability that proves the act of profiling in America depends on what color fits the agenda.

 I felt the title Proximity expand and constrict, validating the phantom skin that is close yet distant. “I have forgotten, my skin, misplaced my body.” This line made me think of California, the bubble of liberalism, love, and unity. California as not a state, but an adj: Califronication, a place, space, and relationship that functions like a knife that is used to amputate. It can cut off identity while making you think the mixology of brown, white, and black can give you purple. You may start dissolving: “my hands finger by finger, then the legs and the chest leaving the heart exposed and beating…” Is there feeling left when the cells of the skin , the color, is no longer there? Isn’t color coordinating the world the reason for all the mistakes made? Will being color blind leave us seeing, but what happens to the color erased, but still there, can one ever enjoy “the sense of touch {not} of being touched” without their skin?