Van: Reflection on Color Complex

I had a bit more difficulty thinking about “color complex” than I thought I would, especially with the amazing reading selection we had. To talk about our bodies is an inherent “color complex” if you are of color. To even acknowledge non-white experiences, to be “nontraditional” is the “color complex.” I tried to, then, take a stab at a few poets of color, whether I found them to be intentionally speaking about their color, their color in comparison to others, spoke about color but not of their skins, or didn’t speak about color at all but how I read color anyways. 

The poem that left the most lasting impression was simple and sweet, granted it steers us into pretty complicated terrain and left a bitter taste in my mouth. “The Identity Repairman” by Thomas Sayers Ellis. Here, the poet is showing some of the names black peoples have been given. The obvious statement is that these names can be applied to even though skin color(s) for blackness aren’t drastically changing. Skin color matters here, even though I wanted to think through phoneotype when I read this. 

African. Slave. Negro. Colored. Black. African American. Our colors range from the lightest of skins with freckles to browns with hues of red or yellow to darker shades as sweet as blackberries and chocolate. I held on to that fact, that these names have been used for us all, while still I noting that Ellis doesn’t use the names that have been given to mixed raced folks. When it comes to rhythm, musicality, repetition, language, I noticed:

-AFRICAN, SLAVE, & NEGRO all used rhythm and repitition, the musicality of language decreases with SLAVE & NEGRO (to which those two mimic one another).  

-COLORED lacked rhythm, repetition, musicality, almost everything that made the African stanza appealing. The writing style isn’t descriptive or poetic, just more like a summary of an essay. 

-BLACK brings back the creative language, but then does something even the AFRICAN stanza doesn’t. The creativity in sentence structure and meaning is captivating, “My heart is a fist/ I fix blackness. My fist is a heart/ I beat Whiteness.”

-AFRICAN AMERICAN is similar to COLORED stanza. I would even argue it repeats the same style or nature, lacking rhythm, musicality, repetition, and especially the kind of creativity that emerged in BLACK. 

And once I step away from analyzing this as a poem, I find how we may be able to think about how the craft mirrors the message Ellis may want us to leave with. To include my own perspective, I would say that the beautiful range of skin tones don’t change but the names do, the relationship to whiteness does, the relationship to resistance does, to Africa, to this creative, ancestral selfhood. 

And these are things I felt strongly after reading BLACK, where the relationship to Whiteness was quite clear, that the same color that is used against black peoples can be used against whiteness (which is a lot to unpack, but it almost gets to this political conversation of how black folks can get rid of blackness and become human, in the sociopolitical context, by destroying whiteness, which is in this humanizing process, which the arguments I’ve heard more are around pointing white folks home to indigenous cultures they come, etc). 

This juxtaposition of black and white is also found in Jackson’s poem “Rose Colored City,” which is pretty direct, speaking to both their color and others (whiteness, again). When the narrator says “Black Power” as a response, a defense, to hearing “White Power,” it crafts the message for the readers. Pieces like this dive into those conversations around the difference in what these racialized bodies and words mean, how color does create different relationships (such as to power).

I thought of Ismael’s poem, which I totally did not fully absorb outside of scattered thoughts that I had to work a little too hard to contextualize. But one striking thing is Ismael’s use of whiteness. The word “white” cannot be used without making a reader at least wonder if it holds the same relationship or is influenced by white power. Invisible Man drowned us in whiteness, right, and perhaps I read into this word more ever since that early exposure. 

What other conclusion am I to drawn from this glorified blond crown of light the narrator speaks of, that gets juxtaposed with the cave-dwelling people, the shadows, and the dog. Even though this poem was too meditative, existential, still, etc for me to grasp meaning from it, there was meaning inherent in those words.