How Difference Is Viewed- Blog 6

There are a couple of ways I began to dissect the poems that I felt resonated the most with this week’s prompt. Difference is navigated in several remarkable ways through narration. The four areas I looked at were: 

1) difference as it relates to how the narrator sees their self and how their oppressors see them, explored more so in Carreno and Smith’s work 

2) difference as it relates to how the narrator sees the other, whose identity and selfhood is also shaped by difference, and how the other is in relation to the narrator, powerfully drawn out in Archila’s poem Three Minutes with Mingus 

3) difference as it relates to how the narrator sees others who share the same difference and what their relationship to each other and world becomes, crafted well by Danez Smith

4) difference as it relates to how the narrator sees the other in relation to how the world sees them,  deepened by the concept that by seeing the other’s humanity, one sees their own humanity, which landed quite beautifully in Lee’s poem.

Then I honed in on voice in each piece, asking who the voices were but also where they were. 

Danez Smith is a poet I’ve run into a few times now (in the Midwest, a conferences, at a friend’s home, haha). Something I admire about his voice is where the narrator is speaking from. His voice lives in the site of transition. I almost asked him once if he has had a near-death experience, but thought, thankfully, of asking myself that question, and how what that represents to almost any black queer body. But I’m sure others familiar with his work or who just read him this week can sense that positionality of voice. “In Dear White America,” he is speaking from neither the site/location of abuse by white America or from the narrator’s destination. We are not in flashback as the narrator details all that is being left behind. In other works he speaks of something like a black heaven that murdered black folks go to and I hear that same sentiment and feel that same space crafted as we leave this here planet on a journey to find some darker solar system. 

The narrator speaks out on how difference is viewed and how it is felt, and although it can appear that this is a one person journey outward into the imaginary depths of the universe, the narrator is letting it be known that they see an unified experience and that this is a journey for his people to take. First person singular seems to read as first person plural. I know some writers who have admired or criticized Smith from speaking from rage. But I don’t actually feel like it’s rage. I think has surpassed that emotion, that grief, that valid expression of pain. I feel like the voice transcends into that of transition away from rage and hurt. It’s almost like a divestment from being different, the point is “we gonna find a place where this madness won’t be humored.” 

Unrelated but important when reading Smith: Some writers say that fear and rage make a character take action, not dreams or hopes. But Smith has mastered the way black folks talk about hope (cause SO much of black literature is hinged on forced, exhausting resiliency and hope). Smith re-conceptualizes hope, right…cause the journey is not made because of rage and “we outta here, fuck you all” but on hope (more of a “we out like Harriett Tubman, because we know there is something more to life than this and what y’all got going here.” I especially encourage black writers to study when other black writers are able to capture hope outside of tropes we’ve been entrapped to. 

ANYWHO. The other poets I listed above also located voice outside of physical location. I’ll end with Archila’s voice. 

So, as Smith’s narrator speaks from in between Earth and a solar system of darker planets, the narrator of Archila’s piece speaks from not-quite-the-living-room (where they are probably playing a Mingus record) and not-quite-the-physical-scenes-of-memories-evoked. We are located in the in-between. Close enough to speak to the fright underneath beds with bullets firing and killing people in the child’s community, far enough to “picture [Mingus] in Watts.”

There becomes a more uniquely imagined landscape to traverse than what is familiar. I found it important to understand Archila’s background and poetry themes. He writes of themes of social justice, brutality and identity. The human voice in struggle and the new language that we create from that location. I truly do not come across literature that bridge distinct cultures and racialized experiences or hold the complexity of various pains of color. But yes! I can add William Archila to that growing list. A Salvadoran man who escaped the civil war in 1980, one year after the coup that started the civil unrest and eventually the war. 

One can only re-echo the sentiments of many poets of color, both read in this class and beyond, who speak to the cruelty of seeking refuge in the very country that meddled, intervened, incited the corruption, degradation, and destruction of your homeland. Fucking Reagan, right? And yet, as Archila notes that he needs a “gutbucket of gospel, the flat land of cotton” to keep up with Mingus’ mind and music, we also need that coffee and mining plantation of El Salvador to understand the wealth divide in this country, we also need to hear the music of the enslaved Afrikan and Indigenous folks there, we also need the stories of poor countrymen, the stories of colonizers, and of oil pipeline deals in order to HEAR Archila’s words. 

He focuses on this bassist, on this hybrid of sounds throughout black history, and what he hears (but what do we hear? What does his poem sound like? What instrument does he use? Is it the marimba de Arco or marimba criolla?) I counted the syllables and boy do I not remember iambic what have you’s but I can tell a pattern when I see one. There is a gem hidden in this poem, it’s like what Mingus’s compositions held. We are in music, we are in mindscapes, we are not in physical place or time even though we feel grounded (by this focus on Mingus as we float on the melody of a childhood song).