Here’s something I picked up in a
bit of casting around on the Web, regarding the appropriation of personae by
white poets from marginalized groups. According to Craig Svonkin:
Lowell, Plath,
Berryman, Bishop, and Jarrell, given their generally progressive politics,
risked accusations of racism or appropriation inherent in their choosing to
adopt Black, Jewish, or otherwise subaltern alter-egos. One possibility is that
the 1950s and early 1960s was a period
when racial and gender politics were less focused on difference than is often
the case today, but rather were focused more on forging political coalitions
through metaphorically or imaginatively-created connections between individuals
or groups. For example, in the 1950s and early 1960s, many young, progressive,
northern Jews identified with and worked for Black civil rights, largely due to
their sense that Blacks in the Jim Crow South were the metaphorical “Jews” of
the United States. Thus, self-othering, which in the late 1960s would begin to
be viewed as “appropriation,” may still have been considered an acceptable or
even progressive act given this proclivity toward drawing imaginative,
metaphorical connections between various oppressed or alienated groups.
Well there is simply no doubt
that this is what B. was up to in his ongoing appropriation of a “Negro”
persona, made more explicit by the references to minstrelsy with its use of
blackface. Blackface was originally a way of perpetuating suppression of
African-American experience through stereotype and ridicule, but B. and others
(e.g.: Plath in “Daddy”: “I think I may well be a Jew”) appropriate the
personae of oppressed groups for other reasons, as marginalized agents
themselves looking to forge sociopolitical common ground, as allied victims of narrowly
orthodox white male power structures. As an artist, B. falls right into an
alienated group, though he alienates himself in more ways than that. He was
wounded, emotional, a dork. Unmanly and cringing. Artists were unmanly. (John
Wayne unsuccessfully tried to talk Kirk Douglas out of playing Vincent van Gogh
in the film Lust for Life because he
felt the unmanliness of the artist character would undermine Douglas’s image
and career.)
Anyway, this whole poem is one
extended exercise in alliance-forging with marginalized groups—he gets Jews and
Blacks in the first two lines: “—If we’re not Jews, how can messiah come? /
Praise God, brothers, Who is a colored man.” It makes me mighty uncomfortable because
I’m too aware of what cultural appropriation is about. In fact, I have very little
patience with it. Perhaps it’s true though that an understanding of cultural
appropriation didn’t develop until later in the 60s, so we need to give B. a
pass on this. It’s time to ditch the team name of the “Washington Redskins”,
though you have to remember that in the 30s when the name was chosen, it was
almost certainly adopted as an appeal to strength, courage, resourcefulness—warrior
attributes that football players emulate. It was meant—and meant honestly—to praise Indian peoples. But social attitudes
evolve, and now the praise has soured into stereotype. When a team’s name
becomes offensive because the culture it’s embedded in evolves, you evolve the
team’s name along with it. But a poem is as fixed as a painting. You have to begin
by judging it in terms of the values of its cultural context. Fine. But I’m
still waving bye-bye to this one: “time now in Ghetto town: it’s curtain call:”
I’ll say—ghetto stereotypes, minstrel shows, and death, all packed into one
line. Genius! [Bye-bye…]
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