Kiki Martire – Snopes

These days it can be hard to tell the difference between what I am thankful for and simply privileges. I become more grateful each year for the opportunity to attend a top-notch liberal arts university, and to have the good fortune of family, education, home, food, and friends. Yet amid all I have to be thankful for this holiday season, it is my white A baseball cap and a portrait of Michael Brown is shown alongside his casket inside Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church before the start of funeral services in St. Louis privilege that hangs heaviest in my heart this week. Although Shenandoah is a place of literary rather than political debate, I would feel remiss to not mention Monday night’s announcement that the officer responsible for the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, will not be indicted. I think for most of the country grappling with this news a grim cloud looms over our Thanksgiving festivities. I know that personally my sense of American patriotism feels acutely heightened during this season of gratitude. But this year, it is hard for me to consider the United States a nation of prosperity and freedom, when so many of my opportunities are made possible by the chance color of my skin. In contrast, people of color are still denied full protection under the law and deprived of equal access to justice and dignity in their everyday lives.

In the wake of confusion or tragedy I often turn to poetry for wisdom and comfort. A brief Google search for “Ferguson poetry” led me to a blog posted on Tuesday by the Paris Review that featured Frederick Seidel’s brazenly entitled poem, “The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri” that will appear in their winter issue next month. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the poetic voice of “The Ballad of Ferguson” was a 78 year old white male, Harvard graduate, and the privileged son of a wealthy St. Louis family. Seidel has written about race complicatedly for decades, including horrifying descriptions of his father’s mistreatment of black servants growing up. His poetry is characterized by gaudy excesses of wealth and an unsettling engagement with social issues. Part of the “Ballad” reads:

Skin color is the name.
Skin color is the game.
Skin color is to blame for Ferguson, Missouri.

The body of the man you were
Has disappeared inside the one you wear.

I wouldn’t want to be a black man in St. Louis County.

While Seidel’s poem is certainly disturbing and thought provoking, it is also problematic in its approach. While some stanzas seem entrenched with complex meaning, other sections are concerningly oversimplified and steeped in emotional conflation. More to the point, the author is a white privileged male speaking as an outsider to Ferguson and the black community.

I much p images referred the poetic response of Danez Smith, a black-queer author and poet, with his debut collection [insert] Boy coming out this December. His poem, “not an elegy for Mike Brown” was featured in August by Split This Rock and later was performed as a slam poem in the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam this October in Phoenix, AZ where Smith placed second. A particularly moving segment of the poem compares the violence of the Trojan war to reactions following Mike Brown’s death.

are we not worthy

of a city of ash? of 1000 ships
launched because we are missed?

always, something deserves to be burned.
it’s never the right thing now a days.

I demand a war to bring the dead boy back
no matter what his name is this time.

Not everyone will agree with Smith’s passionate and political response, but I respect his perspective and the quality of his poetry. Furthermore, I believe his approach is validated rather than biased because of his personal position within the conversation.

wild Recently I have been studying the work of Adrienne Rich, a prolific voice on social issues of gender and race. Her poem “Frame” (1980) took me by surprise with its power of sheer emotional provocation surrounding racial injustice. In the poem Rich omnisciently narrates the story of a female college student (presumably a woman of color) and the white male police officer who harasses and abuses her, wrongfully arresting her simply for waiting for a bus. Rich reminds the reader throughout the poem that she is not present in the scene but stands, “all this time just beyond the frame, trying to see.” Use of the anaphora, “in silence” towards the end of the poem emphasizes the complete lack of voice the female student has throughout her experience. The poem comes to a gripping end with the lines:

What I am telling you
is told by a white woman who they will say
was never there. I say I am there.

Here Rich confronts head on a dilemma I, and I suspect many more individuals, struggle with: as a white woman in America who can bear witness to everyday institutionalized racism, how do I speak on behalf of these atrocities? What role do I play? When I hear about incidents of racial injustice in America, and there are many, I feel the need to demonstrate in some way that, although I am white, I care about these massive abuses of power and support people of color trying to live their lives free from persecution. But I will never understand the experience of being black, cannot speak with authority on these issues, and do not wish to replace another’s voice with my own.

In “Frame” Rich acknowledg adrienne-rich es her station of privilege in the scene, being just outside the frame as a white woman. Yet she refuses to be squeezed out of the narrative completely and places herself in a position to care and report. She is not self-aggrandizing, but in her commentary Rich is removed from the shadows and reveals herself as an ally, claims her voice to speak with the oppressed and against the oppressors: “I say I am there.”

Over the last few days I have been disappointed by the silence of my white undergraduate peers whose voices are not speaking out about the Michael Brown case and the social issues that surround it. Perhaps, many are not affected and choose to not care, but I think another scenario is more likely. Many white people, especially young fellow students, seem to be afraid to speak up because they do not think it is their place and do not know how to approach the conversation. And I am not sure I do either, but I do know that writing can make a difference, and voices of support can be heard. I hope we can all consider the impact our voices and written word can have on the issues that matter most. I know I am thankful to have this platform to voice my opinion with dignity, and I wish for others to have the same.

I have had a love affair with the nonfiction essay for quite some time. There is just something about the look of first-person prose on the page, or the sound metaphorical curtains make, as they are ripped ajar, exposing a window into the author’s personal exploits. Yet, in recent years I have witnessed the collection of fellow admirers grow increasingly fewer. The memoir genre has become synonymous with pretension, self-promotion, and less associated with the finer literary arts. I speculate this has much to do with the current generation’s fascination with what some might term an “over-share” culture, where nothing and no one is sacred, a culture for which baby boomers have nearly perfected a disdain.

For the millennial generation, the writer most known for putting it all out in the open is twenty-eight year old Lena Dunham. Dunham shook the celebrity world almost overnight with her success as writer-director-producer-actor of the hit HBO series Girls. On Tuesday, Dunham’s rumored 3.5 million dollar book deal hit the stands, as well as my Amazon shopping basket. The world got a sneak peak in early September when The New Yorker published an excerpt entitled, “Difficult Girl: Growing up, with help.” It is on all accounts a well-crafted essay: her prose is neat, quippy, and always subtly (if not habitually) self-effacing. She weaves a series of experiences neatly together, all reflections on her lifelong relationships with psychiatric therapists and the significant, strange bonds that can manifest from sharing the intimate details of your life with a professional, a stranger. Each glimpse into the personal life of Dunham’s psychologist, Margaret, provides her with thrill and validation for their one-sided relationship. She ruminates on the smallest details,

Then there is the autumn day I come in to find her with a shiny black eye. Before I can even register my shock, she points to it and laughs: “A bit of a gardening accident.” I believe her. Margaret would never let anyone hit her. She would never let anyone wear shoes indoors. She would always protect herself, her floors, her flowers.

The irony is not lost on me. Dunham learns the art of self-exposure from a young age, draws on this in her professional career, and now her literary one. In the many anticipatory reviews surfacing over the last few weeks leading up to the release of her book, Not That Kind Of Girl, I have heard Dunham’s work categorized as a memoir, a collection of personal essays, an autobiography, self-help, and something akin to an advice column. These diverging critics, unable to decide which genre to pigeonhole Dunham into, got me thinking. What does the leap from nonfiction essayist to memoir look like? Dunham is by no means capable of reflecting back on a long life of mature experiences, tying the knot of her life into a neat bow of profound meaning. She uses moments from her youth and young adulthood she finds potentially interesting as inspiration for creative prose. Which raises the consideration, if a twenty-eight year old can write a memoir, then maybe there is more to this dreaded genre than meets the eye.

A New York Times book review labeled Not That Kind of Girl a “Memoir-ish” literary exploit, “a kind of memoir disguised as an advice book, or a how-to-book (as in how to navigate the perilous waters of girlhood) in the guise of a series of personal essays.” But this explanation is incomplete. Dunham’s essays are nonfiction, but manipulated. Her prose is confessional, yet imaginative. She admits within her pages that she is an, “unreliable narrator,” fabricating details as needed. Her work, like the author herself, refuses classification and points to the beginning of a contemporary motif that might be here to stay: celebration of the eccentric, the unabashed. Many have criticized Dunham for putting a magnifying glass to a culture saturated with privilege and the benign dilemmas that ruffle the feathers of the white, middle/upper class. Less controversially, others have wondered why a young person, who has had so much success in the booming market of premium television, would take the risky shift into the print medium, especially as book sales have come under attack with the emergence of eBooks and Kindle. But there is one moneymaking trend that seems to prevail over all, which Not That Kind Of Girl takes very seriously: shameless self-exploitation. Dunham exposes her flaws and turns them into entertainment, rather than leaving them as idle sources of ridicule for others to deploy. The New York Times Magazine summed up their praise rather poignantly,

She is perhaps to the millennials what J. D. Salinger was to the post-World War II generation and Woody Allen was to the baby boomers: a singular voice who spoke as an outsider and, in so doing, became the ultimate insider.

In the wake of such admiration, the literary world sits poised, ready to accept a new function of the nonfiction memoir genre: the cultural observer. A celebrity wrote Not That Kind Of Girl, but this is not a tabloid rag of celebrity gossip. In the weeks to come readers and critics will decide whether Dunham’s ascent into literary recognition will land amongst the Bad Feminist Roxane Gays of the world, or in the sale pile next to Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — no offense Mindy. I think it is possible for personal essayists to trade in such unsightly trademarks as “narcissistic” or “hack” for the nobler pursuits of creative freedom and prose that probes at the pulse of modern-day life. It is time for some nonfiction light to shine on contemporary talent, and that talent might look a lot like Lena Dunham.

The Political in Poetry: Some Thoughts on White Privilege

In Defense of Memoir-ish