Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
“We tough girls tough it out,” she [Anne Wiggins Brown] said with a wry grin. “I’ve lived a strange kind of life—half black, half white, half isolated, half in the spotlight. Many things that I wanted as a young person for my career were denied to me because of my color.”
“On the other hand, many black folks have said, ‘Well, she’s not really black.’ Except for Todd Duncan, our original Porgy, who died last month at the age of 95 and with whom I was very close, the ‘Porgy’ cast didn’t associate with me very much, though it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. Only when I went on a train or into a theater did I think about passing, and even then I didn’t consider it passing. I figured if I simply asked for a ticket it was their problem. Onstage, though, if they couldn’t take me as I was—the hell with them.”
Louis Cabri, Associate Professor of English University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada
The False Laws of Narrative is a selection of Fred Wah’s poems covering the poets entire poetic trajectory to date. A founding editor of Tish magazine, Wah was influenced by leading progressive and innovative poets of the 1960s and was at the forefront of the exploration of racial hybridity, multiculturalism, and transnational family roots in poetry. The selection emphasizes his innovative poetic range.
Wah is renowned as one of Canada’s finest and most complex lyric poets and has been lauded for the musicality of his verse. Louis Cabri’s introduction offers a paradigm for thinking about how sound is actually structured in Wah’s improvisatory poetry and offers fresh insights into Wah’s context and writing. In an afterword by the poet himself, Wah presents a dialogue between editor and poet on the key themes of the selected poems and reveals his abiding concerns as poet and thinker.
Just three years old, the festival has been forged by first lady Laura Bush and the Library of Congress in the belief that literature is a living thing, that the right words, composed in just the right way, can push a life forward.
Her work illuminates people in the shadows: a seamstress stitching her way through segregation; an early 20th-century prostitute so fair skinned she can pass for white; a dock worker’s wife who keeps her husband’s supper warm as she waits for him well into the night.
Into some of her poems she has woven her own complex story: the blending of the black and white blood that made her; her blood tie to her native Mississippi; the blood of her mother, cruelly spilled.
What binds the characters? It is that in the body of American letters, they have routinely been pushed to the edge of the page by other protagonists deemed more “universal.” This day Natasha reads poems that bring their marginalized stories to the center…
…2012: It’s May. Natasha is the incoming chair of the creative writing program at Emory University and the newly minted poet laureate of her home state of Mississippi. She gets an unexpected call from the Library of Congress. Billington and his colleagues have been following her work since her first reading at the book festival. They are impressed with her 2007 collection, “Native Guard.” They are also taken with “Beyond Katrina,” her 2010 meditation on the psychological and structural wreckage dotting Mississippi’s Gulf Coast landscape years after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.
Billington believes the time for this kind of poet is right now. She is only 46 and in the prime of her artistic life. This will signal that the library is looking forward. He offers her the highest United States honor a poet can achieve, poet laureate of the nation.
Saying yes isn’t hard, though the honor humbles her, even makes her a little nervous…
…Sept. 13, 2012: The audience in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington leaps to its feet. Applause crashes against the stage where a black woman in a dark dress stands, her hands clasped to her heart. Today, she looks as though she might burst with joy. This is U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, about to officially open the library’s literary season with a reading. She has come to tell an American story….
Cedric Dover was born in Calcutta in 1904. Dover’s mixed ancestry (English father, Indian mother) and his studies in zoology led to a strong interest in ethnic minorities and their marginalisation. After his studies, he joined the Zoological Survey of India as a temporary assistant entomologist. He also wrote several scientific articles and edited the Eurasian magazine New Outlook.
Dover settled in London In 1934 to continue his anthropological studies on issues of race. He published Half-Caste in 1937, followed by Hell in the Sunshine (1943). During the 1940s Dover contributed regularly to the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service alongside many other British-based South Asians. There he befriended George Orwell, in 1947 he published Feathers in the Arrow: An Approach for Coloured Writers and Readers. Dover moved to the United States in the same year and took up a range of visiting academic posts. He was a member of the faculty of Fisk University, as Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology. He also briefly lectured at the New School of Social Research, New York, and Howard University. Dover held a lifelong interest in African-American art, culture and literature and his influential book American Negro Art was published in 1960. Dover returned to London in the late 1950s. He continued to lecture and write on minority issues and culture until his death in 1961.
A Note on the Text
These poems were first published in Brown Phoenix (London; College Press. 1950).
Brown Phoenix
I am the brown phoenix
Fused in the flames
Of the centuries’ greed.
I am tomorrow’s man
Offering to share
Love, and the difficult quest,
In the emerging plan.
Do you see a dark man
Whose mind you shun,
Whose heart you never know,
Unable to understand
That I am the golden bird
With destiny clear?
Fools cannot destroy me
With arrogant fear.
Listen brown man, black man,
Yellow man, mongrel man,
And you white friend and comrade:
I am the brown phoenix—I am you.
‘There is my symbol for us all.’
For we are tomorrow’s men,
But not you,
Little pinkwhite man,
Not you!
Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze is a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances are so powerful she has been called a ‘one-woman festival’. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.
Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life.
The Fifth Figure is her fifth book, and sees Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture.
In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s Third World Blues: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition.
John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new symphonic collection, Travel Light Travel Dark, Agard casts his unique spin on the intermingling strands of British history, and leads us into metaphysical and political waters. Cross-cultural connections are played out in a variety of voices and cadences. Prospero and Caliban have a cricket match encounter, recounted in calypso-inspired rhythms, and in the long poem, “Water Music of a Different Kind,” the incantatory orchestration of the Atlantic’s middle passage becomes a moving counterpoint to Handel’sWater Music.
Travel Light Travel Dark brings a mythic dimension to the contemporary and opens with a meditation on the enigma of colour. Water often appears as a metaphoric riff within the fabric of the collection, as sugar cane tells its own story in “Sugar Cane’s Saga” and water speaks for itself in a witty debate with wine, inspired by the satirical tradition of the goliards, wandering clerics of the Middle Ages.
A panelist at ‘2 Nations’, our recent event exploring national identity, Hannah Lowe is a poet of Chinese, Jamaican and English heritage. In this poem she performed for the audience that night, she explores how her background has influenced her sense of her own identity.
Three Treasures
Jamaica in the attic in a dark blue trunk,
sea-salt in the hinges. What must it look like
all that wide blue sea?
England downstairs in a rocking chair.
Nanna rocking with her playing cards,
cigs and toffee, tepid tea.
Jamaica frying chicken in the kitchen,
pig-snout in the stew-pot,
breakfast pan of saltfish, akee
China in the won-ton skin,
gold songbird on the brittle porcelain,
pink pagoda silk settee…
University of Houston-Victoria Newswire
Victoria, Texas
2012-09-20
Born to a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father, award-winning author Paisley Rekdal’s mixed heritage often influences her poetry and essay writing.
She will share her insights about biracialism on Sept. 27 as the second speaker in the University of Houston-Victoria/American Book Review Fall Reading Series. Rekdal also will give a reading of her poetry.
The event will begin at noon in the Alcorn Auditorium of UHV University West, 3007 N. Ben Wilson St. It is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
“Rekdal’s interesting mix of style and subject matter is a great addition to our reading series,” said Jeffrey Di Leo, ABR editor and publisher, and dean of the UHV School of Arts & Sciences. “As an Asian American, she gives a voice to a part of biracialism that is underrepresented and continues that theme to other subjects that are often overlooked.”
During the event, Rekdal plans on reading and sharing photographs from her latest book, “Intimate: An American Family Album.” The book is a hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, fiction and nonfiction with photography from Edward S. Curtis, a famous photographer of the American West and Native American people.
The book explores her father’s mixed-race marriage to her mother while paralleling it with stories about Curtis and his Indian guide, Alexander Upshaw. Rekdal found inspiration by looking at photographs from Curtis and imagined his life.
“It’s a memoir about my family, but it also talks about representation of mixed-race people or how they are not represented,” she said…
Paisley Rekdal, Distinguished Professor of English University of Utah
Intimate is a hybrid memoir and “photo album” that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, Intimate creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal’s Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis’s murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.
Trethewey, the daughter of an African American woman and a white man, explores racial attitudes and stereotypes throughout this slim volume, using both personal and historical lenses. The book opens with a gorgeous, understated poem about a fishing trip she and her father took years ago. That experience and their difficult relationship create an underlying tension that shapes the entire book. What readers notice first, though, is the poem’s engrossing imagery:
