Helen Vendler, "Rita Dove: Identity Markers."
A primary imaginative donn any black writer must confront, as an adult, the enraging fact that the inescapable social accusation of blackness becomes, too early for the child to resist it, a strong element of inner self-definition. A black writer thus composes both with and against racial identity. The tradition of American black poetry, only partially recoverable, displays a powerful array of responses to blackness, from the heartfelt Christian promise of the spirituals to the dialect-recovery of Dunbar and his imitators; from the social worldliness and urban language of the blues to the steely anthropological elegance of the poetry of Jay Wright. The history of a poet like Langston Hughes, at last fully available in the biography by Arnold Rampersad, can be read as a lifelong search for stances to take toward, against, and within blackness- from early Whitmanian inclusiveness to African n from which African n from Russian communism (which turned out to be racist, too) to Harlem social commentary. Hughes's most candid social portraits of Harlem were, until recently, censored from mainstream anthologies, black and white alike, in favor of his more idealistic and mournful work; but, as we can now see more clearly, Hughes's poetic practice of social portraiture was one almost entirely unrestricted, imaginatively speaking. But this wonderfully inclusive inventory was restricted in another way: lexically and syntactically, it limited itself to language that the most uneducated person could hear and understand. For a man of Hughes's far-ranging mind and reading, that linguistic self-restriction was a sign of unquestioned moral commitment to the black reader; within it, moved by the syncopated rhythm of boogie-woogie and by the unembarrassed explicitness of the blues, he recreated in the simplest possible words the street scenes he saw around him- the pimps, the faithless lovers, the pregnant adolescents, the practical cleaning-women, the weary mothers, the bewildered unemployed.
But a young intellectual like Rita Dove, growing with Hughes the most obvious literary role-model among older black poets, would have found her own inner life asking for more than a populist linguistic practice; yet she would have taken, I imagine, the stern commitment of Dunbar and Hughes and Brooks to a poetry understandable by all as a moral warning against a style cavalierly hermetic. I want to take up, as an example of the difficulty of writing lyric in America, Dove's experiments in the representation of her inner life, insofar as that representation reflects on blackness. I will be neglecting the handsome poems Dove has written that do not take blackness as one of their themes- notably, many of her poems on travel, on motherhood, and on aesthetic experience.
Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. Her father was a research chemist for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and she first began to learn German at school in early adolescence, because she had been frustrated by the presence of her father's reference texts in German- the only books in the house she could not read. She was a National Merit Scholar at Miami University in Ohio, graduated summa cum laude, and went on a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Tubingen; after that, she took an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is now Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is married to a German novelist whom she met at Iowa, and has a daughter. During the 1980s, she published four books of poetry: in 1980, The Yellow House on the Corner; in 1983, Museum; in 1986, Thomas and Beulah (a sequence about grandparents' lives, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize); and in 1989, Grace Notes.
Ideally, I would plunge immediately into Dove's notable successes; but because the problem of blackness is a thematic one, I have to address her initial difficulties in travelling that thematic path before coming to poetically workable solutions. No black has blackness as sole identity; and in lyric poems, poems of self-definition, one risks self-curtailment by adopting only a single identity-marker. A young poet, not yet well-acquainted with the reaches of her own identity, is more likely than someone older to focus on a single aspect of self; and we can see Dove focusing in this way in her first book, where she attempts to school herself in black historical memory. She writes, for instance, a dramatic monologue for a female slave petitioning, in 1782, to be set free:
I am Belinda, an African,
since the age of twelve a Slave.
I will not take too much of your Time,
but to plead and place my pitiable Life
unto the Fathers of this Nation.1
Belinda has only two identity markers: she is female and she is a slave. Nearby in Dove's first book there is another monologue spoken by a house slave, probably female.2 In yet another of these slave monologues, Dove widens her canvas by speaking as a man; we follow the abduction back into slavery of "Solomon Northrup / from Saratoga Springs, free papers in my pocket."3 Dove (a cello and viola da gamba player herself) gives Solomon Northrup a violin under his arm to bring him closer to herself. She learns, through yet other poems, to find black personae who are close to her by reason of their intellectuality, and it does not stop her that they are men; such men are closer to her than a female persona like Belinda who, though of Dove's gender, would not possess those conceptualizing and linguistic drives that make a poet. Dove writes, for instance, about David Walker (1785-1830), a black Boston shop proprietor and pamphleteer. He slips his illegal pamphlets into his customer's pockets; his customers sew them into their coat-linings, but when these men are arrested, the pamphlets are discovered and subsequently read aloud in court. "Men of colour, who are also of sense," one of the pamphlets begins:
Outrage. Incredulity. Uproar in state legislatures.
We are the most wretched, degraded and abject set
of beings that ever lived since the world began.
The jewelled canaries in the lecture halls tittered,
pressed his dark hand between their gloves.
Every half-step was no step at all.4
Many of Walker's fellow-blacks in Boston can't see the point of his protest; and finally, Walker's radicalism appalls even the abolitionist press. At forty-five, he is found dead in the doorway of his shop.
These historical personae, taken one by one, female and male, represent Dove's first, characteristically objective, steps toward the representation of her own identity as a black. She is not afraid to transgress, in choosing to use a male surrogate, the usual feminist laws of political correctness. She also transgresses the unspoken law by which a black writer is dissuaded from calling attention to divisions within the black community itself. A historical vignette, "The Transport of Slaves from Maryland to Mississippi," from Dove's first book, recounts how, in 1839, "a wagonload of slaves broke their chains, killed two white men, and would have escaped had not a slave woman helped the Negro driver [of the slavemaster's wagon] mount his horse and ride for help." "I am no brute," says the slave woman. "I got feelings. / He might have been a son of mine."5 The slaves were re-captured because of the Negro driver's loyalty to his white master, to whom he reported their escape.
Dove is willing to narrate, without prejudice, the Negro driver's conflict between economic loyalty and race-loyalty, and the Negro woman's conflict between group-loyalty to her fellow escapees and race-loyalty to the driver. The many faces of division within the black community are part of her subject, as they were part of Langston Hughes's subject also. In her early years as a writer, Dove entered a literary scene where both assimilation and separatism had powerful voices in their favor, and her first book shows, in the tragic anecdote of the transport of slaves, as well as in the account of the repudiation of David Walker by the Boston abolitionist press, her willingness to make her readers uneasy. Yet even the best of her historical narratives become somewhat stagy in their strained joining of the exigencies of plot to lyric implication. The lyric has not created the plot, as it should have done (and as it does in the best narrative lyrics, like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"); history has given the plot, and the lyric has had to dance to its tune.
Even when freed of historical circumstance, Dove's "slave poetry" exhibits a certain awkwardness in its wish to achieve historical linguistic probability. The poem ironically entitled "The Slave's Critique of Practical Reason" transcribes the slave's decision, as he picks cotton, not to attempt an escape; the slave speaks in a "folksy" language that nonetheless unconvincingly drops into- or rises towards- complex vocabulary and metaphor:
Ain't got a reason
to run away-
leastways, not one
would save my life.
So I scoop speculation
into a hopsack.
I scoop fluff till
the ground rears white
and I'm the only dark
spot in the sky.6
Against these relatively unsuccessful historical excursions in a lyric time-machine, Dove's first book sets sudden contemporary glimpses that are bravely achieved, like the "odyssey" of six black adolescents out on the town in a car:
We pile in, the engine churning ink:
We ride into the night.
Past factories, past graveyards
And the broken eyes of windows, we ride
Into the gray-green nigger night....
In the nigger night, thick with the smell of cabbages,
Nothing can catch us.
Laughter spills like gin from glasses,
And "yeah" we whisper, "yeah"
We croon, "yeah."7
This may owe something to Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool," but it avoids the prudishness of Brooks's judgmental monologue, which though it is ostensibly spoken by adolescents, barely conceals its adult reproach of their behavior.
Even as she was sketching historical personae and contemporary adolescents in her attempts to represent blackness, Dove was writing color-neutral poems. In fact, the best poem in The Yellow House on the Corner has not a word to say about the fraught subject of blackness. It is a poem of perfect wonder, showing Dove as a young girl in her parents' house doing her lessons, mastering geometry, seeing for the first time the coherence and beauty of the logical principles of spatial form. The poem "Geometry" is really about what geometry and poetic form have in common; and its concluding adjectives, "true" and "unproven," are revealing ones with respect to Dove's poetry:
Geometry
I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
and above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they've intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.8
As the windows jerk free the ceiling floats away, sense-experience is suspended; during pure mentality, pure transparency, even the immaterial scent of carnations departs. The magical transformation of the windows into butterflies is perhaps brought about as the geometrical word "intersection"- by way of the word "insect"- suggests the wings of Psyche. The poem illustrates Dove's sure way with images, which are always, in her poems, surrogates for argument. She often avoids proof by propositions in favor of the cunning arrangement of successive images, which themselves enact, by their succession, an implicit argument.
Here, for instance, from a poem called "D.C." (the "District of Columbia" in which the city of Washington is located), is Dove's indictment of the city. She begins with its most visible synecdoche, the obelisk-shaped Washington Monument, a "bloodless finger pointing to heaven," its bloodlessness a figure for heartlessness. She ends with the Monument, too, as its image lies reflected in the long pool at its base; this time, the obelisk is the cue stick of a billiard-game, "outrageous" because of the gambles with lives taken in this increasingly black city. In between are other images- impartially threatening here, seductive there- of Washington:
A bloodless finger pointing to heaven, you say,
is surely no more impossible than this city:
A no man's land, a capital askew,
a postcard framed by imported blossoms-
and now this outrageous cue stick
lying, reflected on a black table.9
A passage like this helps to define Dove's imagination, which is rapid, extrapolative, montage-like and relational.
The most interesting implicit commentary by Dove on her own imagination comes from a memory recalled in her fiction. The young woman protagonist of the story called "First Suite" has driven across the country to the school where she will be teaching, and arrives, exhausted, a day early. The school nurse tells her to rest on a cot in the school sickroom. As her eyes adjust to the darkened room, she takes in her surroundings, seeing first some cotton swabs," ranged in a misty circle around the barely visible rim of a jar." She sees a digital clock, too. On that slender basis- a glass jar with swabs and glowing digital numbers- her imagination begins to work:
I could imagine the rest of the glass and the wooden sticks as they drew together in a perfect cone, then going on to form the mirror image of that cone, like a severe hourglass. The orange ciphers of a digital clock flared: 9:59, 10:00. I knew I would sleep fitfully until I had seen 11:11- markings in the sand, reckonings. Four marks and a diagonal slashing the four- a numerical group. The Babylonian merchant drew his staff through the sand, eight bunches of firewood- see, I have forty bushels of fine Egyptian cotton to trade.10
The glass (because of the proximity of the clock) becomes an hourglass as its cone of swabs is geometrically projected into a mirror-cone, like a Yeatsian gyre; the hourglass conjures up sand; sand conjures up Egypt; the wooden sticks of the swabs create the eight bunches of firewood for sale by the Babylonian merchant, as the hospital gauze lying unremarked beside the swabs (but soon to be noticed) creates the bushels of Egyptian cotton. The speaker's observation of the digital clock-numbers leads to a counting obsession, which compels her to stay awake till the numbers regulate themselves into perfect symmetry at eleven minutes after eleven- four marks in the sand, which become marks made by the staff of the Babylonian merchant.
Some such idiosyncratic associative process lies behind most of Dove's poems. "Association," however, is perhaps too languid a word to use of this process, since it has strong elements (visible in the excerpt I have quoted) of obsessive behavior. Until something has been done to reality, some operation performed upon it, this poet is restless. Things seem radically incomplete when they present themselves, in life, for inspection. To make things "perfect," the mind must extrapolate the cone made by the wooden sticks of the cotton swabs until it makes the more "integrable" image of an hourglass, itself dictated by the clock; the hourglass, then must find its pictorial completion in sand; a use must be found for the image of sand, and Egypt is brought in; the clock must be watched until the numbers "come right"; the gauze, in order to enter the Egyptian fantasy, has to be fitted into a non-medical use; the sticks of the swabs must undergo a change in scale and become firewood, and so on. The almost inhuman elation felt by the young girl at the end of the poem "Geometry" can now be better understood: once the theorem is proved, an incessant anxiety is given momentary relief, and the soul is briefly untethered, relieved from the confining pressure of internal cognitive difference. All of the images presented to sight in the fictional excerpt I have quoted are in fact elements of such a "theorem" and must be somehow put into a relational syntax by means of such processes as extrapolation, completion, adjustment, coupling, enlargement or diminution of scale, and so on. When they all achieve a mental "fit," the protagonist can go to sleep, even without waiting for the magical symmetry of 11:11: as she says, "11:11 clicked by unnoticed; I slept until the door opened."11 It as enough, for the relief of her anxiety, to have conceived in her mind the point at which the clock numbers would be no longer asymmetrical, as they had been at 9:59 or 10:00.
Dove does not always achieve her "fit." Even in an ultimately successful poem she is sometimes misled enroute, as she tells us in a very interesting set of remarks on an extraordinary poem called "Parsley," which appears in her second collection, Museum. "Parsley" attempts to deal with blackness by moving out of the predicament of African Americans, looking instead at an incident in the lives of migrant Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic where, as Dove's note12 tells us, Rafael Trujillo in 1937 "ordered 20,000 blacks killed because they could not pronounce the letter 'r' in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley."13 The Haitians, speaking Creole (Kr could not roll their "r"s in the Spanish Fashion; and as each failed the test of saying perejil correctly, he or she was killed.
"Parsley" has two parts, the first a song sung by the Haitian cane-cutters, the second a depiction (in free indirect discourse) of the dictator's thoughts as he plans the execution order. Dove has spoken of her false starts in writing "Parsley":
When I wrote the poem I tried it in many different ways. I tried a sestina, particularly in the second part, "The Palace," simply because the obsessiveness of the sestina, the repeated words, was something I wanted to get- that driven quality- in the poem. I gave up the sestina very early. It was too playful for the poem. A lot of the words stayed- the key words like parrot and spring and, of course, parsley. The first part was a villanelle. I thought I was going to do the entire poem from the Haitians' point of view. And that wasn't enough. I had this villanelle, but it wasn't enough. And there was a lot more that I hadn't said, so I tried the sestina and gave that up.14
The "lot more" that Dove had not said after she wrote her song for the cane-cutters turned out to be Part II, her eerily-imagined monologue for Trujillo:
It fascinated me that this man would think of such an imaginative way to kill someone, to kill lots of people; that, in fact, he must have gotten some kind of perverse joy out of finding a way to do it so that people would speak their own death sentences.15
In these remarks we can see Dove's attraction to obsessive forms like the sestina and the villanelle, but we can also see her principled refusal of their attraction when such "playfulness" threatens to interfere with a more important part of the poem's "fit," its moral seriousness. We can also see Dove's inveterate wish to imagine and understand, if not to forgive, the mind of the victimizer as well as the mind of the victims. Poems of victimage, told from the point of view of the victim, are the stock-in-trade of mediocre protest writing, and they appear regularly in African American literature. The position of victimage, and victimage alone, seems imaginatively insufficient to Dove, since it takes in only one half of the world. That half has of course great pathos, and we hear that pathos in the song she writes for the cane-cutters. Its initial reference to a parsley-green parrot in the dictator's palace remains obscure until the second half of the poem. The cane-cutters sing:
There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp the cane appears
to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General
searches for a word; he is all the world
there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,
we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green. We cannot speak an R-
out of the swamp, the cane appears
and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.
The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.
There is a parrot imitating spring.
El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out of the swamp. The cane appears
in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.
And we lie down. For every drop of blood
there is a parrot imitating spring.
Out of the swamp the cane appears.16
As she does in this quasi-villanelle, Dove characteristically opens a poem with an oblique and unexplained sentence. The ineluctable reappearance of the fast-growing sugar-cane, no matter how often it is cut down, is enacted, musically, in the exhausting persistence of the phrase "the cane appears"; but its recurrent drone is sharply countered by the menacing appearing of the "General," who, so to speak, will not permit the natural (if enslaving) villanelle-song to continue.
The almost-sestina of the General has seven stanzas of seven or eight lines each, and a single, detached, one-line conclusion. It is too long to quote whole, but in summary it reveals that the parrot had belonged to the General's dead mother, and that in her village, when a woman bore a son, the men of the town wore celebratory sprigs of parsley in their capes. The General, deranged since his mother's death, and hearing the parrot repeatedly call his name in her voice, feels that he, as her son, is dishonored by the presence, in his country, of people who cannot pronounce her language, cannot, with the word "parsley" correctly pronounced, celebrate his male existence. The General, too, lives in the continual anxiety of the obsessive-compulsive; his relief comes by killing. He haunts his mother's room in the palace,
the one without
curtains, the one with a parrot
in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders
Who can I kill today. And for a moment
the little knot of screams
is still.
He orders, for the parrot, his mother's favorite pastries, and as they arrive, "The knot in his throat starts to twitch." He hears the Haitians singing a Spanish song, "Mi madre, mi amor en muerte," and is irritated by their inability to pronounce the "r"s:
... Even
A parrot can roll an R! In the bare room
the bright feathers arch in a parody
of greenery, as the last pale crumbs
disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone
calls out his name in a voice
so like his mother's, a startled tear
splashes the tip of his right boot.
My mother, my love in death.
The general remembers the tiny green sprigs
men of his village wore in their capes
to honor the birth of a son. He will
order many, this time, to be killed
for a single, beautiful word.
The general sense of certain Spanish words has been permanently eroticized by their association with his mother, and, as obsessed with language as any poet, he kills to defend his mother's honor. Rita Dove enters the dictator's mind, and imagines a sinisterly plausible motive for the mass executions based on a bizarre word-test. Dove's stanzaic imitation of Trujillo's disintegrating yet obsessively circling monologue is a wonderful piece of imaginative mortise-and-tenon work. The poem represents, in Dove's career, a dramatic advance, imaginatively speaking, in the treatment of blackness. It also marks Dove's continued watchful distance from pure lyric; she is nowhere to be seen in her poem.
This changes with the supremely confident poem, "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove," which appeared in the same collection. Though the American Rita Dove is, once again, nowhere to be seen in the poem as a lyric "I," her surrogate is present as "Rasha, the Black Dove." When Dove was a Fulbright student in Germany, she came across a painting of two Berlin sideshow "freaks" of the 1920s. The portrait, by the artist Christian Schad (1894-1982), was painted in 1929; the title of the portrait is "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove." It is reproduced on the cover of Museum, and shows Agosta- his naked torso deformed by a bone disease that causes his ribs and scapulars to point out through his skin like wings- and, seated below him, his fellow circus-freak- a perfectly normal and handsome woman whose only freakishness (in the Berlin of 1929) was that she was black. Rita Dove, herself black, found herself confronting Rasha the Black Dove of Schad; it is no wonder the portrait generated one of Dove's most gripping poems.
The poem is voiced indirectly through Schad the (white) painter. At first he thinks that his own scrupulous and dispassionate eye is "merciless" as it sees and reproduces, in unadorned and unconcealed directness, the two figures- one medically, the other socially, marginal- set aside as freaks by his society. But then he repents, and thinks, "The canvas, / not his eye, was merciless." It is the exaction of his medium, the stylized accuracy demanded by the portrait-genre, that guarantees the mercilessness of his work. But at the close, as Schad comes to a final decision about the composition of the two figures, he changes his mind yet again:
Agosta in
classical drapery, then
and Rasha at his feet.
Without passion. Not
the canvas
but their gaze,
so calm,
was merciless.17
It is the stigmatized figures, heroically posed, gazing out forever at those who gaze at them, who are "merciless." True, the artist's eye, with its absence of distorting, revulsive "passion" before these "freaks," plays a role; true, the canvas which confers, in its recollection of the history of portraiture, classical drapery on this "ignoble" couple also plays a part; but it is what is rendered through eye and generic convention- the socially-marked persons of Agosta and Rasha in 1929 Berlin- that mercilessly indicts German culture. As the young Rita Dove saw her counterpart- a Madagascan woman who could find work only by agreeing to dance entwined with a boa constrictor, and who was given the circus sobriquet of "The Black Dove" in order to recall the old emblem of serpent-and-dove- she knew something had to be merciless. In deciding on subject-matter, Dove does not discount either the painterly eye or genre-convention, but she asserts that eye and head have to bend their attention on deep and consequential things, and that those things must "gaze" out at the beholder so as to compel a returning gaze, one coupled with self-examination.
It is evident from such a poem, and from its attention to a painting by a white artist of a stigmatized black woman, that Dove has thought hard about medium, message, and artist as they cooperate to make art. No black artist can avoid the question of skin color, and what it entails, as subject matter; and probably the same is still true, to a lesser extent, of the woman artist and the subject matter of gender. And yet if these important subject matters are not presented by a dispassionate eye and a trained hand, the result will not be art, and will not exert a gaze prompting the beholder to examine his own conscience.
It was Dove's next book Thomas and Beulah, that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. The book springs from the history of Dove's maternal grandparents, who migrated North (each from a different Southern state) and married in Ohio. The life they made in Akron between marriage and death is the subject matter of the poems, written as two sequences, the first for Thomas, the second for Beulah. Dove solves the "color question" here by having everyone in the central story be black; daily life, then, is just daily life, even though it is in part controlled by a white context appearing only on the edges of the story. The gender question is treated in the poem even-handedly, as Dove, who never appears in person in the book, writes in sympathy with both Thomas and Beulah, often reproducing their own sense of themselves in free indirect discourse. Dove no longer looks to the antebellum slave record, nor to exotic collective massacres, nor to interwar Berlin, to revive history; she records it instead as the account, living vividly in contemporary memory, of the industrial and domestic servitude of two ordinary American people in the earlier twentieth century. Dove integrates here two areas she had earlier tended to keep separate- "low" art as in "Nigger Song: An Odyssey," and "high" art as in "Agosta." In Thomas and Beulah, she keeps the individual sequences as elegant in structural form as a lieder cycle, while letting colloquial black talk run freely through them. The story of Thomas and Beulah unrolls through brief snapshots (the history of their children, for instance, appears in Thomas' four disappointed words- "Girl girl / girl girl"18). It is a common story- both parents working in marginal jobs for low pay, Thomas in the Zeppelin factory, Beulah as a domestic and a milliner; Thomas' eventual lay-off in the Depression; Beulah's disappointment in marriage and exhaustion in maternity; and finally their illnesses and deaths in poverty. But the sequences are punctuated by the ordinary satisfactions, too: making hair pomade, attending a daughter's wedding, buying- at a church rummage sale- an encyclopedia with "One Volume Missing," V through Z- "for five bucks / no zebras, no Virginia, / no wars."19
From this rich double-sequence of 44 poems (23 for Thomas, 21 for Beulah) I want to take as my example one of the poems that treats the life of a black person without the context of whiteness, as simply one life among others. The poem "Aircraft" depicts Thomas working as riveter in an airplane factory, in what should have been the heady days of a steady paycheck. But Thomas is not happy, as he faces yet another morning of his work:
Too frail for combat, he stands
before an interrupted wing,
playing with an idea, nothing serious.
Afternoons, the hall gaped with aluminum
glaring, flying toward the sun; now
though, first thing in the morning, there is only
gray sheen and chatter
from the robust women around him
and bolt waiting for his riveter's
five second blast.
The night before in the dark
of the peanut gallery, he listened to blouses shifting
and sniffed magnolias, white
tongues of remorse
sinking into the earth. Then
the newsreel leapt forward
into war.
Why frail? Why not simply
family man? Why wings, when
women with fingers no smaller than his
dabble in the gnarled intelligence of an engine?
And if he gave just a four second blast,
or three? Reflection is such
a bloodless light.
After lunch, they would bathe in fire.20
The things here that make Thomas unhappy are not blackness and white oppression- not at all. He is unhappy because he has been refused induction into the army, as "too frail for combat"; and he is unhappy because women outclass him at work; they get the interesting work of assembling "the gnarled intelligence of an engine" while he is nothing but a riveter of airplane wings. The only form of vengeance for these insults that Thomas can conceive as within his power would be to disobey his working orders, and give to his rivets, instead of the prescribed five-second tightening-time, "just a four second blast, or three." He merely plays with this dangerous idea, but even his telling himself that it is "nothing serious" means that he has thought of it enough to repudiate it.
Why does it seem so extraordinary to have a black man treated as an ordinary person, with ordinary physical and social resentments? Somewhere in the background, of course, Thomas's blackness tacitly figures, if only his poverty- he has to sit in "the peanut gallery" of the moviehouse. But Dove's picture of a mind that is occupied with induction-disappointment and gender-jealousy is both particular enough not to attempt a false "universality" and humdrum enough to make Thomas like many other men, white as well as black. With her usual cunning, Dove presents Thomas' interior monologue in interlocking thematic snippets, concerning A) War, B) Disobedience, C) Masculine Fire, and D) Women. The sequence of these elements, abstractly rendered, would look like this:
A: Draft-board insult- induction denied
B: Thought [of possible work-disobedience]- dismissed
C: Afternoon brilliance of light, obscuring factory environment
D: Contrasting morning grayness and chatter of women, linked
B: Prescribed order of riveting
D: Flashback to moviehouse, with Thomas longing (remorsefully) for extramarital sex
A: Newsreel of war
A: Induction insult remembered
D: Defense against infidelity; assertion of marital bond
A/D: Insult repeated- women have better jobs in war-work
B: Thought of vengeance (in reprisal for insults) once again entertained- this time clearly defined as subversion of orders- but reflection if dismissed as
D: A bloodless light like the gray light of morning, time of the chatter of women
C: Longing for fiery brilliance of afternoon.
If we turn this scheme into a string of code, its DNA reads:
ABCD: 10 lines
DA: 7 lines
ADA/D: 4 lines
B: 2 lines
DC: 2 lines
As the space of each successive stanza becomes more constricted, the tension between insult and vengeance- between a longed-for masculine fiery glare and the actual gray female superiority- grows. Dove fleshes out each of her elements- ABCD- by tiny vignettes, so that each takes on characteristic sensual force; and she links the elements of the vignettes by an immediate musicality, as gaped matches glaring and gray, bolt is echoed by blast, gallery presages magnolias, sinking joins leapt, intelligence eerily connects to engine. The early separate w's; war, why, why, why, wings, when, women, with- eight words beginning with w out of thirteen successive words:
... war.
Why frail? Why not simply
family man? Why wings, when
women with....
One can almost hear Thomas' frustrated stutter accompany his three successive indignant questions. It is not cowardice that makes Thomas draw back from vengeance, nor patriotism that prevents his impulse to sabotage the firmness of his rivets. It is rather the fact that abstract and "bloodless" reflection is not natural to him; he lives in a world of work, visuality, and sexual desire, not a second-order world of thought. To comfort himself, he turns his mind to the satisfying masculine exaltation of aluminum glare in the afternoon sun, as the word fire, with which the poem ends, satisfyingly combats and "replaces" the insult frail, with which the poem had begun. Of course, if the two words did not share three essential letters, the replacement would not seem so poetically satisfying.
Thomas and Beulah represents Dove's rethinking of the lyric poet's relation to the history of blackness. No longer bound to a single lyric moment, she lets the raw data of life (perceived by a man and by his wife at the same epoch and in the same circumstances) become pieces for a reader to assemble. The sure hand of form supports each life-glimpse: cunningly counter-balancing each other into stability, the tart and touching individual poems add up to a sturdy two-part invention, symbolizing that mysterious third thing, a lifelong marriage, lived, it is true, in blackness but not determined by blackness alone.
This important discovery- that blackness need not be one's central subject, but equally need not be omitted- has governed Dove's work since Thomas and Beulah. Various poems and sequences in Grace Notes (1989) have adopted this attitude, neither focusing exclusively on race nor excluding it from presence when it comes up.21 The aesthetic level from which this balancing of subject-matter arises has nothing much to do, I think, with blackness. It comes from Dove's discovery (as she puts it in a poem called "Particulars") that life exhibits a "lack of conclusion," and presents "an eternal d" with what "Particulars" dryly calls "agenda"- having one's "second coffee at nine ... / crying every morning, ten sharp-," the recognition of the repetitiveness of that pattern makes the notion of "particular sorrow" moot. The newly-learned "secret" of life- that it lacks conclusion, is always unknotting what it has knotted- is the most devastating secret a poet like Dove, loving conclusiveness, could learn. "Each knot of grief, / each snagged insistence"23 is now subject to being unwound; and somehow the poems will have to insist on the temporariness of their psychic states rather than on conclusiveness and "fit" alone. This means the abandon of the "dovetailing"- and the pun is justified- which was, aesthetically, so enormously reassuring in a poem like "Aircraft." I think Dove is not yet sure of what can replace dovetailing in the terms of formal construction. But she knows thematically that exploration of un-dovetailed conditions and unknown places is what lies in store for her. I will take up, then, from Grace Notes, two examples of Dove's new style, both dealing in some way with blackness.
Blackness begins, but does not end, a poem called "Stitches"; the poet slips and falls, breaking open an old scar so that she has to be taken to the hospital Emergency Room to have the wound stitched. During the poem, she carries on a sardonic dialogue (in italics) with herself, first in self-reproach for carelessness, then in self-reproach for her instant metaphorizing of the doctor's stitching of her wound. In the beginning of the poem, the tear in the flesh is immediately interpreted by the first, inveterate referent for any black, blackness- which always threatens to be the only referent for self, closing down other facts of identity:
When skin opens
where a scar
should be, I think nothing but
"So I am white underneath!"
Blood swells then
dribbles into the elbow.
At the end of the poem, we meet first the witty set of metaphors about the doctor stitching the wound (including a last invoking of blackness, skin being seen as "topsoil"), and then the poet's self-reproach for her automatic wish to trope everything, no matter what the occasion. Blackness is now forgotten in favor of critical self-interrogation:
The doctor's teeth are beavery, yellow:
he whistles as he works, as topsoil
puckers over its wound. Amazing
there's no pain- just pressure
as the skin's tugged up by his thread
like a trout, a black line straight
from a seamstress' nightmare: foot-tread
pedalling the need right through.
You just can't stop being witty, can you?
Oh, but I can. I always could.24
The self that hates wit, and utters the sardonic baiting line, is the same self that makes wit. The more interesting alternative self, emerging only in the rebuttal closing the poem, is a non-ironic one, always present but sometimes choosing, by allowing wit its play, to refrain from "earnestness."
That "earnest" self is the self of most first-generation black American poets. It was first encountered in a sustained way by Langston Hughes, who took on the wit and gallantry of the blues as an antidote to plangency or indignation. The "earnest" self behind "Stitches" cannot any longer use the sophisticated and oblique "arrangements" of the artificer-self; and so "Stitches" is told chronologically, in the order of its happening, rather than by the process of reflective faceting which organized a poem like "Aircraft." "Stitches," as it progresses, literally shows blackness being forgotten in favor of the more urgent inner aesthetic conflict between earnestness and wit. And yet by admitting that her first, instinctive response to a wound was her assertion of inner whiteness, Dove shows blackness as an ever-present, unsheddable first skin of consciousness, a constant spur to "earnestness" against the aesthetic playfulness of poetic wit.
The last poem I will mention is one I perhaps do not entirely understand. It is called "Medusa,"25 and plays (I think) with the idea of blackness as conferring gorgon-status on a black female. Sexual feeling is identified with an underground cave-like liquid darkness which the eye, that "hairy star," cannot reach and is in danger of forgetting:
I've got to go
down where my eye
can't reach
hairy star
who forgets to shiver
forgets the cool suck
inside
In a famous poem, "I, Too," published in 1932, Langston Hughes prophesied eventual justice for the American black- that he would be invited to leave his ignominious place in the kitchen and join in the general feast at the table. And yet, for Hughes, justice alone does not suffice. Hughes ends his poem with a vision that was astonishing at its moment in the 1930s- that the aesthetic of America will change, and that the black body, which seemed a thing of revulsion, and the black soul, which seemed a thing apart, will be seen, amazingly, as beautiful:
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
and be ashamed-
I, too, am America.26
Dove's "Medusa" is a descendant of "I, Too," and embodies a comparable prophecy: that the despised Medusa, once she is truly seen and loved, will become a star (even a constellation) in that process that "stellified" Bernice's and Belinda's hair:
Someday long
off someone will
see me
fling me up
until I hook
into sky
What is the price that must be paid by the person who learns to see and love the gorgon? He must "drop his memory" of his former aesthetic, as America will learn, in Hughes's prophecy, to think beautiful what it formerly thought, under a more restricted aesthetic, repellent. And what will happen to Medusa once she is stellified? Her hair, once represented as serpentine, but in reality a liquid darkness with its "cool suck" and "shiver," will become, in the astral cold, something like a halo of icicles: "My hair / dry water." Let me reproduce this mythological tale of the redemption of blackness once more:
I've got to go
down where my eye
can't reach
hairy star
who forgets to shiver
forgets the cool suck
inside
Someday long
off someone will
see me
fling me up
until I hook
into sky
drop his memory
My hair
dry water27
This manner of dealing with blackness- non-autobiographical, mythological, cryptic- is at the opposite pole from the journalistic demeanor of "Stitches," or, looking back, from the historical focus of the slave narratives, the geographic exoticism of "Parsley" and "Agosta," and the realistic story of Thomas and Beulah. The severe geometry of form in "Medusa" suggests the power of Dove's writing to embody a black identity without being constricted by it to a single manner. More than any other contemporary black poet, Dove has taken on the daunting aesthetic question of how to be faithful to, and yet unconstrained by, the presence- always already given a black American- of blackness. She earns, by a poem like "Medusa," her epigraphs prefacing sections of Grace Notes- Cavafy's clear-eyed advice, "Don't hope for things elsewhere,"28 and Claude McKay's celebratory remark on "the dark delight of being strange."29 When Whitman remarked, in the Song of the Exposition, that the Muse had left Greece and had come to inhabit America- "She's here, installed amid the kitchen ware!"- he, alone among our nineteenth-century poets, might have foreseen that in one of her incarnations this American Muse would be one with the terrifying Medusa-face of slavery- but a Medusa who would become, by taking her liberty into her own hands and opening herself to a recognizing love, an American icon of the beautiful.
Notes
1. Rita Dove, Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 28. All quotes from the first three collections of Dove's poetry are taken from this volume.
2. Ibid., p. 29.
3. Ibid., p. 31.
4. Ibid., p. 30.
5. Ibid., p. 32.
6. Ibid., p. 38.
7. Ibid., p. 14.
8. Ibid., p. 17.
9. Ibid., p. 22.
10. Rita Dove, "The First Suite" (from a novel-in-progress), in Black American Literature Forum 20 (Fall 1986), p. 244. The passage, somewhat cut, appears in Dove's novel, Through the Ivory Gate (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 19. What is cut out is the imagination: the extrapolated cone, the obsessive relation to the digital numbers, and the fantasy of the Babylonian merchant. These would all be entirely at home in a poem by Dove; her cutting them out of her novel suggests that she has not yet come to a desirable integration of her imaginative with her tale-telling impulses.
11. Ibid., p. 245.
12. Selected Poems, p. 136.
13. Here and elsewhere the correct date of the Haitian massacres, 1937, is mistranscribed as 1957. The event is described by Robert D. Crassweller, in his biography Trujillo (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 154-56, as follows:
The terrible events of the thirty six hours that began on the night of October 2 ... had surely been planned well in advance, as a kind of military operation...
In Santiago alone the [Dominican] Army rounded up between one and two thousand Haitians, herded them into a courtyard formed by government buildings, and systematically decapitated them with machetes, this weapon being used whenever possible in preference to firearms in order to simulate a spontaneous attack by an enraged Dominican peasantry. In Monte Cristi another large group of Haitians was marched at gunpoint to the end of the harbor pier, with arms bound, and simply pushed into deep water to drown....
A crude test was adopted to probe the claim of Dominican nationality which the terrified Haitians often cried out. Everyone was asked to say the Spanish word perejil, and those who pronounced it "pelegil" were damned as Haitians and cut down without further ado.... The number of those who perished in these October hours will never be known with accuracy.... Estimates range from a low of 5,000 to a high of 25,000. The Haitian Government at one time put forth a figure of 12,000 fatalities, and Trujillo in later days spoke of 18,000. A figure between 15,000 and 20,000 would be a reasonable estimate, but this is guesswork....
An almost incredible time elapsed between the killings and the world's knowledge of them. The first public mention appeared in The New York Times on October 21, seventeen days after the events.... It reported rumors of a border clash in which "several Haitians" had been shot.
Crassweller does not give a specific source for the story about the test-by-pronunciation. Jes in The Era of Trujillo- published only in 1973 by the University of Arizona Press, Tucson, but submitted as a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in 1956, shortly before Galindez disappeared, probably kidnapped and murdered by Trujillo forces- does not mention the test; he does say that "private sources mention 20,000 and even 25,000" killed (p. 209).
14. "Conversations with Rita Dove," ed. Stan Sanvel Rubin and Earl G. Ingersoll, Black American Literature Forum 20 (Fall, 1986), pp. 230-231.
15. Ibid., p. 230.
16. Selected Poems, p. 133.
17. Ibid., p. 100.
18. Ibid., p. 158.
19. Ibid., p. 163.
20. Ibid., p. 160.
21. However, Dove can still write a poem where race is the central concern, like the relatively unsuccessful "Arrow," which fails because it has no imaginative interest in the lecturer whom it accuses of racism.
22. Rita Dove, Grace Notes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 31.
23. Ibid., p. 43.
24. Ibid., p. 51.
25. Ibid., p. 55.
26. Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 275.
27. Grace Notes, p. 55.
28. Ibid., p. 57.
29. Ibid., p. 45.
