Is this poem racist?
.
. Poem Encounters a Nigger Man
. One day when Poem was aimlessly making
. his way through yet another text, he
. was suddenly accosted by
. a drunken nigger man, almost too indignant
. to be able to stand, who blamed him
. for the presence in the text of
. the phrase, “nigger man.” Wanting to be alone
. with his thoughts, Poem merely growled that
. he had nothing to do with what was in
. the text, which wasn’t exactly true since
. Poem was clearly an alter ego
. of the text’s author.
. When he
. tried to continue on his way, though,
. the nigger man persisted, blocking his attempts
. to escape him until Poem finally
. exploded, telling the Nigger man that the phrase
. belonged in the text, the text obviously
. being about the type of black man the phrase
. stood for and he exemplified. Poem went on
. to lecture the nigger man about the stupidity
. of caring about the names people called you,
. then made a quick move to one side that freed
. him of the nigger man before the latter could
. start in on all the innocent African Americans
. that had been lynched.
.
. The nigger man didn’t
. mind. He had more whiskey, and it wasn’t
. long before the daylight, under
. its, and his harmonica’s influence,
. began no longer to seem
. nothing more than a day’s proper wage
. but something wonderful the next
. roll of the dice had a good chance of winning.
Mostly works for me up to the final bit, beginning, “The nigger man didn’t mind …”, which is a bit trite and stereotypical.
Nice idea — I like the wandering poem — but doesn’t quite come off — your Poem is real, your nigger man isn’t.
Best,
Robin
Thanks for the response–a pretty perceptive one, it seems to me. As for “didn’t mind,” how about “didn’t give no fuck?” Just kidding. I do intend to change “didn’t mind,” though. You’re certainly right about my nigger man not being real–he ain’t s’posed to be! Actually. among the flaws of the poem is that I’m not sure exactly what he is, but I do know he’s not real–he’s a stereotype, but also a representative (or an attempt at one) of a certain kind of obnoxious black AND of the kind of feeling I get and love to get from the deep south collage/paintings of Romare Bearden. My mainest aim here I missed so badly it’s probably not noticeable: it was to somehow capture something of the plus/minus of a portion, an authentic portion, of the black American world, the lazy, scorned, richly sensual low world of the down-and-out blacks. This is not racist because there ARE down-and-out blacks. Pure id-dity, enviable iddity (which many whites “achieve,” also, in a different way.
I could go on. I believe I have a fairly complex (and interesting) understanding of blacks and Jews, though I isn’t neither–an understanding currently unpopular, so mostly in my closet with my religious and political beliefs.
–Bob