I think I am getting more woke. I was giving a talk about poetry at a university. I was illustrating the need to be personal and specific, especially in the realm of “political” poems. I used the African American poet Countee Cullen’s poem, although at that moment I couldn’t remember the poet. I said the poem was about a boy visiting a large city (the poem is “An Incident,” the city is Baltimore) who for the first time in his life was called the N-word, and that’s all he remembered from his visit. Because the poem used the word, I used it.
A few days later, I got a message from the director of the program, letting me know an African American student had come to see her, very disturbed that I had used that word. I have to admit, I was shocked. And embarrassed. The director sent me an essay she thought might help me understand, written by a teacher and her student about this very issue.
My first thought was “Oh for Pete’s sake, are we going to erase history, edit historical novels, now?” My further considered answer is “Well, I guess we don’t need to erase history, but we need to acknowledge what that word has done.” In other words, I guess have no right to use the word, even in the innocent way I used it.
I was describing this incident at Thanksgiving. My granddaughter Abby was listening. She’s 15 and goes to Sidwell, the Friends school in D.C. There are a large number of African Americans in her school. She quickly said “No, you can’t use that word. Period.”
Then she told us her class is reading Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. The book is set initially in Ghana, among slave traders and the warring tribes that supply the slaves. It travels across time to plantations in the American south, and to New York. . . .I’m not finished with it yet. (You can read about it in the May issue of The New Yorker.) Abby said her teacher—who is from Ghana and wears tribal dress—said she wanted her students to read the book , to know what the history is, so that, she said, her own son might be less afraid to go out at night. The other Black students in the class, mostly the boys, said they’re always at least a little scared when they go out. They’ve been taught, never walk with your hands in your pockets, never pull up your hood.
The castle and dungeon in Ghana.
The novel describes the unspeakable condition of the dungeon where slaves were packed in so closely they were layered on top of each other in the dark. They couldn’t move; it describes rapes and murder.
Are 15-year-olds too young to read this? How foolish to think so, since violence and hatred is everywhere. It’s a matter, it seems to me, of having a wise teacher who knows how to lead the discussion.
I actually think it’s the young Black students who are woke. They’ve come to a sharper degree of consciousness not only about their present situation, but about their past. We’ve all known this history, of course, for a long time, but if you’re Black, to feel it in some articulate way, not just in your bones, that may be what’s changing. To read it and write about it—such work is proliferating at a grand rate.
If you were the one whose relatives had been grossly abused for generations in the name of the N-word, you ought to be the only one allowed to touch it, to say it. it is radioactive. It stands for, for, for what I can’t even imagine, having been remarkably privileged all my life. Not that my contemporary life has been easy, or comfortable, but it’s been safe from the thousand cuts.
I’m not thinking groveling with guilt, here. I can’t fix what happened. I’m thinking awareness. And respect. Awareness of what the long reach of history has wrought, for us all. And the respect not to reach into the filthy grab-bag of history for our words.