Towards Post-Blackness

I am happy to associate myself with this monograph on Rita Dove’s poetry by Lekha Roy, one of the few literary scholars in India who have had a serious interest in exploring the writings of African American women writers.

Rita Frances Dove is a distinctive presence among contemporary American writers and while many readers find her poetry beautiful, they also sometimes find it hard to understand. Although primarily a poet, Dove has also published works of fiction, drama, and essays. In 1993, Dove became the youngest poet to be named the Poet Laureate of the U.S. At least two African American poets, Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks had preceded her in that role with a different title, “Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress.” Dove used her two-year appointment to generate public interest in poetry through her travels and poetry readings. Her 1986 collection Thomas and Beulah, which received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, is a thinly veiled fictional treatment of her grandparents’ journey during the Great Migration from the South to Akron, Ohio, from the early years of the twentieth century into the 1960s. This narrative work evokes the fragility of the couple’s lives, but also the dignity and complexity of Thomas and Beulah as individuals. Their journey is narrated in two parts: the first, “Mandolin,” consists of twenty-three poems giving Thomas’s side, and the second, “Canary in Bloom,” gives Beulah’s in twenty-one poems. Like many other African American writers during the past hundred or more years, Dove chooses to tell a human story, which is at the same time a black American story. As sometimes in relation to Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, Charles Johnson, and Toni Morrison, attempts to reduce Dove’s writings—poetry, fiction, and drama—to a unidimensional racial matrix, faces the risk of missing out on their nuance and richness. In several interviews Morrison has rejected what she calls the “white gaze,” the expectation that black writers of diverse backgrounds don’t become “universal,” until and unless they create white characters and situations in their writings. In several interviews (such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15MMmgwl1V4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kgq3F8wbYA), Morrison makes clear that there is only one race—the human race—and that whiteness, like blackness, is a social construct.

Roy interprets Dove’s creative journey in Hegelian terms, a journey in which the poet is viewed as transcending the fixity of identities to embrace “voluntary affiliations across the color-line in a changing, post-ethnic world.” Dove, Roy avers, frees up the lived spaces shared by all human beings, beyond the historical, cultural, and mythic influences they might have experienced through their racialized identities. Dove’s most recent volume of poems, Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021), notes Roy, touches upon hopes and fears that are universal. For Dwight Garner, who reviewed the volume in New York Times, Playlist is “about the weight of American history, which,” Dove believes, “we are still metabolizing. It’s about mortality. This book is the first time the poet has publicly acknowledged that she has—and has had for over 20 years—a form of multiple sclerosis.” And still, in her poem, “The Soup,” the poet prefers to think about her dinner, and not the diagnosis the doctor has given her: “Yes, soup was what I wanted: not news/but the slow courage of the lentil/as it softened, its heart splitting into wings.”

While I welcome Lekha Roy’s monograph, Towards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove’s Poetry, I do not expect every reader in India or elsewhere to agree fully with her readings. Like the poet’s jostling of words that Rita Dove celebrates in her life and writings, the jostling of scholarly interpretations is something we should all welcome. I expect South Asian interest in African American writers to keep growing in the years and decades to come. I believe readings of African American history and culture offer a close cousinship to the now well-established fields of Dalit and Adivasi Studies.

~Amritjit Singh

Langston Hughes Professor Emeritus,

English & African American Studies