Dear Claudia,

It's difficult to find a balance when one is writing a personal

letter that will be read by a community, but I feel were all of like
mind or we wouldn't be here in the first place. I feel that I also
can assume, from various posts, that the two things you and
Tony want most: 1) for your names to disappear from the
conversation about "The Change"; and 2) for the conversation
to prove ongoing, are visibly triumphant. Just look at the names
of others surrounding this piece.

Until a couple of days ago, I would not have thought either the
names or the conversation were necessary. Several things have
changed my mind, although one should have served as sufficient
forewarning: last Wednesday night, Tony's "big black girl from
Alabama"--my home state--leapt from "The Change" and gave
terrifying chase with her tennis racket, clearly intending to
smash me to bits. The anxieties that provoked the dream were,
by that point, predictable and almost--but not quite--comic, for I
had recently been the target of some very upsetting...no,
shocking, indeed previously unimaginable, racial antagonism.

This came about as the result of composing a special online
feature called "The New Black, intended to be a celebration of
what Id long seen budding, then bursting into full flower in
2010-2011, of African-American poetry. Three in less than a
century--what a great idea for an expansion of an annual
National Poetry Month omnibus I write!

Or maybe not: at first, my editors thought my enthusiasm too
specialized and narrow. Then I was told by a half-dozen people


of both races that I was insensitive not to recognize the
cultural/historical/sociopolitical friction still existing between
black and white women. How could I recognize something that
had not been true in my own experience? "It's not you," one
advisor said. "It's slavery. Reconstruction. Jim Crow." Then I
was warned that this was an especially touchy topic in the wake
of the murky-murk of what I myself called, Rankine v.
Hoagland, declaring it the poetic equivalent of the O.J.
Simpson verdict. Dont go there, dont write it at all--the timing
couldnt be worse.

No, I said, explaining that though I'd been thinking about this
wildly impressive third wave for many years, the past twelve
months made it obvious that this new poetic renaissance wasn't
something engendered within the confines of my imagination.
Furthermore, I had a number of cheerleaders, intentional and
accidental: first, I found a post made by Jericho Brown, saying
he was really into [an] essay written by Percival Everett about
VIDA, of which I am a member and you are on the board. The
best possible omens, thought this highly superstitious creature,
for it was on Jerichos page that I had first found the news of
"Rankine v. Hoagland, which my instincts told me meant an
abysmal racial divide would once again open between whites and
African-Americans in this country and we would all fall into
hellish rage and then dead silence.

But Jerichos words, and your position, seemed to underscore
something Id picked up on in an earlier essay by Seth
Abramson: the gender disparity that still exists in publishing,
which was reinforced by subsequent items about Riverhead and
VIDA in Lagniappe, The Southern Reviews b-site. For me,


Everett and Kim Pearson spelled it out. Everett said: "The same
way the government used to place historically warring Native
peoples on shared or adjacent reservations, so has the culture
sought to pit women against African Americans, African
Americans against Hispanics and so on." Pearson said: "Racism
= prejudice + plus power. In this country, historically, the
dominant racist ideology has been white supremacy. The belief
in white supremacy is not restricted to people who are socially
constructed as white. White supremacist discourse has
permeated our laws, and culture, so its not surprising that there
are people of color who live down the stereotypes they have
been taught to believe about themselves. That's called
internalized oppression. Personally, I think that helps to explain
the complicity of women and people of color." And youve
given further validity to their words by example: youre an
African-American woman who serves on VIDAs board. And
others remarks echoed, in one way or another, the positions of
Everett, Pearson, and yourself.

If Im a savage little terrier when it comes to advocating for
others, I'm usually pathetic when it comes to myself;
nevertheless, I had a sufficient number of trusted supporters and
cheerleaders to allow me to remain unleashed. So I finished the
piece. Then I had the nightmare. Then, I was up all Thursday
night and to 11:00 a.m. on Friday writing a re-introduction to a
book I had already introduced. Then, after e-mailing my two
highly skilled and exacting editors / proofreaders--both of whom
work in arenas where Southern blacks and whites meet--what I
hoped was the perfect draft of this piece, each suggested strongly,
out of a desire to protect me, that I remove a line because of the
trouble Id had with The New Black.



Thus I found myself in a writers worst waking nightmare: a
moral dilemma centered on a single clause: when one crosses
the Jekyll Island bridge, on clear days, it's as though you can see
all the way to Africa, and I am haunted by the ghostly apparition
of slave ships and the lingering, suffering-but-ultimately
triumphant spirit of Fanny Kemble. I live about eighty miles
south of Savannah, and what I had written was utterly true, for
even when I'm fictionalizing in a poem for dramatic effect or to
protect others privacy, I believe that the essential truth must
prevail. All writers have is their words, and if we are not faithful
to them we can scarcely hope we will receive better treatment.

I admit it. I was sorely tempted to yield. But I wanted to keep
being brave, to use a complimentary word one of my readers
had applied to me, and wouldnt it be mutually disrespectful to
be silenced as a writer because of fear? To what have I devoted
my entire writing life--which is to say, my life--if not bearing
witness to the racial atrocities I saw while growing up, to act as a
vessel for the ubiquitous suffering that continues in this world?
Why didnt people want to know this? Wasnt it the basest form
of colonialism to use another's time and energy as the equivalent
of raw materials for the purpose of their own enhanced status as
writers, i.e., their manufacture? It's not as though I don't see, for
example, and on a daily basis, enormous pine trees from local
farms lopped and headed to plants to be made into furniture,
after all.

But the answer is simple: the other writers were too busy doing
exactly the same things I was.



Thus I decided to consider all of these of coincidences and
collisions an enormously lucky accident. After exchanging
personal e-mails, I decided to ask if you thought the sentence
indicated further racial insensitivity on my part. You said you
didnt believe in policing other peoples work. Nor do I. Thus I
replaced my words, and then I began to read some of the various
posts Id collected. A genuinely shocking one, encountered for
the first time last night, concerned a person who once wrote me
that I came from "a great line of agitators, which is true, but it
makes me wary of my own tendency to be easily agitated.

The post focused in particular on the reading of a single poem
during which the audience--80% white--had laughed for
precisely the wrong reasons. I was simultaneously moved to tears
and outrage. I wanted to throttle, personally, each member of
the class that had taken the thematic / imagistic thread as a
joke. While Im reluctant to police others sense of humor, such
laughter seems more appropriate when provoked by the one of
our great contemporary poets of comedy and, for me, yet
another prescient source, Chris Rock. Speaking for black
women in a monologue they might find offensive, for I know
many thin ones, I found it hilarious that Im regarded by both
races--80% of my doctors are white and scold me constantly
about my desultory eating habits--as a Cheerio-belt-wear[er].


If humor is one of humankinds saving graces, so is attunement
to what you have called, quoting Judith Butler, the condition of
being addressable. It is a condition that affects us all, as does
the imperfection of earthly understanding. But if I needed
any further provocation to understanding these conditions, to


convincing myself to retain what I had written, to realizing that
the dialogue which you and Tony began needs to continue on
the parts of both races, I have a beyond-gracious plenty of
reasons. And from these and I cannot look away (look away,
etc., despite being born in the heart of Dixie.)

I think about the French root of "courage" and how it contains
within it coeur. Claudia, you and Tony have been clear about
what the hoped-for outcome of your discussion, and I want to
end by making it clear that if all of these circumnambient names
arent sufficient proof, the others in mon coeur show me that I
have not lost what I feared; indeed, they have enabled me to find
something: my own "change," the self-advocacy for which I have
been hoping and praying for so long Lord, o so long.

With best wishes for peace,

Diann Blakely

P.S. This open letter has become so long that I fear it will
overflow your screen, but yet another suggestion for deletion was
made. Does the last phrase--'so long Lord, o so long' make it
sound overwrought and as though youre trying to appropriate
African-American speech? one of the proofreaders/editors
asked. I'll leave it to readers to decide on the "overwrought"
part, but insofar as the issue of appropriation is concerned, we
both knew the answer--a resounding no--and I knew that once
again she was simply trying to protect me. For Down
Here, Adrienne Richs dream of a common language was my
earliest linguistic reality; and if my later influences are many, two
of the most powerful are Faulkner (particularly As I Lay


Dying, the two-volume Compson saga, Go Down, Moses, and Light
in August) and Tennessee Williams (particularly A Streetcar Named
Desire and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) Even more particularly, I
think of their gimlet-eyed but compassionate understanding of
women, of cross-racial complicity, and of the nose upturned at
the powerful odor of mendacity. And here I shall defer to
Alfred Corns eloquence about the Souths racial osmosis. The
King James Bible, with its upsurging, magisterial swells and
sweeps, combined with sheer personal charisma--think chrism--
not only gave us, after all, some of the most memorable passages
in Faulkner and Williams, but also those in the speeches and
writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

P.P.S. The re-introduction of which I spoke, the one which
occasioned the initial deletion, was rejected, as was a subsequent
plea to revise it in accordance with what its Commissioner
wanted all along: "a plug." (No one else seems to see the
crossover connotations of a word used for sex and now used
more commonly for marketing, but I do.) As I recall, I was
specifically asked not to repeat my original piece, or merely to
provide excerpts. Instead I thought it would be more
interesting, and a wholly non-martial salute to all involved, if I
told the story--yes, in my own wholly nonlinear and associative
way, but isnt that how Eliot said a poets mind should in fact
work, ceaselessly amalgamating disparate experiences?--of
how it came to be written and how much the celebration of
many people--their books, individual poems, odes, and lines--
seemed occasioned thereby. I will say nothing else except the
Commissioner is a straight white male; that I outlined in detail
the very points I wished to make; and that I said would make
them in a very linear way, using the excerpts from the original


introduction as supporting material. The mans gender and
racial identity, as well as his rejection, seems proof of the points
made by Abramson, Brown, Everett, Jones, Pearson, and many
anonymous others); it seems additional proof that certain people
do not want this conversation to continue. To relapse into the
KJB resonances that seem engraved upon my synapses and very
pulse, O Thy Blessings are Manifold Indeed, O Lord, for I have
been provided with other moments of comedy and will soon be
provided with a website venue upon which to post this string of
pieces, and at first I thought the ending would be the
Commissioners words: he was "passing." And then what seems
as though the id and Jokes and the Unconscious were let loose like a
pack of slavering, rabid dogs, and Claudia, dont you think
cruelty should be policed? Here I am referring to two other
truly outrageous puns: was Tonys intention, in The Change,
to refer to a euphemism for menopause? Was he intentionally
disrespecting Sam Cookes A Change is Gonna Come? And
what was in the mind of an African-American poet and fiction
writer whose work I have admired for many, many years when
she decided to re-master poor Phillis Wheatley? Does she
want her sold back into bondage?

Thanks, however, are due here to Cornelius Eady for taking the
photograph of her first manuscript last week, and to Kevin
Young for making it available to him. How I wish I could have
been there with him and the Other Ms. Wheatley, meaning
Natasha Trethewey, whom Ive known for at least seventeen
years and remains as sweet and gracious and ferociously, spikily
intelligent as Elizabeth Alexander. With the latter I share a
craving for radiance and a teacher in Derek Walcott.



Those who are agin us are agin us, as Patricia Spears Jones
wrote in a post, and there are many arrayed agin us. An
attack on one minority is not only an attack on all minorities, but
it is also a crime against humanity, for hatred, being the
projection of something feared onto an Other, seeks to destroy
that Others right simply to be. If I am in accordance with
Jennifer Michael Hechts assertion that happiness is a myth, I
am surely also in accordance with many others in believing that
everyone has the right to exist with integrity.

P.P.S. In conclusion, Id like to offer two links and an
explanation of my title;

1) I have said many times that I did not write The New Black
as a refutation of Kenneth F. Warren
(http://chronicle.com/article/Does-African-American/126483),
but that I was grateful for the CHE for printing one itself
(http://chronicle.com/article/African-American-
Literature/126867/#comment-17513574 0). Yet I remain
embarrassed that Harvard, my alma mater in the strangest
possible way, is lending its imprimatur, i.e. its endorsement, of
Warrens foolish and dangerous argument.

2) My title comes courtesy of Wallace Stevens: He observes
how the north is always enlarging the change, Stevens writes of
the aurora borealis, seeing them as snakes. Form gulping after
formlessness, he writes, envisioning the Northern Lights as
emblems, in other words, as signifiers, of original sin. It is of
extreme significance that Stevens seeks comfort in motherkind,
which makes that gentled that can gentle be. Of course, Man-
kind seeks gentleness and then simmers with self-hatred for


admitting vulnerability, weakness, lack of self-sufficiency, the
condition of being addressable. Who can understand better
than writers just how much words can hurt?

Look no further than Bible for proof that since the Pentateuch,
women and blacks have borne the mark of Cain. But in this
case, Gerald Barraxs words contradict Stevenss, and on them I
will close: "How can any American poet, White or Black, not
write about race? It is our national ground of being. Southern
writers, for what should be obvious reasons, have dealt with it
more openly and honestly than regional poets of the North, East,
and west, who either politicize race or ignore it altogether. The
former should have their noggins thumped for trivializing the
crucial human issue of our culture; the latter should have their
artistic licenses revoked." In other words, in our times, it is the
American South that has enlarged the change most definitively
than any region of this American Mean Ole World.