Blogdrama

Open letter to the darling Sam Columna,

I spent quite a bit of time that night, discussing your reading.  I was pissed.  Not because I didn’t like the work but because of my inability to stop you from continuing to read not just past my limit of tolerance for references to male genitalia in a single sitting, but past the gracious 5-7 minutes we were all allotted-with only two exceptions, Bhanu and Sommer.  I was pissed because I didn’t have a good reason to interrupt your reading even though I wanted to.  At least I didn’t have one that would justify my doing so without being a complete ass.  I have no interest in that.  Serena had the right.  Daniel had the right.  As seen by me, but perhaps if Daniel and Serena were asked about it they would disagree with me about “having the right” to stop your reading at the 10-minute mark, but for that answer, you must ask them.

Let me clarify: I think it is a sense of entitlement that allowed you to continue reading beyond the time that we were given and beyond Bhanu’s chuckled-over call for only one more.  This is not a novelty. I am a woman of color living in the United States of America.  People continually feel entitled to sequestering my attention.  There are mechanisms of privilege and oppression around me that make it extremely difficult to decide how my body is going to be utilized when encountering information.  I felt subjected to your work and not an audient to it.  Much like one is subjected to a pap smear.  Helplessly pried open with a speculum, prepped for the scraping of my non-phallic parts, my female difference exposed, examined, albeit with my reluctant consent.  Sexism works this way, by a circular reminder of what a woman is less-than, not same-as or not comparable to penis.  The same language that calls attention to my marginality, places the phallus (to hearken back to Serena’s Hinduism) at the epicenter.  My whole aesthetics is based on how to usurp that phallic symbolic language, within poetry.  Sexual assault victims have been interrogated-will continue to be interrogated- as to whether or not they ever, consciously or unconsciously, gave a motive that would lead the perpetrator to think the victim asked for the unwanted attack on their bodies.  Sam it’s not that your reading was bad, it was inescapable to me, and that powerlessness closely resembles my experience of victimization.  That’s not what bothers me the most.  What is more irritating to me is the blithe ignorance of how much space the penis was taking up in our consciousness, once again and no contest from anyone about it not being okay.  So it isn’t the fact that your work found a way to repeat images that don’t push the tender buttons I like to be pushed, lame pun intended.  It is the fact that here there I was, once again, petrified to move, to say stop, to fight back the swing of the male pendulum in my direction.  This I call male privilege.  This pisses me off. 

I thought about something that Daniel McDonald said to me in response to my complaints, “You should have said something.” More or less-that night I bought a bottle of champagne and imbibed and may not recall exactly.  I thought about that.  Yes, it was my right to speak up afterwards.  Maybe even during.  Then I thought about something Danielle Vogel said, “It would have just taken one of them to not hit her and the whole narrative would have changed.”  She was referring to the males in Bhanu’s impromptu performance.  Yes. How would my speaking up possibly change anything?  I am not sure that I would have changed the narrative at all.  Yet, that interruption is just the sort I wish had happened at Dikeou.  I don’t mean that it is fair to interrupt a poet, mid-reading.  An interruption would have ruptured the sense of immobility and powerlessness that flooded me as I sat during what seemed like an interminable subjection of my female body to more male privilege and to which, I repeat, I reluctantly consented.  Something I find equally unfair.  I actually liked your piece in TitMouse.  It was a critique that was smart and effective.  It makes me want to read it again and it made me want to perform it.  Can I?  

A quick word on trauma.  I do believe your poetry is about trauma and experiences of violence to some extent.  Your gender and sex being particular places of hurt/trauma depending on your definition of the latter word and as such it is centrifugal and a cathexis object.  Not just you, all males are hurt through gender and sex, but you also hapen to be a poet, whose work has a certain confessional aspect and while it may not be autobiographical, it still holds the “I”.  Such use of the word facilitates the placement of the experiences delineated in the poem and the references to the word “my” personal.  To someone, anyone and even the author.  It is my impression, and it may be incorrect, that your “I” isn’t about “Sam’s identity”, it is a generic penis porter, “I”.  Or let us say that it is about your person, either way the symbolic floats up from the voice of the poet to call attention to one male’s experience of his penis, it reiterates, it demands focus, it will not be purely coincidence or artifice.  There are subconscious machinations or at very least implications of phallocentricity, which I have already deemed as sprouting from trauma. 

A quick word on race and identification.  I am not a multicultural woman and I do not know what it is like to pass for white.  Marlon and you are both men of color (Marlon is indigenous to this continent, his people are) who pass for white, on occasion.  I want to make something very clear.  I didn’t become “brown” the minute I started using the word to refer to myself.  I became brown when others said I did.  Whether or not I identify as brown, I am still brown.  It is irrelevant that any person of any background is or isn’t Caucasian exclusively, if they appear to be so, they have white privilege.  Among my own people I am criticized for being “white” (see coconut) because I have assimilated, but white folks have never confused me for white.  In other words if you pass for white, then there is privilege that you may be carrying, like with any other structurally granted privilege, without ever having done anything to deserve it.  

On another note, I feel flattered by your comment.  Thank you.  I write for you, after all.  I want to say that I never felt hurt by your reading, Sam.  I don’t know that anyone actually said the words, “Sam’s reading hurt”.  The other thing is that you’re absolutely right, there was plenty more that happened that evening, but I know I learned a lot and felt a lot as a result of your work, not necessarily all enjoyable but that’s what poetry is about.  It just sucks that it became such a mess.  But we’re poets, we’re janitors, waiters and we can clean a mess up pretty fucking efficiently.  So maybe you’ll think about some of the things I said or other people said and maybe you will write me a hateful response and we’ll clean that up too.  Or maybe you’ll have coffee with me and finally lend me that recorder you spoke about. 

Cheers, poet!

- Bajo.