by Candace Wiley, co founder of The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat
1
In December, a white woman entered our poet-of-color space.
The year before too, a different white woman entered our poet-of-color space and had the nerve to offer instruction to the whole group of poets.
2
Nothing is neutral and ahistorical.
This is problematic for an organization dedicated to poets of color who reserve our largest event of the year--The Watering Hole winter retreat--strictly for poets of color. I chalk it all up to a misreading of the event and space.
But still, I wonder why the question wasn’t posed. Why wouldn’t those women have said, “Hey, C-Money! (Read: That’s what my peeps call me in my head.) I’ve read The Watering Hole’s website and know your focus and don’t want to alter the space in a negative way. I’m white. Can I come?”
Is it too much to ask my permission before you come into my house?
My business partner Monifa Lemons and I have had white friends tell us flat out that they love what we’re doing, that they’d love to be a part of it, but that they would never venture into the space and become an altering presence. They told us this unprompted in moments when (unbeknownst to them) we needed to hear it and moments that (thanks to them) we could refer back to.
It surprises me, not that these women showed up, but that the question wasn’t asked. (Read: Why wouldn’t I, as a white woman, be entitled to enter this space? Why would you believe that my presence complicates things? I’m wonderful! You can ask my _____ [enter race here] friend. Am I being unfair?)
3
What complicates this scenario even more is that these white women were invited into the space by black women. Black women who we’d (Monifa and I, as founding directors) invited personally.
Black women were attacking (is that the word?) a home for poets of color in the South that was built by black women.
Attacking in love.
Attacking with no malicious intent.
Attacking under the guise of being polite, calling-in from the roadside, wiping their feet at the door, and only speaking in comfortable silences.
Attacking while humbly offering themselves to the space.
Now, ain’t that something.
4
I know that Free Black Space is not the place where I have to defend gathering as poets of color. For those of you who aren’t writers though, it may be helpful to know that people of color in predominantly white writing environments struggle.
One reason is because the class’s focus moves away from the writing and instead centers on asking for explanation of or validation for the of-color characters’ existence. The author is put in the position of explaining, validating, couching, defending, etc. the experiences of their brown, beige, and tan characters, rather than learning more about their own writing style. If the author is “muzzled” (a technique by which the author of the piece is asked to remain silent until the last five minutes of workshop), the author becomes privy to (Read: subject to, made to suffer through) a plethora of misreadings and misinterpretations by people to whom the author’s culture is primarily represented in their lives by white Hollywood writers who see them as ___________ [you can fill in this blank with as many stereotypes as you want]. This is a problematic workshop model for people whose culture might confuse the class, particularly so in an environment where the class and professor assume they get it or that the author should explain it.
You’ve seen this before.
Think back to high school and college English classes. With Robert Frost, the class discussed form, symbolism, arrangement, repetition, rhyme, meter, etc. With Langston Hughes, the class discussed whether or not a scene really happened to him (Read: certify its historical accuracy), how that’s the way things were in the olden days (Read: another certification), and how they just can’t believe that black people were treated so mean. (Read: What. The Entire. Foci?!?)
Literature written by or about people of color (or writers from non-white nations or queer writers, etc.) is treated as inherently biographical and political, not as a piece of technically proficient art.
5
I was asked by a professor, “Why does it always have to be a black thing.” A more experienced professor would have pointed me to the litany writers who had done the “black thing” better.
Fiction writer Lan Samantha Chang was warned against continuing to write Chinese-American characters by the director of her MFA program, who said doing so would typecast her and her career (NPR).
To The New Yorker, fiction writer Junot Diaz describes his MFA program by saying, “That shit was too white…. Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc)....Shit, in my workshop we never talked about race except on the rare occasion someone wanted to argue that ‘race discussions’ were exactly the discussion a serious writer should not be having….Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.”
6
Nothing is neutral and ahistorical.
If graduate students are always teetering on the brink of dropping out of MFA programs (because of imposter syndrome), minority MFA students live by fingers grasping the ledge trying to figure out how to save themselves.
These are spaces where simply asserting the artistic presence of people of color (particularly without the white gaze) is revolutionary. (Shout out to my big cuz Kehinde Wiley) As a student, it takes a different mentality to survive. Rather than walking into a classroom ready to learn, I walked in ready to be stubborn
or
to be invisible.
Nothing is wrong with explaining, but to always be in the mode of explaining the artistic lives you create (which are real to you and confounding or far-fetched to others) is exhausting, exasperating, and often belittling.
Defending them is worse.
People are willing to accept that Captain Kirk can play cowboy in interstellar space
and win
every
single
time,
but not that black people do whatever regular thing it is that they are doing in my old workshop pieces.
Who are these college diversity efforts really benefitting? Are students of color forever intended to be sprinkled in, to serve as diversity tokens, to round out their white classmates
or
are classes filled with diverse students supposed to enlighten, challenge, and support each other as they grow together?
Sprinkled.
Filled.
7
Monifa and I designed The Watering Hole winter retreat as a counter to the elite, white, cisgender, heteronormative structure of most MFA programs. Our core tenets are affordability and accessibility for poets of color in the South. We work to create Harlem Renaissance style spaces in rural South Carolina and each retreat becomes a family reunion of strangers calling each other Tribe and asking each other, When did you get free? Can you show me how to get free, too? (Shout out to Bettina Judd’s patient poems)
So when those white women walked in, led by black women we trust, Monifa and I had to look at each other and wonder who left the gate open. It seemed a direct affront to our mission statement. On two separate occasions, someone wandered into our yard, let the screen door slam, tramped mud-caked shoes through our kitchen, and opened the frigidaire with unwashed hands, as if our mission statement did not apply to them or their friends.
8
When I defend The Watering Hole against sidelong charges of “reverse racism,” it baffles me that when it comes to race, people don’t understand why specialized groups would want to temporarily separate themselves. (Read: Why wouldn’t you want to hang with us? We’re wonderful!) (Read: Segregation is not allowed anymore and because I’d get in trouble for it, you shouldn’t do it.) (Read: Segregation is something that is enforced on people of color, not chosen by them.) People don’t ask Masons, fraternities, or all male colleges, why they would want a closed all male group or whether that is even a viable option. People don’t ask why the International Constitutional Law Conference doesn’t welcome Personal Injury attorneys or Ceramics residencies don’t welcome photographers. People don’t see these spaces as segregated (though they are) or problematic. In essence, other groups of people find the same reprieve and power from momentary separation, though not the same criticism. It’s not viewed as backwards. It’s viewed as necessary and has been used as a way to coalesce power and resources.
“Regular” spaces are white spaces, drenched in a willful blindness, well-intentioned misreadings, and understandable ignorance to race and representation. I hope I don’t overstep myself to assert that the same is true for queer people when it comes to concepts of gender and sexuality. “Regular” spaces can only do so much.
Monifa and I are working to create a cultural mechanism that propels poets of color into spaces with more power. We gather with the intention of reversing some long-held standards in the literary world. (Is that the “reverse” racism of which we’ve been accused? Now, ain’t that a slave-code-black-code-code-switch.) We have built a system that has not waited for permission to exist, has not relied on systems of power that already exist, and has not depended on funds from places of power. We do all of the fundraising ourselves. (Read: Feel free to visit twhpoetry.org and click the donate button) We are a Free Black Space, full of utopian impulse and flying in the face of hegemony. This is not a job. It’s a family. And we will stand at the gate with a hand up to stop or arms open to hug as we show people where to take off their shoes, where to wash their hands, and how to get free.
This ground we’ve broken is holy ground.
As holy as grandma’s kitchen.
1
In December, a white woman entered our poet-of-color space.
The year before too, a different white woman entered our poet-of-color space and had the nerve to offer instruction to the whole group of poets.
2
Nothing is neutral and ahistorical.
This is problematic for an organization dedicated to poets of color who reserve our largest event of the year--The Watering Hole winter retreat--strictly for poets of color. I chalk it all up to a misreading of the event and space.
But still, I wonder why the question wasn’t posed. Why wouldn’t those women have said, “Hey, C-Money! (Read: That’s what my peeps call me in my head.) I’ve read The Watering Hole’s website and know your focus and don’t want to alter the space in a negative way. I’m white. Can I come?”
Is it too much to ask my permission before you come into my house?
My business partner Monifa Lemons and I have had white friends tell us flat out that they love what we’re doing, that they’d love to be a part of it, but that they would never venture into the space and become an altering presence. They told us this unprompted in moments when (unbeknownst to them) we needed to hear it and moments that (thanks to them) we could refer back to.
It surprises me, not that these women showed up, but that the question wasn’t asked. (Read: Why wouldn’t I, as a white woman, be entitled to enter this space? Why would you believe that my presence complicates things? I’m wonderful! You can ask my _____ [enter race here] friend. Am I being unfair?)
3
What complicates this scenario even more is that these white women were invited into the space by black women. Black women who we’d (Monifa and I, as founding directors) invited personally.
Black women were attacking (is that the word?) a home for poets of color in the South that was built by black women.
Attacking in love.
Attacking with no malicious intent.
Attacking under the guise of being polite, calling-in from the roadside, wiping their feet at the door, and only speaking in comfortable silences.
Attacking while humbly offering themselves to the space.
Now, ain’t that something.
4
I know that Free Black Space is not the place where I have to defend gathering as poets of color. For those of you who aren’t writers though, it may be helpful to know that people of color in predominantly white writing environments struggle.
One reason is because the class’s focus moves away from the writing and instead centers on asking for explanation of or validation for the of-color characters’ existence. The author is put in the position of explaining, validating, couching, defending, etc. the experiences of their brown, beige, and tan characters, rather than learning more about their own writing style. If the author is “muzzled” (a technique by which the author of the piece is asked to remain silent until the last five minutes of workshop), the author becomes privy to (Read: subject to, made to suffer through) a plethora of misreadings and misinterpretations by people to whom the author’s culture is primarily represented in their lives by white Hollywood writers who see them as ___________ [you can fill in this blank with as many stereotypes as you want]. This is a problematic workshop model for people whose culture might confuse the class, particularly so in an environment where the class and professor assume they get it or that the author should explain it.
You’ve seen this before.
Think back to high school and college English classes. With Robert Frost, the class discussed form, symbolism, arrangement, repetition, rhyme, meter, etc. With Langston Hughes, the class discussed whether or not a scene really happened to him (Read: certify its historical accuracy), how that’s the way things were in the olden days (Read: another certification), and how they just can’t believe that black people were treated so mean. (Read: What. The Entire. Foci?!?)
Literature written by or about people of color (or writers from non-white nations or queer writers, etc.) is treated as inherently biographical and political, not as a piece of technically proficient art.
5
I was asked by a professor, “Why does it always have to be a black thing.” A more experienced professor would have pointed me to the litany writers who had done the “black thing” better.
Fiction writer Lan Samantha Chang was warned against continuing to write Chinese-American characters by the director of her MFA program, who said doing so would typecast her and her career (NPR).
To The New Yorker, fiction writer Junot Diaz describes his MFA program by saying, “That shit was too white…. Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc)....Shit, in my workshop we never talked about race except on the rare occasion someone wanted to argue that ‘race discussions’ were exactly the discussion a serious writer should not be having….Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.”
6
Nothing is neutral and ahistorical.
If graduate students are always teetering on the brink of dropping out of MFA programs (because of imposter syndrome), minority MFA students live by fingers grasping the ledge trying to figure out how to save themselves.
These are spaces where simply asserting the artistic presence of people of color (particularly without the white gaze) is revolutionary. (Shout out to my big cuz Kehinde Wiley) As a student, it takes a different mentality to survive. Rather than walking into a classroom ready to learn, I walked in ready to be stubborn
or
to be invisible.
Nothing is wrong with explaining, but to always be in the mode of explaining the artistic lives you create (which are real to you and confounding or far-fetched to others) is exhausting, exasperating, and often belittling.
Defending them is worse.
People are willing to accept that Captain Kirk can play cowboy in interstellar space
and win
every
single
time,
but not that black people do whatever regular thing it is that they are doing in my old workshop pieces.
Who are these college diversity efforts really benefitting? Are students of color forever intended to be sprinkled in, to serve as diversity tokens, to round out their white classmates
or
are classes filled with diverse students supposed to enlighten, challenge, and support each other as they grow together?
Sprinkled.
Filled.
7
Monifa and I designed The Watering Hole winter retreat as a counter to the elite, white, cisgender, heteronormative structure of most MFA programs. Our core tenets are affordability and accessibility for poets of color in the South. We work to create Harlem Renaissance style spaces in rural South Carolina and each retreat becomes a family reunion of strangers calling each other Tribe and asking each other, When did you get free? Can you show me how to get free, too? (Shout out to Bettina Judd’s patient poems)
So when those white women walked in, led by black women we trust, Monifa and I had to look at each other and wonder who left the gate open. It seemed a direct affront to our mission statement. On two separate occasions, someone wandered into our yard, let the screen door slam, tramped mud-caked shoes through our kitchen, and opened the frigidaire with unwashed hands, as if our mission statement did not apply to them or their friends.
8
When I defend The Watering Hole against sidelong charges of “reverse racism,” it baffles me that when it comes to race, people don’t understand why specialized groups would want to temporarily separate themselves. (Read: Why wouldn’t you want to hang with us? We’re wonderful!) (Read: Segregation is not allowed anymore and because I’d get in trouble for it, you shouldn’t do it.) (Read: Segregation is something that is enforced on people of color, not chosen by them.) People don’t ask Masons, fraternities, or all male colleges, why they would want a closed all male group or whether that is even a viable option. People don’t ask why the International Constitutional Law Conference doesn’t welcome Personal Injury attorneys or Ceramics residencies don’t welcome photographers. People don’t see these spaces as segregated (though they are) or problematic. In essence, other groups of people find the same reprieve and power from momentary separation, though not the same criticism. It’s not viewed as backwards. It’s viewed as necessary and has been used as a way to coalesce power and resources.
“Regular” spaces are white spaces, drenched in a willful blindness, well-intentioned misreadings, and understandable ignorance to race and representation. I hope I don’t overstep myself to assert that the same is true for queer people when it comes to concepts of gender and sexuality. “Regular” spaces can only do so much.
Monifa and I are working to create a cultural mechanism that propels poets of color into spaces with more power. We gather with the intention of reversing some long-held standards in the literary world. (Is that the “reverse” racism of which we’ve been accused? Now, ain’t that a slave-code-black-code-code-switch.) We have built a system that has not waited for permission to exist, has not relied on systems of power that already exist, and has not depended on funds from places of power. We do all of the fundraising ourselves. (Read: Feel free to visit twhpoetry.org and click the donate button) We are a Free Black Space, full of utopian impulse and flying in the face of hegemony. This is not a job. It’s a family. And we will stand at the gate with a hand up to stop or arms open to hug as we show people where to take off their shoes, where to wash their hands, and how to get free.
This ground we’ve broken is holy ground.
As holy as grandma’s kitchen.
