To Make a Man

       I am not a man. In fact, it was in conversation with a few of the men whose essays appear in this issue that I was disabused even of the illusion that I was one of the guys. So, fine, that’s clear. Here I am, writing about the Black male in poetry, some kind of woman. And maybe I’ve been included in this conversation because I’m some kind of woman. Maybe I’m here because I’m the kind of woman people refer to as “a daddy’s girl.” I’m the genuine article. The kind who, at 75, will likely still be calling my father “Daddy.”

       Once, after Mom complained about something my father had done, I defended him saying, “What Daddy did made perfect sense to me.” And what could she say except, “Everything your father does makes perfect sense to you.” And she was right. So far as I can see, Daddy’s nearly infallible. I do dearly love that man.

       So maybe I’m included here, the only woman with a guest pass to this all men’s club, because I can be trusted, because everyone who knows even a little about me knows there is at least one black man I believe can do no wrong. And isn’t that one of the things we have to think about when we think about constructions of black American masculinity? Mustn’t we think about the fact that, facing the historically and culturally imbedded quagmires that black men in America must daily face, each one must need at least one person who believes he can do no (or at the most very little) wrong?

       Mind you, it might be safer not to have too many people thinking you’re the hottest thing around. Consider Etheridge Knight’s “On Seeing The Black Male as the #1 Sex Object in America”:

       …Black men in the south
       Of America / are / soooooooo pretty
       that men, and women, hide
       Under sheets and masks and ride
       And plot under the Alabama moon
       How to “cut the nut.”

       Isn’t part of the construction of black masculinity in America the myth of the perfection of his body, strength, and penis? And can’t this construction work on a man in dangerous ways? So perhaps part of the responsibility for those of us who construct images of black masculinity is toward the construction of balanced portrayals. What should we call the black man’s equivalent to the virgin/whore paradigm? It would be dangerous to believe that every black man must be pimp-ilicious, savage, and strong. It would be equally dangerous to assume that an individual black man might not display some or all of these attributes. It would be dangerous not to carefully examine these assumptions and others like them: what they represent and why; who they benefit and how; what they mean and when; how and where they can and cannot
       be applied.

       One thing that a successful poem must do is push against pre-constructed notions, test them, deny them, walk away from or embrace them. A sonnet; a sestina; a pantoum; a poem steeped in anaphora; one rich in whole rhyme, half rhyme, slant rhyme, or alliteration; a poem reliant on Biblical allusion or the blues; a long-lined poem, a short-lined poem, a prose poem, a syllabic poem, every poem contains and is contained by a certain set of values, the boundaries it will test, dismiss, confirm. The act of writing is a process of complicating expectations. To write a sonnet is not simply to write 14 lines of iambic pentameter in a Shakespearian or Spenserian or Miltonic rhyme scheme. To write a sonnet is to question and complicate the values set forth for the sonnet by everyone who has written a sonnet before your sonnet, and to anticipate and frustrate the expectations of any reader who picks up a sonnet after yours.

       By anticipate and frustrate I mean the poet must predict what expectations a reader might have, adhering to them well enough so the reader will, out of pleasure, or excitement, knowledge or intrigue, continue to read. To the same ends, the poem must compromise the ease with which it will be read. A thinking reader does not appreciate a stereotype, extreme simplicity, the predictable and uncomplicated obvious.

       A thinking reader knows every runaway slave did not sport the tattered trousers or the provision-filled, stick-slung bandana portrayed by the stereotypes 19th-century typesetters used in runaway adverts. A thinking reader would thank you not to simplify the ingenuity of freedom seekers by relying on this image, these details alone. And the uncareful reader will never turn into a careful, thinking one if her preconceptions are not shaken, confounded, tossed out. The poet who writes about a 19th-century fugitive slave must acknowledge and subvert descriptive and stylistic boundaries established by the standard stereotype. A poet writing about any black man in any age must do the same. To not illuminate the expectations set up for each character, to not demonstrate the ways in which he falls short of, exceeds, surprises, conforms to or reconfigures these expectations, to not make a character something less than mechanically perfect and something more than simple, easy, plain, is to not show a character the respect of diligence, perception, skill, and care.

       Consider, once more, my daddy. He’s my dad. I see him when I see him, maybe 5 times a year, and I have yet to write poetry about him, so, sure he can be perfect. I mean, I don’t have to actually live with him or, through my poems, make him live. I love him, but it’s up to Mom to actually love him. And bless her little heart is all I have to say about that. ‘Cuz I’ve loved some black men in my life.

       And maybe that’s why I’ve been asked to write this essay, because I’ve been known to love a black man or two in my time. And isn’t poetry, like a relationship, a private and intimate declaration made public? And, as with any good relationship, doesn’t poetry require that we notice and care for and tend to and think about those on whom we’ve focused our attention? And don’t black men, like poems, sometimes do things that don’t at first, if ever, make perfect sense to us? And isn’t love, like poetry, partly about learning to incorporate that which does not make perfect sense into that which creates a sense of completion? And don’t our subjects, desired even in and often because of their imperfections, live and breathe (sometimes before we’ve written about them and sometimes because we’ve written about them)? Maybe I’m part of this conversation because, as a poet, I’ve grown into and out of and over and into and out of and into the love of my subjects, which, nearly half the time, have been black men.“”

       I know this much: I’ve completed two manuscripts of poems, both historically-based collections about African-American life, and neither would have been complete, in fact neither would have really gotten started, had I not found ways to balance my attentions between portrayals of black women and portrayals of black men. And so maybe that’s why I’m writing this, because I’ve taken an intellectual interest in gender studies and because that interest has bled into my poetry.

       At my little women’s college in Virginia I am coordinator of the Women’s Studies program. Much of what that job has entailed for me has been working to change the title of the program and shift the course offerings so that we will have a Gender Studies program. The reasons for my involvement in this campaign are myriad, but one is that, in America at least, who you are is often measured by and against who you are not. I believe that to study and understand womanhood in American culture it is crucial to study constructions of masculinity.

       One of the most dangerous things about the myth of the perfection of the black male body, strength, and penis is the fact that the myth is oftentimes not true. Like the 19th-century typesetter’s stereotype, this image of strength and virility was constructed, in part, as a means for someone else to regain and maintain control over black men. And yet, unlike the tattered-trousered fugitive, the unbreakable black man remains a model with a great deal of appeal.

       Like all living beings, every black man has his flaws, and to know him well enough for true respect and love means you’ll have to recognize those flaws. But, too often, the perceived role of those of us who live with, love, or write about black men is to keep silent about those weaknesses. To broadcast them is viewed as a betrayal—I confronted my own mother over a version of this crime. And yet, to perpetuate the stereotype by never calling it to question feeds, often unwittingly, into its original design. Men who cannot be wholly revealed because they cannot reveal their weaknesses alongside their strengths are more caricature than men.

       It’s men I want to I love. Men I want to write about. I write toward the question I asked myself in one of the earliest poems completed for my first book: “What do I know if I don’t know/what it is that would have made him a man?” Not a perfect man, not a demon man, not whatever one-sided kind of black man we grow so used to (and for some of us so weary of) seeing. Only a man. A real, live man. I want to write men who are flawed and men who are fabulous. Men who are balanced. Men who are complicated as Brooks’ Satin-Legs Smith. I want to write into poems men who are able to do no, or just a little, or, if it suits the occasion, all kinds of wrong. I want to know what might make and unmake a black man, because in working toward that knowledge, in writing toward that knowledge, I move that much closer to knowing what can make and unmake me (woman, black, American, man lover, woman lover, human being). I inch that much closer to understanding what can make and unmake us.