Toi Derricotte, Contributor Spotlight

Contributor Spotlight  Born in 1941, Toi Derricotte grew up in Detroit, and when she thinks of her childhood, she remembers fear. "I had a need to be with people, but I was afraid of doing something wrong or saying the wrong thing." Her parents were getting divorced, a beloved grandmother had died, and Derricotte, an only child, was shunted into silence. As part of a middle-class, African-American family in the 1950's, she felt enormous familial pressure to conform, to disprove stereotypes -- a repudiation of race and culture that came with a cost. In a poem called "Blackbottom" from her most recent book, Captivity, Derricotte writes about driving through a ghetto with her family: "Freshly escaped, black middle class, / we snickered, and were proud; / / We laughed at the bright clothes of a prostitute, / a man sitting on a curb with a bottle in his hand. / We smelled barbecue cooking in dented washtubs, and our mouths watered. / As much as we wanted it we couldn't take the chance."

From the time Derricotte was ten years old, writing poems became a source of both refuge and empowerment for her, giving voice to an emotional life that could not be shared or consoled. Only once did she dare to show her poems to a family member. When she was fourteen, her cousin, Melvin, was in medical school. He was taking an embryology class, and he allowed Derricotte to accompany him to the Chicago Museum, where they had fetuses and embryos on display. It was the first time anyone in her family had ever talked to Derricotte about conception, reproduction -- sex -- and she thought he might be receptive to her poems. Instead, after reading them, he said, "These are sick. Morbid." She didn't show her work to another soul again until she was twenty-seven.

At Wayne State University, psychology became her dominant academic interest, and she planned to pursue a Ph.D. in it, but her studies were interrupted when, at twenty, she had a child. She had to get out fast and make money. She switched her major to special education and, upon graduation, worked as a teacher. Eventually, she moved to Manhattan, ventured into writing workshops, and then obtained her master's degree in English and creative writing from NYU at the age of forty-three.

Since then, Derricotte's literary career has blossomed. She has published three collections of poetry: The Empress of the Death House (Lotus Press), Natural Birth (Crossing Press), and Captivity (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press). She has been the recipient of two fellowships from the NEA, as well as the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The Paris Review, and The Kenyon Review, and in numerous anthologies, including The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry, A New Geography of Poets, and New American Poets of the '90s. She has taught in the graduate creative writing programs at NYU, George Mason, and Old Dominion, and is now an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Each of Derricotte's autobiographical collections has represented a complex process of examination and reconciliation: "Every book for me is about reclaiming something that had been extinguished, reclaiming emotions, memories, parts of the self." With The Empress of the Death House, it was about "anger and sex." With Natural Birth, which focuses on giving birth to her son in a home for unwed mothers -- a fact she didn't reveal to him until he was seventeen -- it was about "shame." With Captivity, it was about "family, class, and race -- a lot of scary poems."

"I feel the need to represent what's not spoken," she says. "I discover a pocket in myself that hasn't been articulated, then I have to find a form to carry that. Speaking the unspeakable is not that hard. The difficulty is in finding a way to make it perfect, to make it have light and beauty and truth inside it."

Clearly not shy of difficult subjects -- race and gender, family and society -- she embraces the contradictions that inevitably arise when approaching them. "I'm constantly trying to acknowledge the complications, rather than to simplify." About being light-skinned, for instance, she offers a long, elliptical, but provocative homily about race, identity, perception, and reality: "When I was a kid, the worst accusation that a black person could hurl at another black person was 'She think she white,' which meant 'She's not thinking right, she's crazy.' It's hitting at the very center of what one builds an ego on, a self. If you don't know what you are, how can you be a self? It's an insult that destroys the self in formation. What is 'light,' anyway? I had a dinner party for my mother not too long ago, and afterward, talking with my black friends about my relationship with her, they said that she is darker than I am, that I look more white. I had always thought that she was lighter than I am. Another time, after a reading, a black woman said to me, 'What makes you think you look white?' What makes people see what they think they see? And even further, how do we know that what they report they see is what they really see -- even about themselves? Racism does funny things to mirrors. If reality is so twisted, how do we know what we see?

"I'm thinking of a story that this one woman, Carla Gary, told me. She had just moved into an all-white neighborhood, she's playing in the playground, she's five years old, and suddenly this white girl starts screaming, 'The nigger's going to get me, the nigger's going to get me,' and the girl starts running out of the playground. Carla runs after her, because she's scared, too. Who's the nigger? She's terrified. The white girl looks over her shoulder and sees her, and she screams even more because Carla is chasing after her. So Carla runs all the way home and she tells her mother, 'The nigger's going to get me, the nigger's going to get me,' and her mother is crying and laughing at the same time. She says, 'Carla, you are the nigger,' and Carla says, 'No, I'm not. I can't be. I can't be that thing that girl is screaming about.' "

Derricotte continues: "It's almost as if in order to accept that you're that terrible thing, you'd have to be crazy. In some ways, we're constantly running away from that terrifying self that we can't conceive as being us. There are so many things that can warp our sense of what's real. People would like to believe that you can look at someone and tell what they are. Because that would make you feel safe. Most poets know that's not the case."

At the moment, Derricotte is finishing a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, which collects journal entries written over the past twenty years, and is at work on a new collection of poems. With Cornelius Eady, she is also preparing to run Cave Canem, a workshop retreat for African-American poets (with no tuition requirements) this summer in New York State.

In her mid-fifties now, Derricotte does not fight her designation as a black activist and feminist poet -- labels that, ironically, sometimes introduce unfair limits -- but she is hardly rigid, nor is she given to demagoguery. Rather, Derricotte is gregarious, unaffected, and youthful, and possesses an abundant sense of humor, even with the most serious of issues: "People would like inspiring books that tell them what to do, something like Five Steps Not to Be a Racist," she says, laughing raucously. But then, as always, she becomes sincere about the matter at hand: "That's just not the truth. The easy solutions don't really prepare one for the hard work that needs to be done."