Race, Identity, and Self in Two American Poems

Introduction: Race as Self-Exploration

Both Aurora Levins Morales' 1986 poem Child of the Americas and Patricia Smith's 1991 poem What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren't) examine the impact of race upon the author's sense of self and identity. America is supposed to be a class-blind and race-blind society where all people are created equal. However, throughout most of American history there has been either a subtle or not-so-subtle undercurrent of racism in terms of how citizens of non-white ethnic groups have been treated. Members of historically discriminated-against groups wish to retain their heritage without losing their individuality. The struggle to be a unique person who transcends easy categorization — yet who also honors her heritage — defines both the Morales and the Smith poems.

For Morales, the struggle to craft an identity lies in the difficulty of honoring her "hyphenated" characteristics as a Latina, Jewish, Puerto Rican, and American simultaneously. For Smith, the difficulty lies in being an African-American woman in an America that defines black womanhood in terms of negatives — as something to be erased through hair straightening, or as something exotic, sexual, and primitive in a pejorative way. Both poets must create a new narrative and a new sense of voice for themselves in order to be regarded as worthy of speaking as poets. They also seek to redefine their status as fully sexual beings in positive terms.

Morales and the Multiplicity of Latina Identity

Aurora Levins Morales begins her poem proclaiming "I am a child of the Americas," stressing that she is both a North American and of Central America. She says that Spanish is in "my flesh, / Ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips" — in the sense that it defines her appearance, her language, and her culture. It is where she comes from and is part of her heritage. However, Morales also clearly characterizes herself as an English-language writer: "I speak English with passion: it's the tongue of my consciousness, / a flashing knife blade of cristal, my tool, my craft." Her secondary language also informs her consciousness, but she is clearly a hyphenated American rather than simply a Latina or Caribbean resident. "I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. / I am not Taíno. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back. I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there." (Taíno refers to the native people of Puerto Rico.)

Morales expresses the classic exile's fate in literature, but her poem does not mourn this status — rather, it celebrates her unique positioning as a source of creativity, specifically linguistic creativity. Speaking and understanding different languages does not create barriers to self-expression. Rather, it opens the poet's eyes to new ways of speaking and seeing herself that monocultural inhabitants might lack. The "flashing knife blade" of English she invokes — a metaphor that suggests both a classical rapier wit and the stereotypical knife fight of a Latino figure à la West Side Story — is a source of unique inspiration, never a cause for regret about what might have been lost through migration. Living betwixt and between mainstream, homogenized American culture and the various identities encompassed in her background sustains her.

The poem is notably absent of nostalgic regret and the desire to look back at how things might have been had Morales simply remained in her homeland, or if her homeland had remained untouched by colonial outsiders. It is a powerful statement of identity and security in the poet's sense of self. The poem echoes the sentiment expressed by Roberto Bolaño in his speech "Literature and Exile" to the Austrian Society for Literature (2000):

"Of course, a refrain is heard throughout Europe and it's the refrain of the suffering of exiles, a music composed of complaints and lamentations and a baffling nostalgia. Can one feel nostalgia for the land where one nearly died? Can one feel nostalgia for poverty, intolerance, arrogance, injustice? The refrain, intoned by Latin Americans and also by writers from other impoverished or traumatized regions, insists on nostalgia, on the return to the native land, and to me this has always sounded like a lie. Books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in the memory."

So long as she can write, suggests Morales, she has an identity. The various components that make up the mosaic of her identity — being American, Puerto Rican, Jewish, "a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean" — are all aspects of her art and character, but no single shard of the mosaic sums up her character entirely. All of her must be considered to gain a complete picture of this "child of many diaspora, / born into this continent at a crossroads."

The need for Morales to make such a sweeping claim lies in the fact that there is often a temptation to offer a blanket characterization of Latina literature and to define Latina writers merely by their ethnic identity. This form of tokenism and exoticization is almost as harmful as denying the profound influence that ethnicity can have in shaping one's worldview. The collection from which the poem is drawn, Getting Home Alive (1986), written in collaboration with her mother, Rosario Morales, is an attempt both to lay claim to the specialness of Latina heritage and to allow for the multiplicity of Latin American identities contained in one persona. "Important themes in Getting Home Alive are female Puerto Rican identity, third world and working-class feminism, women's relationships, Puerto Rican multiple identity (Latin American, African, Jewish, North American)" (Miguela 2011).

Morales also addresses the difficulties of holding a multiplicity of identities when a member of one of the groups she belongs to marginalizes another. Within Morales' identity — Jewish, American, Latina, Puerto Rican — prejudice, anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny can still occur between members of the component groups. This makes balancing her multiplicity of identities all the more important, so that she does not marginalize any single aspect of her character. "I have a personal commitment to confronting racism wherever I find it — including in Jewish communities — and in confronting anti-Semitism wherever I find it, including in communities of people of color," Morales stated in one interview (Doughty 1995).

Being a member of a minority group does not make one immune from criticism of being racist, which makes Morales all the more determined to celebrate her full sense of self. "There are differences, as well, between the ways Chicanos and Puerto Ricans have been colonized, and in the specific ways racism has impacted us. These specific histories of oppression can create challenges to our capacity to build alliances" (Doughty 1995). In celebrating the different aspects of herself, Morales creates a sense of group identity in her poem that still allows her to be a unique individual — a child of many Americas, a speaker with one voice that can speak in many languages.

The Body as Site of Identity in Morales

The greatest source of inspiration for Morales is the body. Although cultural definitions of the self may be incomplete and limited, the body in Morales' poem never lies and harmoniously harbors the author's collage of elements in all of their complexity (Miguela 2011). The poet speaks of herself as "Caribeña, island grown. Spanish is my flesh, / Ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips: the language of garlic and mangoes… I am of Latinoamérica, rooted in the history of my continent: I speak from that body" — a body that is whole.

This wholeness is a conscious artistic and political choice. By rooting her identity in the physical, Morales bypasses the reductive categories that cultural and national labels impose. The body becomes a living archive of her ancestry: African, Taíno, European, and Caribbean all co-exist in her skin, her hips, and her tongue. It is a deeply affirmative stance that culminates in the poem's closing declaration of completeness, a stark contrast with the bodily discomfort that governs Patricia Smith's poem.

Conclusion: Speaking as an Affirmative Act

Smith's poem does not end on a positive, upbeat note like Morales' work. But that does not necessarily mean that her poem is depressing. Rather, through the act of speaking itself, the poem is an affirmative assertion of the right of the poet — as a black woman — to express her pain by critiquing the dominant ways in which both black and white society offer her a means of self-expression. Both poems, through their catalogued lists of identity in the case of Morales, and Smith's list of self-defining experiences of black girlhood, attempt to instruct the reader to see the poet's identity in a more complex manner, beyond categories and stereotypes.