Gregory Pardlo Addresses Yusef Komunyakaa

Double consciousness, put simply, is an alienated self-awareness. “This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” as DuBois defines it in The Souls of Black Folk, abstracts the inner lives of African Americans and divides the imagination against itself. If the black self and the white gaze were circles in a Venn diagram, instead of an almond-shaped overlap, we’d find the white gaze eclipsing the black self in varying degrees. DuBois’ symbol for double consciousness is the veil. In reality, as a poet, I can’t actually look at myself through the eyes of others. Whatever others are present in my head when I’m alone at my desk writing, they are only present because I’ve conjured them. Their voices are my own. I am the one who imagines, based on my experience and cultural knowledge, what others are seeing and reading when they see and read me and my work. This is not to discount the very real existence of #BBQBecky and her crew, even the ones armed and in uniform, but to suggest that double consciousness is an inside job.

Readers often praise your work for showing what it means to be a black man in [insert generic spatial-temporal context]. You don’t fancy yourself a racial ambassador in that way, I gather. In interviews you’ve disapproved of writing and interpreting African American literature as a “service literature” made to compensate for gaps and omissions in the literary record (a challenge you do seem to take on in 2004 with Pleasure Dome). Neither are you addressing white supremacy explicitly because to do so would require you to dredge from inside your imagination the sedimentary dung that is the American racist imagination, a process which, unless you’re writing poetry that simplifies the world to good and evil, threatens to poison the mind.

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