Will Harris on Writing's Use of Racial Markers

For the latest Poets & Writers "Craft Capsule," the magazine's series of "micro craft essays," Will Harris explores racial markers in a piece of writing. "In deploying a racial marker, the speaker reveals themselves as marked. And they can only be marked within the context of racially exploitative society," writes Harris, who weaves work from Monica Youn and Stuart Hall, among others, into a close-reading of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. An excerpt:

When I feel trapped, marked, incapable of writing from a position that is my own—and, at other times, anxious that I’m making myself complicit in the consumption of my perceived “authenticity”—I read “Tan Tien” by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. 

It recounts a journey, probably to the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. You could read it as a poem by a mixed-race poet, born in Beijing and raised in Massachusetts, traveling to China as an adult. But that reading would contain it within essentializing categories it overwhelms. In Thinking Its Presence, the scholar Dorothy Wang suggests the poem requires a different approach to other “minority texts.” Whereas such texts (and persons) are often read as “fixed”—[Meiling] Jin’s poem, for example, uses clear grammatical structures to echo the blunt trauma of her experience—Berssenbrugge exploits a more fluid and abstract language, largely devoid of racial markers, reflecting a racialized experience characterized, in Wang’s words, by “contingency and relationality.” Take this stanza…

Take that stanza at P&W.