Toi Derricotte entered the main room of the Bethlehem Chapel about five minutes before her 5:30 p.m. talk was scheduled to begin on Oct. 22. With a big smile, she walked slowly through the small audience, greeting students she saw and asking if they were writers. When I told her that I was writing about her poetry reading for The Hoot, she recalled a recent interview that she did for the student newspaper at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches writing.
Making her way across the room, she listened intently as students opened up to her about their work. Under the soft yellow glow of the chapel’s ceiling lights, she approached the podium. She brought with her a kind, gentle energy that filled the small room and put the audience at ease. Following an introduction by Professor Elizabeth Bradfield (CW), Derricotte softly sang “Deep Song,” a Billie Holiday track about loneliness from 1956.
Derricotte read selections from her new book, titled “I: New and Selected Poems,” as well as her 1999 memoir “The Black Notebooks.” Derricotte has won numerous awards for her literature, including her new book, which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. She is also the co-founder of Cave Canem, a non-profit organization that features the voices of African American poets. Her visit was a featured event within Brandeis’ 2019-2020 Creative Writing Reading Series.
At the beginning of her talk, Derricotte said that she first heard Billie Holiday when she was fourteen and realized that she was not alone in her sadness. Then, in her twenties, she said, she read Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” during a writing workshop and had the revelation that she could take unspoken, torturous thoughts and feelings from within and make them into something passionate and powerful. She described poetry as a mirror that she uses to see herself in a new way and credited writing for helping her cope with life.
“If I didn’t have poetry, I’d probably be dead,” she said.
She began by reading pieces that focused on her troubled relationship with her father. In her poetry, Derricotte described her childhood, recalling heart-wrenching memories like begging her father not to beat her when she had a migraine and attempting to hold back her tears so he would not accuse her of crying for attention. Before reading a poem about her father titled “When the Goddess Makes Love to Me,” Derricotte said that to change in the present, one has to grapple with personal history, even if it is traumatic.
Due to the emotional weight of Derricotte’s work, she sings her poems instead of reading them. She said that she sings the same melodies for her poems at each reading, and when she writes, she is “writing by a song.” In her head, she said, the words have musical sounds.
In much of Derricotte’s work, America’s troubled racial history forces the author to grapple with her identity. Derricotte is African American but passes as white, and said she often feels that she is doing something wrong when she’s simply walking in her own skin. She then read her 1997 poem “Passing,” which describes Derricotte’ discomfort with being black in a literature class. In the poem, she asks her peers, “Was I passing when I was just sitting here, before I told you?” Derricotte interjected in the middle of reading “Passing” that she still has complex experiences regarding her race to this day, telling a brief story about an encounter that morning in the airport. Derricotte described making a comment to a woman about how black folks greet each other. She said she could see the woman wondering if Derricotte herself was black, and after Dericotte informed the woman of her race, the two of them talked about passing as white in America.
She then finished reading “Passing” and posed a question to the audience. At the end of the poem, Derricotte describes the following scenario: Her father, who also passes as white, goes to get his driver’s license updated. The employee, without looking up, asks her father what race he is. Her father remains silent. The employee then looks up. What race, Derricotte asked the audience, does the employee write down?
After taking answers from audience members, Derricotte said that she thinks the employee would have written down that her father was white, since in that era, one would not challenge someone’s whiteness. She also said that race makes people “think crazy.” However, she added, in the modern era, “You have to think crazy to survive.” To conclude her poetry reading, Derricotte sang another Billie Holiday song called “Everything I Have Is Yours.”
During the audience Q&A, Derricotte shared more about her background and what led to her becoming a poet. She explained that her family expected her to be a doctor or a teacher and never even mentioned professions like poet artist. She told the audience that she had planned to be a doctor. However, she became pregnant at age 19 and left her hometown of Detroit after graduating from Wayne State University in 1965. Upon moving to New York City, she took writing workshops and graduated from New York University in 1984 with a master’s degree in English literature.
She also explained more about her relationship with her father during the Q&A. She said that at age 19, when she was pregnant, she went to a Catholic home for girls and gave birth. When she came home to show her son to her father, Derricotte discovered that he had taken all of her poems from her childhood footlocker and burned them in a fire. Speaking about a possible reason for her father’s behavior, Derricotte said that her father didn’t think he could ever be loved. She then spoke more broadly about how some people tragically lose the ability to love. “One of the most brutal things that happens to us is the way we’re afraid to express tenderness and connection,” Derricotte said.
At Brandeis, Derricotte fearlessly shared her struggles, memories and observations through her poetry. In her concluding remarks, she told the audience that writing can help us learn to love ourselves, forgive others and understand loved ones. Derricotte’s talk, like her poetry, was something awe-inspiring.
