istory, past and present, Collins uses lyric form to x-ray whiteness's indelible and simultaneously invisible power. Though many of the references are expected--state-sanctioned racist violence by white Americans, white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, blackface minstrelsy-- what distinguishes these poems is Collins' skill as a poet, her faith in language and its limits, her wit and humor. Many poems read as though she raised an antenna to capture the warped frequencies underlining our body politic. "[A woman caller said two black men]" (poem number 37) begins
a woman caller said two black men
no the woman said two men were seen
when the cop came said the black were no
said almost nothing she hadn't seen
the one inside the white cop said
was angry hostile a black man who
asked for the white cop's didn't know (52)
This poem echoes Cornelius Eady's brilliant collection Brutal Imagination, while also referencing Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s July 2009 arrest at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, yet its associative repetition abstracts the scenario, impressing upon the reader its dangerous absurdity. In another poem, "[could get a credit card loan car]," Collins taxonomies in part what white privilege is and how it works, again abstracted beyond the personal to the structural:
could get a credit card loan car
come and go without a never had
to think about a school work job
to open doors to buy a rent a nice
place yard park beside a walk
in any store without a never had
to dress to buy a dress shoes under-
wear to understate or -play myself (41)
My chief concern about this book is whether white readers will seriously and actively engage with it; much of what Taylor takes up is second nature to people of color in the US, but might be more than a little helpful to the Lena Dunhams, among others, out there. White Papers is no The Invention of the White Race, but it is something.
In Apart, poet Catherine Taylor takes up the task of examining whiteness through her and her mother's experiences via the history and society of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, where from 1948 through 1994 a state-sanctioned system of racial categorization, segregation and violence more than equal to the Jim Crow laws of the U. S. South held swap, warping the lives of everyone who lived within it. Taylor would not be the first white person, and certainly not the first white person with ancestral ties to South Africa, to address the apartheid system, but what sets her and this book apart--for she, like her mother, a South African native, and yet differently from her, is both psychically and geographically apart and a part of (party to) that system--is that she did not grow up there, but primarily in the US, only spending extended stays during childhood, until the Soweto Uprising in 1976. Apart unfolds like a densely-packed archive, ordered along the axes of affect, memory and anecdote, unfolding not as conventional memoir might, chronologically or historically, but in six sometimes unruly sections, combining poetry, prose, theoretical musings, documentary material, archival images, and annotations.
This approach mostly succeeds in depicting and embodying the messiness--the contradictions, the complexities, the multiple ironies, the experiential limitations--of being white in South Africa, of being a white liberal, as was Taylor's mother, who as a student attended the Black Sash Advice Group, a women's anti-apartheid organization, and Taylor is. It portrays the challenges of attempting to engage with the power and capital apartheid accorded both, conferred on all white people whose lives it touched, whether they wanted it, accepted it, or rejected it. Taylor rightly and repeatedly notes black South Africans' criticisms of white liberals' attempts to determine the shape of black freedom, and also attends to apartheid's intersections with class and gender issues. Her aim is "resonance", which "evokes associations and emotions," but which also "can result in catastrophic failure of the vibrating structure." Apartheid did coll