Callaloo

Sometimes in this homogenizing age of mass media (when plenty of people just want to look like the characters in “Friends”), we tend to forget that many Americans are confronted daily with the very difference of their own heritage.

—Rita Dove

Rita Dove’s work, more than is widely recognized, suggests that racial specificity is a necessary element in the writer’s craft, rather than a rupture in a seamless, universal language of art. To posit Dove’s “transcendence” of race as the ultimate sign of her excellence is to undermine the African-American tradition of writing which foregrounds and explores blackness and to perpetuate the myth that racial identity has played no real part in the formation of mainstream American literature. Instead, Dove’s oeuvre instructs us to consider “a kind of poetic consciousness of occupied space—of the space we inhabit, of the shape of thought and the pressure of absence” (15), as she argues in The Poet’s World. “Each poem,” she says, “has its house of sound, its own geographical reverberations” (18). This regard for space and the intersections of writers, readers, language, and the “reverberations” of inestimable forces exerting pressure on the writer’s page lends a rousing complexity to all of Dove’s work, including her reviews of other poets and writers.

Dove’s introduction to “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson is a definitive contribution to the debate about the Negroness or blackness of Tolson’s work. In opposition to critics who have often interpreted a transcendence of race in Tolson’s work, Dove defines his use of black tropes and traditions while identifying what she calls “the multitudes” in his poetry. Dove’s translation of Tolson’s work demonstrates that its epth and breadth are based on—not present despite—its explicit racial signification.

The habit of translation that admits Dove’s and Tolson’s works into the realm of Great Art based on the assumption that they move beyond race provides only a conditional acceptance upon which the threat of expulsion looms. If black writers like Dove and Tolson are granted a stay on the literary mainland because critics feel their race will not interrupt the status quo, then such translations actually situate them as potential exiles.

Because of their success as writers, it is difficult to imagine Dove or Tolson as an exile.¹ They both, for example, would become published authors whose work was solicited by the White House. Further, each would earn the title of Poet Laureate—Dove in the United States and Tolson in the West-African nation of Liberia. Both received honorary doctorates from their undergraduate institutions, Miami University in Ohio and Lincoln University in [End Page 789] Pennsylvania, respectively. Tolson also was awarded a chair in the humanities at Tuskegee where, it turns out, Dove taught for one semester as a writer-in-residence (Dove, Poet’s World 93). All of these accomplishments firmly situate Dove and Tolson among their literary peers. And yet, ironically, some critical translations of these poets’ achievements separate them from that part of their cultural and literary heritage that most significantly contributes to their power as artists.

Both poets have written compellingly, for example, about encounters in the South where they both witnessed elevated levels of racial tension. As Dove explains, her marriage to German novelist Fred Viebahn “had occasioned raised eyebrows or disdaining glances before, but never had we been exposed to such fiercely hateful glares” (Dove, Poet’s World 93). And the hate in those glares would erupt into action:

Once Fred and I were driving back from Tuskegee after a dusting of snow had canceled classes. Near Auburn University, in front of a fraternity house “garnished” with a large Confederate flag, we had to slow down in order to pass by throngs of frat boys waging a snowball fight; when they saw who we were, they blocked the street, began hurling snowballs at our car, and screamed epithets I was too scared to actually understand and which Fred was reluctant to repeat to me later. “No way you bastards!” Fred muttered, and...