I Am Halves, I Am Pieces

We’re reading Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within over at TweetSpeak Poetry. We’re into Part 2, “Inner and Outer Worlds,” and the author has continued to come up with a whole array of exercises to stimulate thinking, inspiration and creativity.

One exercise she suggested, however, went a bit over the top. Encouraging the reader to rethink gender roles, she suggested that men apply makeup – or have someone apply it to them, and put on women’s clothes, to see what it felt like. And then write about the experience.

Uh, no.

I noted various exercises that I could do (or be willing to do), and then came to the suggestion to “write about your relationship with your racial/cultural identity. When were you first aware of being Asian, Caucasian, Jewish, ‘different’ from other people? Did you grow up within a certain group, and/or as an outsider to other groups? See if you can recall a specific incident when you experienced your ‘otherness.’”

That was it.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in segregation. I remember the separate water fountains and bus seating. I remember the separate bathrooms for “white and colored.” I remember the segregated schools, which were giving way just as I was entering high school.

As significant as racial differences were, other differences were equally profound for me – religious ( I know what it is to be a religious minority amidst a religious majority), ethnic, and economic – and the difference between living in a region more akin to the Caribbean than to the United States yet growing up in a what was a very Americanized suburb.

Sometimes the differences and conflicts were so pointed that you didn’t feel “whole.”

I Am Halves, I Am Pieces

I am half redneck and half coonass

I am half north Louisiana and half south

I am half Southerner and half New Orleanian

I am half city and half suburb

I talked like Indiana in a town full of yats and chawmers

My family was half Catholic and half not

I grew up Protestant in a Catholic sea

My Americanized suburb was full

of French and Spanish names

The ground felt solid but rested on liquid

My family still fought the Civil War

(and still lost)

I am smorgasboard and melting point

I am English and Irish and French and German

with African-American cousins

I learned Beatles in a place of jazz and blues

I have half-brother and half-sister

from twice-married mother and thrice-married dad

I am halves

I am pieces

To join in the discussion and see what our leader Lyla Lindquist is up to, take a look at today’s post at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph: New Orleans Streetcar 1950 by Robert Frank.