To Render Human: On Blackness and Implications of Persona in Poetry with Cheswayo Mphanza

Registration for this workshop has closed.

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Please Note: The third session will take place on Thursday, July 7th. There is no meeting on Monday, July 4th.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon proclaims, “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.” Being human, or the attempt at being human, is tricky business. Especially when one considers the parameters of race and gender. Perhaps that’s why persona poetry writing, literally meaning “mask,” is a daunting endeavor. What does it mean to write in an objectified body about inhabiting the persona of monsters, objects, and other objectified people? There has to be an argument made here about the ever elusive difficulty of reaching, reclaiming, and reconfiguring of the human/e that Black writers have attempted to arrive at through the use of persona.

In this workshop, we are going to explore the persona poetry, and perhaps ekphrastic as well, of Black writers in terms of how they think about being Black and projecting their sense of selfhood onto others. In turn, we will produce our own persona writing and interrogate what this transference of self means. Are we actually writing in persona or are we revealing our own troubling notions about what it means to be our (non)selves or an/other? To uncover this mask, we will look to the work of Ross Gay, Safiya Sinclair, Tyehimba Jess, Donika Kelly, Terrance Hayes, Evie Shockley, and Frank B. Wilderson III.

Capacity: 12