Quotes from Toi Derricotte

Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

I hate it when, after I let a white person know they've said something racist, I end up having to listen for hours to their life.

Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

The job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.

What is more punished among the angry than anger? among the unsatisfied than desire? among the hate-filled than hate? among the frightened than fear?

It is not just the language that we are sharing, it is what we don't say. We are calling each other out of loneliness, across space, out of recognition of our beauty and power, and we are willing to go past the destruction and hurt we have done to reach each other.

A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charred body gives off light--a halo burns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip, another with his arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection.

Violence is central in our lives, a constant and unavoidable reality. Experience is not a linear construct moving from one point to another - childhood to maturity, "bad" to "good," beginning to end - but a wheel turning around a point that shifts between hope and despair. "At the still point of the turning world," the job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.

we were brave before memory.

Light skin gives me such privileges that my complaints are not worthy. I'm not "positive" enough. Not "black" enough. I'm not a "real" black person. Worst of all are the terrible choices - the possibility of losing connections to those I love, betraying them, those who have done terrible things but at the same time have had to survive within the context of racism. Whose side am I on?

Sometimes memory is like a dream. The worst nightmares are forgotten. Sometimes living is a nightmare. Just getting up, meeting your neighbors, and walking down the street.

My Father Still Sleeping After Surgery In spite of himself, my father loved me. In spite of the hands that beat me, in spite of the mouth that kept silent, in spite of the face that turned cruel as a gold Chinese king, he could not control the love that came out of him. The body is monumental, a colossus through which he breathes. His hands crawl over his stomach jerkily as sand crabs on five legs; he makes a fist like the fist of a newborn.

This is an act of destruction of the self, an undoing of the self's protection. Over and over I face the wall, the way in which I must confront my own complicity. Even the smallest fragment is a great victory.

To be published as a "woman of color" makes me squiggle on a pin: I want to be read by white people, and not just white people who are interested in "black" writing. I want even my speaking about color to speak in some universal way.

The effects of the great social forces trickle down to the most vulnerable. Racism is a form of child abuse.

We are all wounded by racism, but for some of us those wounds are anesthetized. None of us, black or white, wants to feel the pain that racism has caused. But when you feel it, you're awake.