The Known Unknown: Persona, Empathy, and the Limits of Imagination

We poets are a passionate bunch. I don’t go in much for poet stereotypes, but I think this much is true, at least as it applies to our feelings about poetry itself. We care a lot about language and we’re always looking for the best way to do what we do—it’s one of the things I enjoy about us. We tend to argue amongst ourselves about what poetry is, to opine on what it can be and what it should be, debating the merits of our craft and the ethics of our practice. The conversation is ongoing, and sometimes heated, but it’s not often that our feuds bubble up to the surface of mainstream American consciousness. The discourse tends to unfold within the niche confines of our poetry culture. Every once in a while, though, one of our controversies shows up in The New Yorker, The Guardian, or The New York Times.

I’ve been wondering what it is in these conflicts that draws us in, and sometimes draws national media attention, and I’ve noticed that almost without fail, the origins of these quakes lie along the same fault line: identity. Michael Derrick Hudson’s yellowface performance as Yi-Fen Chou. Anders Carlson-Wee slipping on the skin of a homeless person—arguably, a homeless black person. Ailey O’Toole swapping out a few words from lines by Rachel McKibbens, a Chicana poet, and calling them her own, going so far as to tattoo her transgression onto her own flesh.

These poets have all engaged in the questionable practice of borrowing—the name, the experience, the language—from the life of another. Or, more specifically, from the life of an other: a person of color, a person relegated to society’s margins by their background or class. In each case, this marginalized position was one the borrower did not share with the person they borrowed from.

I use the term “borrowed” here loosely. One might also call it appropriation. Or theft. It all depends on who’s speaking. And the question of who’s speaking may well be where the tectonic plates of this debate keep shifting.

It’s worth noting that the well-worn adage, “good writers borrow, great writers steal,” is often attributed to the Great Writer T.S. Eliot^[1], a man whose identity lines up squarely at the center of the dominant culture. That approach may seem well and good—or great—among those writing from a position where their credibility, authority, and the value of their words are rarely questioned. But what about those who have to fight to be heard? There’s a lot more at stake when you’re pushing against the doors of a tradition that’s inclined to overlook and dismiss you, when you’ve struggled to find your way onto the stage, only to have someone saunter forward and plant themselves between you and the microphone. Most often, the voices decrying these moments of theft are loudest from the margins.

When it comes to the act of speaking from another’s voice or perspective, there is, of course, a poetic tradition to which we can look: the persona poem. But rather than consider the use of persona purely on the level of craft, seeing it as simply another tool in a writer’s toolbox, I think it’s crucial to consider the ethical implications that lie within the choice to infiltrate another’s voice. If you’re a poet writing in persona, what is your relationship to the voice you’ve chosen? How near or far are you from its experience? If you get it wrong, whom will you have to answer to, and how much do they mean to you? Do you have more power than the speaker of the poem, or do they have power over you? Do they have the opportunity to speak for themselves—and what does it mean for you, specifically, to speak for them?

In a recent conversation about the murky moral territory that is writing in persona, one poet expressed frustration with this line of questioning. The problem, they contended, was that we had arrived at a moment in our culture where we no longer trusted the author’s imagination, and the trouble with this mindset is that imagination is the source of empathy—because isn’t that what empathy asks of us? To imagine the lives and feelings of those whose circumstances are unlike our own?

I’m not so sure.

We tend to think of these words—imagination, empathy—as belonging unquestionably in the realm of the good. But imagination, for one, can be brutal. As Claudia Rankine observes in Citizen, “because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying.” The looming specter of the predatory black man, the black man as criminal, as near-supernatural beast, is an invention of the white imagination—an imagining that has led to the deaths of Michael Brown, Jonathan Ferrell, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and countless others whose names dot our history, or were lost or forgotten to a history   uninterested in remembering them. The image of the black woman as invulnerable, hypersexual temptress means that so often crimes against us go unrecognized as crimes—allowing a man like R. Kelly to habitually victimize young black women with impunity for decades. And it is within the white imagination that black children are prohibited from fully inhabiting the space of childhood innocence. Given that imagination has been turned against my people time and again, I don’t think I owe anyone’s imagination my trust unless they’ve earned it.

But is imagination a requirement of empathy? And is empathy an essential element in recognizing and respecting the reality of another? When I think about the times I’ve tried to share my version of existence with another person, to tell them what it’s like to move through the world in this particular body, I don’t know that I’m asking them to imagine it. And I’m not sure it’s empathy I’m after in these moments, either.

I find something uncomfortable about the exaltation of empathy. In all honestly, when a person describes themselves to me as “an empath,” my hackles go up. In a recent talk at The Racial Imaginary Institute’s On Whiteness symposium, sociologist Sadhana Bery offered some insight into this unease, as she unpacked the phenomenon of white empathy: “In its most elemental form, white empathy is a practice of consumptive identification, in which whites consume black experiences and subjectivities. The sensibility that this identification generates, and the sympathy that it ultimately yields, produces in whites feelings of goodwill towards themselves,” she argued. “White empathy is something done to blacks, by using blacks.”

So perhaps at the center of many of these conflicts is the issue of consumption, or, as Bery put it, “consumptive identification.” In the best of cases, one may argue that the author who attempts to speak from a vantage or through a language not their own is doing so in order to explore, understand, and connect to an unfamiliar experience—that it is the heartfelt, generous gesture of one who wants to better know the world. But in the worst case, at the core of such an exercise may lie a sort of self-congratulation, and the arrogant belief that the space of an other is theirs to occupy: in which case, it strikes me as more of a colonizing impulse than one of genuine interest and respect. 

I don’t mean to say that a writer should be limited to writing only what they know, or that no one should put pen to paper unless it is to record a thing that they have literally lived. After all, when we sit down to write a poem, who is it that speaks? Is it our voice calling from the page, our shadow twin, or someone else altogether? But whether or not the I of the poem is the same as the I of the author, the author is always in the room; the author is always the creator of that space. And the space the author makes of the page is never neutral: it is informed by everything the author is and isn’t, everything the author has seen or felt or survived, every center of power to which the author has access, or to which the author’s access has been denied. We live within systems of power that surround us and invade every aspect of our lives, and try as we might, we can’t leave all those mechanisms behind when we come to the page. As far as I’m concerned, it’s best that we acknowledge that fact as writers, and be conscious of it as we write. Especially when we’re attempting to write a reality that’s not our own.

For my part, I suppose it all comes down to this: I do not want to be consumed. My existence and experience of this life is not for consumption by a culture that’s more eager to listen to my story if I’m not at its center, and if I’m not the one telling it (see Green Book, The Help, Black Like Me). I don’t need anyone to imagine what it’s like for me, superimposing their version of my life over my own lived experience. I’m right here, ready to speak: just let me tell you what my life is, and you can listen. And when I speak, it isn’t empathy I’m looking for, it’s understanding—though perhaps not the kind of understanding one might think. It’s the understanding of an open mind, ready to receive my words and believe them, while accepting the impossibility of knowing the world exactly as I know it.

When I learn about a life that’s vastly different from my own, whose challenges are alien to me, whose sorrows I’ve never weathered, what strikes me is that I cannot imagine. I try to conjure their reality and my imagination fails. I reach toward a sense of comprehension, but I cannot fully arrive at it. I cannot contain this knowledge because it isn’t mine to hold. What I come to understand is that I will never know what it’s like, not really. What I feel is not what the other feels—what I feel is the gulf between what I know and what they know. It can be a devastating chasm of a feeling. What if, instead of empathy, it is this sort of understanding that we seek? What if, instead of attempting to step into the place of an other, I step to face them, feeling the distance that separates their life from mine, ready to heed the words they offer into the space between us?