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The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, by Toi Derricotte
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"The Black Notebooks is the most profound document I have read on racism in America today. . . . [It] is not just one of the best books on race I have ever read but just simply one of the best books I have ever read."―Sapphire
The Black Notebooks is one of the most extraordinary and courageous accounts of race in this country, seen through the eyes of a light-skinned black woman and a respected American poet. It challenges all our preconceived notions of what it means to be black or white, and what it means to be human.- Sales Rank: #207270 in Books
- Color: Multicolor
- Published on: 1999-06-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .70" w x 5.00" l, .46 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Amazon.com Review
Realizing that her light skin and "good hair" conspired to give her a unique, unasked-for perspective on the racial divide in the United States, African American poet Toi Derricotte inscribed her anguish in two decades' worth of journal entries. The Black Notebooks records countless moments when Derricotte was showered with offhand entitlements and racist confidences by whites who assumed she, too, was white. She speaks ambivalently of milking such moments, deliberately making end runs around her dark-skinned husband, Bruce, while looking for a home in an all-white suburb or hoping for a decent hotel room. Derricotte talks bluntly, too, of a self-loathing that accompanies being black in America and of not being "black enough." Her honest, angry, painful truth-telling veers into self-absorption and repetition, but perhaps that's fitting: racism hammers away at people in tiny and huge events repeated day after day. Says Derricotte, "My skin causes certain problems continuously, problems that open the issue of racism over and over like a wound."
From Library Journal
A black woman whose light skin has allowed her to pass for white, poet/ professor Derricotte speaks of her tormented struggles with her racial identity.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Poet Derricotte offers this portrait of a black woman's frustrating experience with racial prejudice from both outside and within her own people, and her own ambivalence about the color of her skin. This volume is largely comprised of the journals that Derricotte kept when she lived for the first time in a mostly white community. The author, who is light-skinned enough to ``pass'' when she wants, recounts keeping her dark-skinned husband away from real-estate brokers so that she could be shown better homes in nicer neighborhoods. This process secured her a house in an affluent suburb of New York but led to so much self-loathing and examination of her own feelings about the darker-skinned members of her race that she suffered a deep depression and ultimately separated from her husband. She wrote The Black Notebooks, she notes in her introductory essay, not out of ``desire'' but to ``save [her] life.'' At her best, Derricotte is reminiscent of Nella Larsen, for whom ``passing'' was a primary topic, and Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebooks, which is also about avoiding breakdown through writing. Some pieces in the collection are less cohesive than others and are subsequently less impressive from an artistic standpoint than pieces with a strong overarching theme. Typical of the latter group are ``The Club,'' which concerns Derricotte's and her husband's sojourn in the white suburbs and the country club that they were never invited to join, and ``Diaries at an Artists' Colony,'' with its collection of reactions from fellow colonists to her revelation of her racial background. ``Blacks in the U.'' and ``Face to Face,'' on the other hand, are more disjointed, but their point is not lost: It's not easy to be a black person in either a racially divided country or a color-conscious black community. A very strong first prose offering on an always provocative subject. (Author tour) -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Dark, wrenching story of woman tortured by her color
By Dera R Williams
It took me longer than usual to finish a book of this size. Inside of this little book was heart wrenching anguish and I just could not read it through without interruptions, reading other things and giving myself a rest.
Is Ms. Derracotte a victim of the tragic mulatto syndrome or is some of her anguish of her own making?
Coming from an upper class African American family that has kept the blood line "light and bright" for generations, the author's journey as a white- looking black woman comes to a climax when she moves to an all-white exclusive neighborhood in New York. It's not that they don't want her there, they just don't want her trying to assimilate into their way of life. The fact that she conducted the initial business of purchasing the house without her husband (he was more identifiable black, thus she participated in the " passing" game.) should have been a clue, nevertheless she was determined to make them accept her. And this is where I had conflict. Why would a black woman who was raised around other affluent blacks, accepted and identified as black, want to be in these people's country clubs and social circles? Why did she not avail herself to the groups that she grew up among, The Links, Jack and Jill, etc. and be happy where she would be accepted. Even as a poet/writer there are groups to belong, many of them interracial who will accept one on the basis of common goals.
More than a book on a woman conflicted by her blackness of lack thereof is the sad commentary on race identity and how America has pitted blacks among each other based on skin color going back to slavery. Nella Larson, Jessie Fauset, and Wallace Thurman and numerous other authors have written on the this issue of characters who are conflicted and the schizophrenic existence they live. Also how one's family views and upbringing affects how we feel about ourselves. When pride in one's race and self and not enough self-love is not stressed enough then we have these kind of stories. Some blacks of the author's background have similar stories, others do not go through this much drama.
I met Ms. Derracotte about three years ago when she was a writer-in-residence at Mills College here in Oakland. I went to her reading, met her and have to say that she seems more at peace with herself. She is a cofounder of a writers retreat for African American poets. In answer to one reviewer who asked what was the point of this book, I think the answer was this was a catharsis, a cleansing for her soul.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful
By A Customer
I liked the book, and I really wanted more about certain things. It's interesting to get a glimpse into her world and its extraordinary circumstances. Her story helps to identify the nuances of racism today. Also, she zeroes us in on some very intimate moments in her life, and that raises questions about human relations in general. I thought it was brave of her to share like this. I'm sure I would read another installment if she wrote one.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A Profound Witnessing
By BeadMoonStardust
The Black Notebooks is likely the most unabashed work I've ever read about the human experience in America. Add to that the issue of race, identity, and desperate desire to 'fit' and 'be' In--only to be denied--and you have a poignantly engrossing treatise on Race, Psychology and Sociology in the US, Mid-To Late 20th Century. Within this book Derricotte exposes her trauma of living as a woman who visually (to whites mostly) appears to be white, and because of it, is relentlessly bombarded with slurs and racist ideology, spoken as plain as day and without apology or consciousness. These routine offerings (endured) by the white people in the author's life are perpetrated because of the belief that she is 'one of them.'
What is grinding in Derricotte's work is that recurring moment of awareness within herself that she is black and that others speaking so shamelessly do not see it. Further, the author must then decide [again and again] to address the slights (by telling them of her ethnicity) or ignore them out of fear of being 'found out' and alienated/ostracized by the society that she chooses to surround herself with. And that is, in the midst of what has to be a schizophrenia-inducing ongoing nightmare, part of the issue--left unadressed--as I see it. Derricotte has been raised in a middle-class/upper-class world where she says all the people she knew loved and touched were black--albeit apparently of lighter flesh tone like she is. That said, her choosing to live exclusively among whites seems like an escape from everyone else--even though her husband is visibly black, though he was raised in an all white environment and never saw himself, his blackness as something of an asset.
It seems to me that Derricotte could have made different choices earlier in her life that would have reduced the bludgeoning of racism she faced on a daily basis by choosing often to hide in the midst of white society. Perhaps her upbringing--for all its exceptional and exclusionary (among other blacks) 'qualities' contributed significantly and maybe unconsciously to her wanting to be buried in the bosom of whiteness.
Many paradoxes exist within this memoir. The psychological dismantling, soul shredding and ultimately soul expanding experiences offered here are without a doubt, memorable, indelible and personal. And in some ways, universal, because the ultimate goal of living is to, in fact, live, and to love, celebrate and rejoice the gift of life itself. For all of the author's courageous, outrageous and intense revelations on race and identity, we are made more whole because of her honest sharing and unique perspective on the subjects of racism and all the other isms that are a byproduct of it.
This book is recommended to anyone wanting to dive headfirst into the murky waters of self-discovery through and ultimately beyond race.
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