A Review of Jaswinder Bolina’s Of Color — December 20, 2020 by Sherif Abdelkarim
Of Color (McSweeney’s, 2020), a collection of essays by poet-professor Jaswinder Bolina, looks at American identity across several places: from the midwestern homes of blue-collar immigrants, to the groves of academe, to our bizarre political arena, to the imagined future of imagining in America. Nine essays and a coda make up this volume. Many strive to teach a lesson and impart practical advice on personal, professional, and political life. One essay, “Writing Like a White Guy,” confronts the identity politics game that professional minorities are encouraged or compelled to play in this country. It teaches a basic fact about assimilation: this term, which “shares a Latin root with the word similar,” demands that outsiders negate their former identity for an other’s. (Fun fact: ethnic’s etymology’s even less savory.) Readers are advised to distinguish what they want for themselves from what others demand of them in order to make their life theirs: they’re urged to make the language they inherit in the classroom their own.
Unsurprisingly, Of Color’s lessons all center on questions of identity and inclusion in the United States, and all are unpleasant. Their solutions require our essential participation, a consoling if daunting proposition. In “Color Coded,” we learn that “the world isn’t as objective as all those college philosophy classes suggested.” The impressions of dead white men’s words work on us like magic to alter self-perceptions. Yesterday’s “white masters… are oblivious to those experiences of bigotry and exclusion that are condemnably common for the rest of us. In this essential matter, those writers of the literary canon are utterly ignorant, and so their reports on the human condition are gapingly incomplete.” Bolina and fellow artists have striven to contribute reports of their own by interacting with the wider world outside academia.
If non-whites—I mean non-privileged, non-normative, or non-identifying-as-white; more below—if they can and do contribute to Western civilization, Bolina insists on their freedom to pursue the fields and topics that occasion them, ahead of the conflicting expectations thrust upon them. To the privileged, non-white artists Bolina entrusts the task of delivering their art to the general public. One of my favorite essays, “The Writing Class,” admonishes poet-professors for operating in a closed circuit: “when the consumers of poetry are almost exclusively also those who produce it, we are left ascribing value to our own product. The trouble is that nobody outside the industry needs to agree with our valuations.” Implicit in the broken connection between academic poetry and public affairs is the loss in quality control, not merely relevance. The essay inspires many questions, old and new, concerning the so-called artist of color. I ask myself: What role should the political play in the artistic product? Where does committed art end and propaganda begin? Where does the exploitation of identity end and the exploration of experience begin? What do we lose in embracing the dominant, “white” culture (assuming it exists)? How can we reconceive our culture outside the either/or, black/white paradigm?
I hope all artists take Bolina’s cue and ask themselves these questions. His own poetry embraces a cultural hybridity, but I wouldn’t’ve guessed so from these essays. Their tones get ugly: anxious, irritated, and full of resentment. I find them especially in their place when damning our republic’s hyperrealism, its unnecessary illusions, its racist legalism, its legacies “of slavery and segregation, of ghettoization and internment and deportation. Of murder…. No white gripe can conceal the fact that that pain, that violence, and that shame are also America” (“Color Coded”). At the same time, America is not what we’re brainwashed into believing at school: “Our textbooks celebrate Columbus, Daniel Boone, Lewis, Clark, and every manifestly destined land-grabber who followed as trailblazers boldly claiming uncharted territories. In this telling, America is a nation of humble pioneers confronting brutal savages, a nation of industrious homesteaders terrorized by interloping raiders, a nation of—yes—cowboys versus Indians” (“American, Indian”). Notice how Bolina seats us beside him so uncomfortably. We’re left uncomfortable, and you wonder how one holding this poet’s insight can even call America home. The poet himself wonders, and you can say Bolina’s essays attempt to justify the very claim to himself.
Those who read Of Color won’t find the poet’s anxious self-searching so surprising, at least not once they realize Bolina himself is white—that’s how I read him culturally, anyway. As he explains, whiteness isn’t entirely a racial category, but also a class one, a viewpoint. Thanks to the endless sacrifices of his immigrant parents and the privileges they afforded him, Bolina chose the life of the poet; he chose Americana over ancestral traditions; he “chose to marry a white woman” (“White Wedding”). The artist recounts this latter decision with humbling sincerity: “My shame was rooted in my alignment with a mainstream that dismisses the validity of outsiders like my parents; my self-regard was in trusting my own judgment over my family’s, over that of the hundreds of millions of people in South Asia and abroad who live and love and thrive by the trusted and enduring mores of our collective culture. The arrogance in the latter is astonishing, which might make it the most American thing about me” (“White Wedding”). I admire Bolina’s knack for getting at the heart of the problems he articulates, even though the problems themselves remain unsolvable, leaving him discontent. He would like to believe that he can marry his Indian and American identities, but the illusion that he must choose between two distinct cultures that ex vi terminorum have nothing to do with one another unsettles him no end, and therein lies his—our—impulse to dispel the myth of American homogeneity, a myth to which many sadly subscribe.
Bolina could have done more to assure readers that he himself does not subscribe to such a myth. For starters, he could have better handled the term “white,” which messily refers to so many things in this book: a class, a skin tone, and a vast geography; the book clouds all three. The writer ignores the less rosy circumstances of minorities of European descent in America, though many abound. His dart at “white America” misses its mark insofar as it overlooks historical contingencies of region, religion, and socio-economy. For all their fears of being profiled, the essays simply don’t consider common ways people get excluded from the group. I guess that’s testament to Bolina’s adamant attention to color. Curiously, he seems to buy into the myth that minorities who assimilate are invariably complicit in an oppressive, hegemonic white culture. Of himself he sighs: “I don’t possess any English significantly different from plain old overeducated Midwestern English. In my writing, I have only the parlance of whiteness to express my brownness. The parlance of privilege” (“Writing Like a White Guy”). This problem has a name, and the fact that Bolina wincingly sees it as a “white person” problem testifies to his frankness with himself and his audience.
Predictable as they are in their anti-white pontifications, these essays balance unpleasant tensions with feel-good levity. “Foreign and Domestic” sympathizes with the petty thieves who mug the author one picturesque night. “My People,” about immigrant neighbors who bring different pasts to their shared suburban space, humorously sketches how only in America can the nephew of an SS officer befriend the son of a subadar—a captain of the British Indian Army. As do the others, this brief essay demonstrates “how complicated the question of identity is in the United States, how resistant identity can be to differentiating labels like South Asian American or European American.” Indeed, the poet’s look into his family’s political dysfunction, as absurd as anybody’s, argues against neat personal and political labels in America today. Case in point: “White Wedding,” which imparts a smart and relatable reading of the dating scene for those whose cultural baggage weighs on the relationships they enter. While it draws some disturbing conclusions on the ultimatum given immigrants (assimilate or leave), and doesn’t shy away from calling out a nation that “will surveil us, deport us, imprison us, and shoot us in the street for the simple fact that we don’t affirm its existing sense of normalcy, and it will blame its actions on our shortcomings rather than its own,” this essay, in keeping with the rest, equally discovers that we’ll never realize a colorblind America, nor should we ever want to—a message that should empower rather than defeat us.
So it’s a hard white knot Bolina ties through his essays, each tightening the paradoxes of whiteness—its desirability, if for the sake of the benefits it yields; its exclusivity. Sadly, the privilege-privation problem will probably outlive the endless racisms of the day, but for now, we can sate our spirits with new terms of equality that sever binaries. A book of colorful depths, Of Color will treat those wishing to unbind themselves of surface identity politics. They deserve attending to Bolina’s book. Feast on it, take his poetry for dessert, then cap off with a rude digestif—Bret Ellis’ White (Vintage, 2019).
