IS YOU IS, OR IS YOU AIN’T? (THE ANSWER
BECOMES A SET OF FURTHER QUESTIONS)
What are you? you have asked. You are either a male student whom I know but do not teach and whose parents avoid racial conversation at the dinner table, or a woman in a Houston bar who has run her fingers through my dreads without asking permission. Whoever you happen to be, please clarify your question: are you asking in the existential or the racial sense? My knee-jerk existential answer is: I am a human. I am a human constituted of the anatomical – emotional – physiological – historical – genetic – cultural – psychological – social complexity of our species. This human status
renders a complete response to your question What are you? (or more properly Who are you?) so intricate and expansive as to make the question functionally unanswerable in the time our encounter—which both of us would like to be as brief and casual as possible—allows. I’m willing to wager, however, that you’re asking option two: the racial question. And I’ll double down that you’re asking from within the narrow confines of an American construction that carries the racial residue no salt air could scour from the hulls of conquistadors’ and colonists’ Atlantic crossings, such that your question
bears a Victorian, at best, conception of race as its subtext. In that case, trying for a quick exit from the conversation, I’ll say that as the issue of a White father and a Black mother, I am a mulatto. (Although having seen the genetic data from my mother’s mitochondrial mothers, I am something closer to a quadroon, but I would have to explain this term to you, extending our chat longer than either of us would like, so I’ll leave my answer at the degrading and zoological original—part man, part pack animal.) To move hypothetically forward in racial time, if you were asking your question
from a place of conscious Blackness, a latter-day Négritude, I would answer, My momma’s just as black as your momma (which may or may not be entirely true) to create an authenticity that would, with any luck, bind me to you and evolve into a sense of belonging such that I’d have some soft place to rest my head in this dirt-hard, fractured little America of ours. This scenario is not to be though—whoever you are, you most decidedly do not speak from a place of conscious Blackness. Of course, I could try my most honest answer: in the history of recorded ideas and migrating peoples, no one
has invented a category that precisely defines What, in your idiom, I am. (The same could be said for you, I’m sure, had we time and desire enough to wade into your pool.) If the world continues as it does to change and stay the same, I do not in my lifetime predict success in this definitional endeavor and particularly not star-spangled success. By pointing to the paucity of categories precise in their definition of me, I do not reject love for my mitochondrial mothers, stolen as they were from their Gold Coast homes, shipped as they were across a body of water stretching farther than they
imagined a body could stretch, enslaved as they were in Rappahannock County, Virginia, for the purpose of producing Orinoco tobacco. Nor do I reject love for my father’s Englishness (although were you and I interested in talking for longer, we could scope the purity of this Englishness: historical records and family lore suggest 19th-century Pollock forebears were forced from the Scottish Highlands during the Clearances while the reddish tint of my father’s beard suggests a Viking in the woodpile—the colonizer and colonized again rehearsing their psychodrama within the double-
helix of me). So yes indeed, what am I? I am a whole that is equal and unequal to the sum of his parts. A liquid in a solid system. The undetected spectrum floating between fixed poles of a binary. I’m something while not being anything that humans, especially American humans, can figure out. Picking up your social cues, the clock has run out on our casual encounter, and you are, as I am, very eager to go your separate way—you have a class to get to or your boyfriend waiting with a gin and tonic—but to keep respectable and polite, let me ask: Did I answer your question? Is it clear to you now what I am?
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of two poetry collections, Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books, 2018), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy (U. of Georgia Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Baffler, and The New York Times Magazine. Pollock serves as Chair of the English Department at Rye Country Day School and is a member of the poetry faculty at the Solstice MFA program of Pine Manor College. He also curates the Kitchen Table Series, a bi-monthly online poetry reading.