Representing Themselves: Contesting Western Representations of Minoritized Communities in the Poetry of Danez Smith, Franny Choi, and Tommy Pico

Abstract

Over time, dominant world powers like the United States have levied the tool of definition to dehumanize, delegitimatize, and disempower certain peoples. How society defines what is normal vs. abnormal, human vs. inhuman, positive vs. negative, and so on has the potential to privilege certain groups over others who are defined as worse in some way. However, dominant cultures do not hold the power of definition exclusively. In recent years, individuals from minoritized communities have taken to defining their identities independently of their dominant culture’s representation of them after fighting for and winning certain rights and liberties that they had previous been denied. In particular, some poets from minoritized communities within the United States have made self-identification central to their works. They do this by examining the ingrained misrepresentation of minoritized communities—located in the numerous forms of American mass media (television, film, literature, news, etc.)—and unmasking the embedded systems of oppression that pervade those misrepresentations. This essay analyzes a collection of poetry from three contemporary poets of minoritized communities within the United States: Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, Franny Choi’s Soft Science, and Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem. In each of their collections, the poets resist American media’s misrepresentations of their specific identity by asserting their own experiences and identities as a point of direct contrast. Specifically, Danez Smith resists American media’s obsession with the deaths of contemporary Black people by celebrating Black life; Franny Choi addresses American media’s dehumanization of Asian-descended peoples by contesting the Asian-robot archetype from American science fiction; and Tommy Pico resists the historical ecological Indian stereotype by reimagining the nature poem. In all three of their collections, the poets take up the powerful weapon of language to both reject the false identities the United States has forced upon them and represent themselves in a way that is unadulterated by American media.