The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey

by Toi Derricotte

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393319019
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/1999
Edition description:	ABR
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Toi Derricotte is the author of four collections of poetry. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Editorial Reviews

"In The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, Derricotte revisits in a more exploratory and obsessive vein...contrasting the intimate family sites of blackness, fraught with danger, pain and desire, with the outer, white world, occassionally vicious, more frequently clueless and flat. Derricotte has kept these notebooks over twenty years, she explains, for several reasons: to examine blackness, to free herself from self-hatred (for being black, for not being black enough, for passing, for asserting her blackness): in short, to save her life. Edited down to some tow hundred pages, the book consists of an introduction and seven essays. It is a collecton of illuminating, often razor-sharp slices fromthe slagheap of black pain and white obtuseness and cruelty. Sometimes black cruelty, sometimes white kindness; but the color line never blurs, even as others fail to recognize the writer as black, even as the writer herself sometimes "forgets," tilting to the "white/American" side of African American double consciousness first named by W.E.B. DuBois nearly a century ago...." -- The Women's Review of Books

Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz

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.

Kirkus Reviews