I was recently made aware of a heated debate that is taking place on two related essays featured on PoetryFoundation.org.
The first essay, The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I: What are the ethics of poetic appropriation? by Abe Louise Young, is a critique of Raymond McDaniel’s un-credited appropriation of personal stories documented on Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History & Memory Project.
The second essay, The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part II: Reflections on found poetry and the creative process by Raymond McDaniel, is a response to the aforementioned critique and an explanation of McDaniel’s process of pulling from Alive in Truth to construct Convention Centers of the New World, a poem in the author’s recently published collection Saltwater Empire.
Below is my contribution to said debate:
Having spent years in graduate school studying ethics and the application of this science to various scenarios, I never ran across poetry as a potential circumstance. In fact, I never ran across any scenario that applied the science of ethics to questions of privilege either. Instead, the entire program focused on law, policy and moral imperatives.
Rather than insist students critique the relationship between law/policy/morality and ethics, there was an underlying assumption that these terms and their practice were unquestionably synonymous. As a queer person of color living in the occupied region known as the Southwestern United States, consideration of synonymity of these terms and practices debilitated the importance and applicability of ethics as a whole.
For instance, to say that law equals ethics would mean that the presence of my family in the United States is inherently unethical given that the first to relocate here did so without legal consent from the United States government. Although born in the United States, applying this framework could deem my presence here unethical because of the manner in which I came to be born within the confines of this nationstate. Lately, conservatives have attempted to resurrect such thinking and intend to challenge the legality of birthright citizenship for those born to parents who have “illegally” or, in the case of synonymous terminology, “unethically” “entered” this country.
Perhaps this argument makes sense from the simple Right/Wrong, Law = Ethics framework. Yet, if one were to turn to the very words considered synonymous with ethical matters and questioned the integrity of such words, would ethics lose their intrinsic and seemingly sacred value? Arguing against undocumented immigration makes sense only in the amnesic consciousness of a country that has legally practiced slavery, genocide, displacement and occupation from its genesis and beyond. It is because of the historically inhumane founding of this country that my family practiced the undocumented crossing of a border built to uphold the immorality of white supremacy.
If morality is synonymous to ethics, the very existence of the United States is unethical. At which point, one must adjust the notion of law/policy/morality being synonymous to ethics in order to apply ethical criteria circumstantially and whimsically-adjusted to our personal and/or collective moral imperatives.
It appears the thread of comments arguing for and against ethical application to Convention Centers of the New World are wandering the surfaces of definition.
Abe Louise Young has brilliantly executed an argument that applies the rule of ethics through a lens critically examining poetic acts of privilege and racism. As someone who agrees with the assertion that anti-racism is a moral imperative, I recognize that the ethical criterion applied to this poem is based on a particular definition of morality. In a world void of context, Abe’s question of ethics in relation to the aforementioned poem could be contested through other definitions of morality.
In reading Raymond McDaniel’s essay, I perceive him as a poet attempting to draw light onto the experiences of “those for whom justice has always been in short supply.” If I were to make truth of my assumption and take it a step further to consider McDaniel a poet committed to social justice ideology, I would unquestionably apply a social justice morality to the discussion of Saltwater Empire. Said notions of morality, then, would inform my ethical lens in relation to the poet’s intention and its resulting products.
Because we live in a world replete with complex, layered and interwoven contexts, I concur with Abe’s asservation that McDaniel plagiarized and appropriated the stories of others. In McDaniel’s defense, the poet states: “I assumed that the records were public, that they existed to be public.” Not so simple.
People of privilege enter dangerous territory when they engage in the extremely difficult and slippery act of writing about or “for” those on whom one’s own privilege is built upon. In this particular case, Abe Louise Young, a white, anti-racist, activist and poet, is putting the white poet to task. For many folks of color, this is what we understand to be one of the many critical roles white allies play in our shared efforts to dismantle and eradicate white supremacy.
Any poet attempting to write in the name of justice must (yes, I said “must”) critically and harshly self-examine their intention, practice and product. Privilege is built on the most pervasive of human atrocities. As such, poetry written to evoke a just consciousness inevitably fails if it itself lacks consciousness of privilege, the history on which it is built, and the structures that sustain it.
From the place of academic and literary integrity, the expropriation of others’ words without proper credit is plagiarism. From the place of social justice movements and values, the appropriation of others’ stories is an act of injustice.
Let us not forget that just as the “isolated phrases, sentences and clusters of sentences” were allegedly found, so to were the land, the people, the stories and the spirits that for centuries have called home what many now call the United States of America.
Let us not forget that just as the “isolated phrases, sentences and clusters of sentences” were allegedly found, so to were the land, the people, the stories and the spirits that for centuries have called home what many now call the United States of America.
