It’s Not a Mask If You Wear It Right

“My name is Langston Hughes. Born in 1902. I like Bessie, Bop—” I stopped, and turned away from the audience to an alarmed Japanese teenager on my left. “Eh!?” he said, interrupting my introduction to ask, in Japanese, “You were born in 1902? But you don’t look like you’re 121 years old!” To which I turned to face the rows of kids and parents and whispered, “Shhhhhh! It’s a secret.” And they began to laugh as the syncopated rhythms of the drums and the swing of the piano began.

I was recently reminded, firsthand, of the power of persona. As an American poet and teacher living in Japan with some background in jazz, I was asked to teach youth about the genre at Kanazawa’s annual  Jazz Festival. I love jazz. My brother’s a jazz flutist. I grew up with Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and Bobby Timmon’s piano moanin’ in the background on school nights. Now, I occasionally sing standards at live jazz sessions, but I’m by no means an expert or even a musician. I can barely clap on beat for more than eight bars! Yet, the festival organizers decided I should be given a band, a black box theater, and an audience of a couple hundred children and their parents. The question then became not one of knowledge, but of voice: How do I give myself permission to be able to embody jazz with confidence?

The answer was in my bookbag. I had recently begun rereading The Selected Works of Langston Hughes—the first poetry book I ever owned—in tandem with his autobiography of international travels, I Wonder as I Wander. I realized Hughes and I had so much in common: both Black men born in the Midwest who moved to New York City; both poets and avid persona writers; both lovers of music and the music of Black vernacular. And while reading his autobiography, I was reminded we both not only experienced life as expats, but also life in Japan, as he had traveled to the country in 1933 to meet artists and writers.

Hughes also wrote a book for kids called The First Book of Jazz, which traces the origins of jazz from the drumbeats of West Africa to the ragtime and marching bands of New Orleans to the cabarets of Harlem and beyond. Using his work as inspiration, I wrote the longest persona poem I had ever written: a forty-minute musical called The Story of  Jazz (in  Japan!). In the musical, Langston Hughes arrives in modern-day Japan, hears a standard playing from outside the Tokyo Imperial Hotel, and enters. While enjoying an upbeat and fast-paced flute and piano rendition of “Spain,” he is approached by a  Japanese high schooler who, enamored by the music he just heard for the first time, wants to learn what it’s all about. Hughes becomes his, and the audience’s, first teacher of  jazz.

Hughes’s voice was familiar enough for me to comfortably step into, but also had the experience and authority to speak on a topic I was passionate but insecure about. Persona as permission. After the performance, I laughed to myself, because the local newspaper journalist had quite a bit of difficulty distinguishing what was true about Hughes and true about me. Similar to how the Hughes persona and my own identity imbricated, I believe persona, at its best, simultaneously erases and augments the writer, allowing for unexpected possibilities.

If you spend any amount of time browsing the internet for the origin of persona poetry, you’ll find the following: drama, “My Last Duchess,” ancient Greek actors, Latin root, Mask, Mask, Mask. I, however, believe persona begins with imaginative play on a child’s bedroom floor. Their first stage. Their first page. Like many children, I played make-believe. I’d parody my favorite cartoons with my brother, bringing to life intergalactic aliens, ninjas, single mothers of child prodigies, and ghost fathers. Some characters were biographically close, others, planets away—always one hundred percent me. My voice and my body were a conduit or a vessel for another life, another story. I was the vampire who sang about french fries and daddy issues; I was Victor Frankenstein’s creature lamenting his abandonment. I was and I wasn’t. And this tension, this dissonance of identity, this fictional truth, was poetry.

In the introduction to their anthology of contemporary persona poetry, Oliver de la Paz and Stacey Lynn Brown define the form as

self-contained conversation, or dramatic monologue, in which the subject matter is filtered through the perspective of a speaker who is distinctly different from the poet-author. The persona poem bridges the various definitions by both amplifying the features of the created character while also revealing a good deal about the poet who wrote it.

Less of a form, persona is a lens through which one sees. As such, there are no formal limits. There are persona sonnets and persona haiku, but most contemporary personas, like monologues, are free verse.

Persona is everywhere and lets us take inspiration from anywhere. Humans, by instinct, are drawn to acting. The alter egos of musicians like Kendrick Lamar or Beyoncé come to mind. Persona has been the artist’s go-to tool to access the intentionally or unintentionally repressed parts of themselves. Regardless of its usage, persona is always an act of play. An act in that one imagines the persona stepping downstage into the light to deliver a soliloquy. Play in that there is no restriction on who or what you can personify. Some of the most memorable personas I’ve encountered were the most unlikely characters: Anthony Febo’s moody house cat, Lucille Clifton’s resurrected Lazarus, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s feisty pokemon Jynx, among others. While seemingly frivolous in character choice, these poems choose a slanted perspective to defamiliarize how we view the world so we can understand it anew.

Consider Tim Seibles’s “Lobster for Sale,” which offers the pensive reflection of a lobster in a grocery store tank. On first listen, it seems almost humorous: “Usually I’m sleepy. so usually./I sleep./And you think. I dream of the open sea./Nope./When I sleep. I dream./of sleeping.” But as the poem continues, we hear the lament of another voice. The lobster says, “Only difference. between this./and the big drink: in here. it’s just. us./and every hour. i measure. every side.” Reflecting on the poem, Seibles said on The Poetry Gods podcast,

I look in there and I’m thinking, that is a kind of incarceration, right.... And suddenly this kinda world starts to develop in my head about, if the lobster could speak, what would the lobster say? And of course, it’s partly my own mind that’s realizing in that moment—I have no idea what a lobster would think, if anything. So of course, you start to think about mass incarceration; you think about the ways in which people of many backgrounds and many colors are psychologically conscripted in a certain way—so then that poem gets to talk about that.

And so persona becomes a way to view the world with new eyes, through the murky glass of inequality.

I recall in my younger years wanting a way to speak to and about my absent father. I looked around my room for a mask and found only piles of manga on my desk, anime posters on my wall. When I looked at my favorite characters, I saw many differences: blond hair, blue eyes, the ability to fly. But what we had in common were missing fathers: Naruto the orphaned ninja, Gohan the superhero whose dad would rather train on another planet than spend time with his family, Gon the adventurous kid who hunts for treasure and his dad. Every other series that aired on Toonami lent me a persona. And while it was too difficult for me to begin to talk about or to my distant father, with these characters, my feelings of abandonment, confusion, and resentment were free to be expressed without any fear of retaliation or dismissal.

For that period of my young writing career, persona was a door to a stage where I could say what I needed to say to my father while in cosplay: Gohan writing odes to his alien step-in father figure, Piccolo; Sarada writing an obituary for her never-home ninja father. Eventually, I moved to writing in my father’s voice directly, and this is when I learned how persona could be a radical act of empathy. When I began writing poems in his voice, I had to actually stop and think: what would he say, what wouldn’t he say, why would he do this, what is the root of him? An early poem that started in his voice, with the line “I didn’t raise no punk ass nigga,” ended with the realization, “When I first lifted you up/ You were the heaviest weight I’ve ever lifted/ You were not just my son/ But the light that beat back every dark crooked finger from my past.” I surprised myself with how persona allowed me access into the psyche of a man I felt very distant from. Reconciliation would come nearly a decade later, but healing began when I opened myself up to the possibility that my father is human and imperfect and still worthy of forgiveness.

Aaliyah  Jihad’s “From My Mother to Her Late Daughter” is another poem that showed me how persona can help us empathize with others. Performed at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational in 2015 (which you can view on Button Poetry’s YouTube page), the poet embodies her mother in a scenario in which the daughter, the poet herself, has died by suicide. The mother says, “My little bean. They tainted your obituary with the wrong seven letters. s-u-i-c-i– like this misery was something you wanted.” I held my breath for nearly the entirety of the poem. Later, at a writing retreat together, I learned from the poet that she wrote in the persona to imagine what those around her would feel if she were to end her own life—to give herself a reason to keep living. The poem opened my eyes to how transformative and necessary it is to step outside of one’s self. Again, persona as empathy, but, in this case, leading to the salvation of one’s own life.

I used to be ashamed of writing so many poems in the voices of others. I have written poems that center around a biographical, confessional “I,” but to say that the “I” in any given poem is not a persona is an assumption in itself. I was relieved to learn I had inherited a lineage, as a Black poet, of writers who use persona as a historian would, to give voices back to the silenced or misunderstood throughout history. Take, for example, the many persona poems Hughes wrote in the voices of everyday Black Americans: blues-heavy widows, elevator boys, landlords, ministers, and porters, to name a few. Other notable historical figures brought back to life in the Black canon include Sara Baartman (Elizabeth Alexander), George Washington Carver (Marilyn Nelson), and Harriet Tubman (Kearah-Armonie). In America, where so much documentation and history has been obfuscated, lost, or destroyed, persona, for the Black writer, is a way to retell and rectify history.

Olio by Tyehimba Jess is a prime example of a collection of persona poems that asks the reader to reconsider the past. The literally multidimensional collection follows Julius Monroe Trotter, a WWI veteran who travels throughout the United States to piece together the life and death of the ragtime musician Scott Joplin. Interspersed between his interviews are contrapuntals, sonnets, and hybrid poems in the voices of late nineteenth-century performers and freed enslaved notables, such as abolitionist Henry Box Brown, conjoined singing sisters Mckay Twins, and piano prodigy Blind Tom. The collection also contains persona poems in the voices of slave owners and the like, in which  Jess, using their voices, reveals the truth about their complicity in dehumanizing Black lives. Brown, in a contrapuntal, declares, “I won my life. This story—/how a slave steals back his skin: smuggles loose like I did.” Persona here gives the unsung in history a second chance, an opportunity to set the record straight.

Even my musical, The Story of Jazz (in Japan!), was an act of historical revisionism. When Hughes visited Japan in 1933, he was suspected by Japanese authorities of being a socialist spy because of his recent travels to China and the Soviet Union. He was followed around the island of Honshu by agents, closely monitored, interrogated, designated persona non grata, and asked to leave immediately on a ship headed to Hawaii. In the musical, Hughes is welcomed back, and this time, instead of being a suspect, he is heralded for his knowledge and cultural contributions. Persona as a way of revising history.

Of course, as writers, we have the option to make up our own characters. The Secret of Me, by Meg Kearney, is a lyric novel in the voice of an adopted girl named Lizzie who is rife with questions about her biological parents and being a teenager. The flowers of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris speak with such authority on death, love, and God they seem to tap into a wisdom as ancient as soil itself. These are works of fiction, yet authentic. Fiction is what the poet Ai, infamous for her entire collections of persona, would sometimes label her poems. Her collection Vice: New and Selected Poems is a great starting point. Murderers, nuclear bomb inventors, racist US government officials—she dove into the heart of human evils. She said, “I’m not really searching for myself when I’m creating these characters. It’s human nature that I’m exploring, the behavior of everyone, every man and woman.” What persona grants us, then, is what fiction writers are afforded every time they write: the ability to create characters and worlds.

As a teaching and learning tool, persona is invaluable, but we must be aware of the ethical issues around it. We must be wary of co-opting narratives—we can do harm by trying to pantomime a voice we aren’t actually capable of replicating. Race, ethnicity, gender, and so forth: these identities and our privileges and relationships to them must be considered tactfully. Patricia Smith, another prolific persona poet who has written as a skinhead, a hurricane, and a mother of a murdered child, says, “You have to make sure that you write the hell out of it. You can’t slack if you’re in territory that might be questionable. You really have to write it.” Amen. It is a type of minstrelsy to misrepresent a voice from the privilege of a page or stage. To avoid this, the questions I always ask myself when writing are: Why does this poem need to be in the voice of this character? What are the stakes for me as a writer? Is there someone with more proximity who could write this piece with more urgency? And to help nuance my piece, I ask: Why exactly is the persona speaking now? Who are they speaking to? What year or moment in time are they speaking from? A lobster speaking from the tank is different from a lobster speaking from a rocky shoreline. Hughes explaining jazz, in translation, in a hotel in Japan, is very different from Hughes teaching jazz poetry in a classroom in Harlem in his mother tongue.

In teaching young poets over the years, I’ve noticed two types of writers. The first are poets who are uncomfortable writing about themselves, so they solely write in the voices and narratives of others. They may also rely on abstractions to the point that they unintentionally (or intentionally) conceal their subject matter. The second are poets solely concerned with the project of the self to the point that it prevents them from exploring other subjects, forms, and approaches to writing. For the writers uncomfortable with their own narratives, I ask them to write a persona and have the persona address the writer, themselves. This eases the poets into the idea of introducing themselves into their work. For the self-focused writers, I often challenge them to write in the voices of people or things they know very little about. While fun, this proves to be challenging because in order to make the character believable, the poets must use diction, syntax, and observations different from their own writing instincts. My hope is that by stepping outside themselves and utilizing the language of another, they return to their own narratives with new ways of expressing themselves. And I always stress that everything you write doesn’t need to be published or performed. It is completely valid and valuable to write as a way of learning and growing and healing. Especially when dealing with others’ narratives.

Just as Langston Hughes says about jazz in The Story of  Jazz (in  Japan!), persona “is fun!” But also practical. Before choosing Hughes as my muse, I knew what I wanted to say, but I was not exactly sure of the best method. A daunting project became an exciting opportunity to time travel and step outside of the limitations of my own perspective and voice. On the stage as Hughes, reciting poems like “Dream Boogie,” tapping to “The Entertainer,” encouraging children to keep rhythm with the percussion, I was reminded of persona’s many uses: persona allows us to step into unfamiliar territory. It gives us permission to play. It allows us to explore the external and internal world and see it anew.