The Poems in “All Is The Telling” Ask: “What’s burned into my DNA?” https://ift.tt/86Iaw2V
Rosa Castellano’s All in the Telling provides one of the most thought-provoking explorations of biracial life in recent memory. Whether in poems about her parents, such as “Othello in the Orange Grove” or “Desdemona Builds a Sandcastle,” or the numerous ones about the speaker’s own experience, these works confront what it means to live as a biracial woman in racialized America.
The opening poem, “Survival Is Plural,” serves as not just a call to arms in the face of elementary school racial profiling but a cri de coeur for the entire collection. Watching a video of a six-year-old girl being led from school, handcuffed in zip ties, the speaker thinks about the white viewers “who don’t see love laid / in the neat lines / of her braids” (lines 22–24). This girl is young enough that she doesn’t realize the severity of the situation until “the squad car / flashes and her cry / breaks” (lines 26–28). Though the speaker acknowledges, “I survived / what I survived (lines 31–32), she concludes, “that little girl, her cry– / a song that drops me to my knees” (lines 43–45). The rest of the book reads as the response to the girl’s cry and the speaker’s attempt to pick herself up once again.
One response comes in “No Black People in the Trailer Park Except My Dad or You Can’t Recognize What You Don’t Know.” The speaker credits the fictional characters who helped shape her into the person she has become. These include Celie, from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Sula and Sethe, from Toni Morrison’s Sula and Beloved, respectively. According to the speaker, these characters
carved a path
[…]
to the place
of planting
where all
my past selves
rise, lick wet
their palms
wipe the ash
from their knees
and speak.
These short lines slow the reader, whose eyes must continually track from one enjambed line to the next, and emphasize the significance of both the fictional characters and the ways they provided a kind of solace and inspiration.
In “Till Beauty Ends Murder,” the speaker stands within the collective, inherited trauma of the Atlantic slave trade: “It starts with a ship, a crossing, a captain and a cargo of men and women, / a tangle of arms and legs and languages” (lines 7–8). The speaker asks, “What’s burned into my DNA? … A song of survival and shame drummed so deep into my bones / it is the push-pull music of my blood” (lines 14–16). What’s more, “And yet, for me, there is no history // that matters except that I have inherited the skin and hair / of my grandmother and my children have not” (lines 17–19). The impact of that stanza break cannot be overstated. For a brief moment, in its “no history,” it refutes the ideas mentioned above, only to revisit them, subtly, once the distinction between the children and their mother is introduced. The mother has Black features that her son does not share. He of the “blonde / shock of hair” will have a wholly different experience from the mother: “The world you live in is different from mine” (lines 22–24).
All of the pressures felt by Castellano’s speaker become even more apparent in the poem “Where Are You From? / When Asked By the Only Other Non-White Person in the Room.” When asked this question, the speaker wants to say, “I’m from birds that fly all night, from water, / from women who haunt themselves. From ghost songs, // guitars, sand paths and learning young to speak white, to vanish, / to not look certain teachers in the eye” (lines 8–11). That last line harkens back to the young girl from the opening poem, while the speaker pushes forward directly thereafter:
& I want to ask, how how do you not break open
in the grocery store, the classroom, the cubicle? I’m exhausted
from explaining why I can’t, won’t go to a co-worker’s bridal shower
at the winery, formally a plantation. From explaining,
that my name or words or smile, are not a trick to make folks think
I’m White or Black or Latina or
to make a friend feel like milk spilled onto the floor–
a messy splash of white.
Reader, forgive me for quoting from this book at such length. Castellano’s work is so good it speaks for itself, even if, as the speaker concludes, “the joke is on us” (line 26). The lines of this poem, with their wide spacing, echo so many poems from the collection and reinforce the challenges of biracial life. Neither white, Black, or Latina, but assumed to be any of these, the speaker is attuned to American history in particular, inimitable way.
The collection concludes with a right-justified poem, “& Let Me Hold.” Here, the speaker, addressing her children, assures them that “love belongs to you / (to me, too)” (lines 8–9). These lines contain hard-won optimism. No matter how many times the news “drops me / to my knees” (“Survival Is Plural, lines 44–45), the speaker urges the young ones to “Wrap arms around // chest and hold tight / this gift // (which is you)” (lines 18–21). Resilience is the name of the game for Castellano in All Is the Telling. The obstacles presented by American society, especially the biracial experience of erasure and discrimination, can be alleviated by love. Castellano’s speaker has learned this the hard way, but readers are all the richer for it.
POETRY All Is The Telling
By Rosa Castellano
Diode Editions
Published April 5, 2025
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