BPR 46 | 2019
In the introduction to The Black Notebooks (1997), Toi Derricotte’s powerful volume of nonfiction chronicling her struggles, both externally and internally, with race and racism, the poet asserts that her “book is about the search for a home, a safe home for all our complexities, our beauty and our abhorred life. It is about not finding a home in the world, and having to invent that home in language” (19). For Derricotte the notion of home in all its complex valences represents both the remembered (and misremembered) past—the places from which a person came, the places that formed her, the homes she did not find in the world—and also the hoped-for future—the places she wishes to go, the people she wishes to be, the homes she strives to construct in the act of writing. This ongoing search for a safe home can be said to constitute one of the driving forces behind Derricotte’s entire artistic output, a passionate literary enterprise for which she has not yet received the full critical attention she most assuredly deserves. In a career spanning over forty years she has produced six gutsy, heartbreaking poetry collections and a brilliant book of nonfiction. Throughout this substantial body of work the idea of home has served as a key bedrock to which Derricotte continually returns and through which she relentlessly picks apart social issues, such as domesticity and motherhood, race and class, the female body, sexuality and the construction of the self. As an artist Derricotte also uses home to explore a range of literary concerns, including formal experimentation, generic boundaries, and modes of poetic address, most specifically the confessional.