Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
The hay rake’s rattle, the stunned sputter of a moccasin
Slung in the blades, the mid-gloam crickets sending
Their codes as though from a nearby country of dreamers.
Each sound found its shape – low drip into mud beneath
The leaking spigot, scrape of sparrows stowing twigs
In the eaves, the combines fading, unzipping the bean
Rows and back again, and the wind-combed drift
Of dust in the field, which is where I can hear it most
Clearly now, my pointing the direction away
From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am…
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.
My father believes that the United States is destined one day to be engulfed in a socialist revolution. All revolutions are bloody, he says, but this one will be the bloodiest of them all. The working class—which includes me—will at some point in the not-so-distant future decide to put down the tools of our trade, pour into the streets, beat the police into submission, take over the means of production, and usher in a new epoch—the final epoch—of peace and equality. This revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it.
…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
The hay rake’s rattle, the stunned sputter of a moccasin
Slung in the blades, the mid-gloam crickets sending
Their codes as though from a nearby country of dreamers.
Each sound found its shape – low drip into mud beneath
The leaking spigot, scrape of sparrows stowing twigs
In the eaves, the combines fading, unzipping the bean
Rows and back again, and the wind-combed drift
Of dust in the field, which is where I can hear it most
Clearly now, my pointing the direction away
From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am…
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.
My father believes that the United States is destined one day to be engulfed in a socialist revolution. All revolutions are bloody, he says, but this one will be the bloodiest of them all. The working class—which includes me—will at some point in the not-so-distant future decide to put down the tools of our trade, pour into the streets, beat the police into submission, take over the means of production, and usher in a new epoch—the final epoch—of peace and equality. This revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it.