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.
Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.
There’s a kind of sky below the ocean –
a field of starfish, turning slowly
like cogs inside
a water-watch, wound by a sea river;
the star’s five fingers tremble and
reach for a clam’s book of meat,
into which it will inject a sedative
and then its stomach.
In The City, escaped parrots colonize
a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that
In a bag? More hits after this…
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
Gil Scott-Heron has a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that transcends the material. This is also the crux of my dissent: What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes? Part of the work here is thinking about the value of human life differently. This becomes obvious when commentators—including Coates—get caught up trying to tabulate the extraordinary value of slaves held in bondage (don’t forget to convert to today’s dollars!). It shouldn’t be hard to see that doing so yields to a mentality that is itself at the root of slavery as an institution: human beings cannot and should not be quantified, monetized, valued in dollar amounts. There can be no refund check for slavery. But that doesn’t mean the question of injury evaporates, so let us ask a harder question: Who will pay reparations on my soul?
Black American music has always insisted upon soul, the value of the human spirit, and its unquenchable yearnings. It’s a value that explicitly refuses material boundaries or limitations. You hear it encoded emblematically in the old spirituals. Black voices steal away to freedom. They go to the river. They fly away. Something is owed.
VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?
GUS: I’m sure I have.
VANESSA: I see.
GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.
VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!
GUS: That’s a new one.
VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?
GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.
VANESSA: I don’t.
GUS: I’m not a racist.
VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.
When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.
Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not
in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid
atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop
damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball
in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,
not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,
an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like
the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark
so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous
wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my
wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...
Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.
There’s a kind of sky below the ocean –
a field of starfish, turning slowly
like cogs inside
a water-watch, wound by a sea river;
the star’s five fingers tremble and
reach for a clam’s book of meat,
into which it will inject a sedative
and then its stomach.
In The City, escaped parrots colonize
a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that
In a bag? More hits after this…
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
Gil Scott-Heron has a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that transcends the material. This is also the crux of my dissent: What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes? Part of the work here is thinking about the value of human life differently. This becomes obvious when commentators—including Coates—get caught up trying to tabulate the extraordinary value of slaves held in bondage (don’t forget to convert to today’s dollars!). It shouldn’t be hard to see that doing so yields to a mentality that is itself at the root of slavery as an institution: human beings cannot and should not be quantified, monetized, valued in dollar amounts. There can be no refund check for slavery. But that doesn’t mean the question of injury evaporates, so let us ask a harder question: Who will pay reparations on my soul?
Black American music has always insisted upon soul, the value of the human spirit, and its unquenchable yearnings. It’s a value that explicitly refuses material boundaries or limitations. You hear it encoded emblematically in the old spirituals. Black voices steal away to freedom. They go to the river. They fly away. Something is owed.
VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?
GUS: I’m sure I have.
VANESSA: I see.
GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.
VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!
GUS: That’s a new one.
VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?
GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.
VANESSA: I don’t.
GUS: I’m not a racist.
VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.
When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.
Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not
in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid
atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop
damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball
in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,
not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,
an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like
the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark
so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous
wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my
wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...