"Incident" is a poem by Countee Cullen, describing a black child's exposure to racism from a white child. It was first published in his 1925 poetry collection "Color".
Reception
The Poetry Foundation says that the poem "throbs with anger", and considers it to be autobiographical.Countee Cullen, at the Poetry Foundation; retrieved August 16, 2024 The University of Baltimore's Baltimore Literary Heritage Project stated that it "paints an ugly—albeit accurate—picture" of early 20th-century Baltimore.Countee Cullen: Baltimore's Brush with the Harlem Renaissance, at the Baltimore Literary Heritage Project; via archive.org; archived September 14, 2007; retrieved August 16, 2024
Rita Dove has called it "heart-wrenching",A Poet a Day: Rita Dove Reads Countee Cullen, by Theresa Riley; at BillMoyers.com; filmed 2012; posted at BillMoyers.com, June 16, 2020; retrieved August 16, 2024 while Trudier Harris finds it to be "one of [Cullen's] (...) most effective pieces", opining that it "shows that America is not fully American for blacks living on its soil". African American Protest Poetry, by Trudier Harris; at the National Humanities Center; published no later than November 27, 2010 (earliest revision on archive.org); retrieved August 16, 2024
Analysis
Rachel Blau Duplessis observes that the poem depicts "the blow of social learning of one’s place in a racial/racist order", and notes that "the central quatrain proposes the equality of the children in size, demeanor, and in age, indeed, in every way but one", and that the word "whit" not only "means 'particle' or 'iota'", but also "irresistibly suggests both 'white' and 'wit.'"On "Incident", by Rachel Blau Duplessis; in Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934; published 2001 by Cambridge University Press; archived at the University of Illinois
Cary Nelson argues that Cullen's preference for traditional and "childlike" forms of poetry means that the word "nigger" is a "violation" that is "more disturbing and effective than its appearance in a modernist collage would be."Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945, by Cary Nelson; p. 23-24; published 1989 by University of Wisconsin Press
References