A poet’s quarrel with herself

In the preface to her new memoir, poet Danielle Chapman ruminates on what it means to write about growing up White in the South. Writing a memoir means exhuming memories of those who raised us, and for Chapman that requires describing the “unforgettable Southern characters from my childhood, who, if they hadn’t loved me with such grizzled fervor, I could easily have lumped in with the feller who brought his own crucifixion cross to the Capitol on January sixth.”

Clearly, such a project carries colossal hazards, and you get the sense that this is a book that almost wasn’t. Chapman forged ahead, though. The result is a memoir of sprawling proportions, stretching between a daughter’s grief, a nation’s wars, and a crumbling house in Tennessee in whose front hall “all of Western Civilization—White People’s History—announces itself as a preoccupation, a fetish, and a relic.”

I’d call the book a reckoning if the word itself weren’t becoming something of a relic—a symbol of what White people thought we were doing, there for awhile back in 2020, before we managed to set the reckoning (if not the racism) safely on a shelf. Better, then, to call the book what Chapman says it is, evoking W. B. Yeats’s definition of poetry as a “quarrel with ourselves.” Holler is indeed a White woman’s scrap with herself and her ancestors. It’s both an intimate fracas with family and a falling out with America’s claims of liberty and justice for all. “How can heaven and hell exist cheek by jowl in a place, in a person, in a nation’s history, and in oneself?” Chapman asks, her book becoming its own fretful attempt at an answer. Readers will not regret entering the fray.