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Silhouette

By Ladan Osman
at a Claudia Rankine reading, University of Chicago, 2011

I enter: carpet, curtains,
large, framed pictures of robed white men,
a glassy glare over a forehead, below the voice box,
students in bland shades.
I don’t belong, the luxury of thinking,
the wealth of talking about thought,
privilege of ease among important people.
I am afraid of them, their smell,
their cotton, their expensive running shoes,
their faces so hard to read
when they make odd-placed sighs
at Black people histories. There is not one
bright color. A professor laughs—
quick, self-turning, a paper cut
to his own heart.
I hate myself for the shame of forgetting
the books on my shelf,
the many others read on the floors of libraries,
corners of bookstores where the cashier can’t see me.
Shame when I see all the book spines there ever were,
their colors and textures like women bent in prayer on a high holy day.
My voice is small as it asks,
What will it matter to them if I make a book?
I am one poet. Isn’t there space for me?
And the tears are sweet, completely sweet
as if they mean, even now you don’t believe?
The colonizers couldn’t have dreamed it,
the preoccupation with the heights of my soul,
my intangible qualities, if I am only the silhouette
of a shadow. If this poet is white in third world countries,
what am I here? It’s possible I’m just like the wind in the curtains.
They monopolize part of the eye.
The wind makes its mischief in goose flesh.
A girl closes the window.

Listen as Ladan Osman reads Silhouette .

Added: Friday, November 1, 2024 / Used with permission. This poem originally appeared in "The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony" (University of Nebraska, 2015).

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Whiting Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman Prize. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and the Michener Center. Her work in film includes: The Ascendants, Sam Underground, and Sun of the Soil. She lives in New York.

Image Description: Ladan Osman stands at a slight angle and looks at the camera. Her expression is neutral and the right side of her face is almost completely in shadow. Ladan wears a long-sleeved black dress and beaded earrings with bright orange tassels. Behind her, to her right is a tall white vase filled with peacock feathers.

Other poems by this author