Award-winning poet shares experience of oppression

One afternoon, award-winning writer Toi Derricotte and her mother went through her mother's homage to her ancestors, a memoir that had been 15 years in the making. Her mother died three days later. \nDerricotte spoke of her work before more than 30 people Wednesday night at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center's Grand Hall. She shared her most recent and developing project, a book she started just two weeks ago in which Derricotte converses with her late-mother's memoirs. \nReading back and forth between her mother's writing and her own, she painted a picture of the dynamics of a loving mother-daughter relationship, despite having very different, strong wills. Through reflections of their interactions and conflicts, Derricotte confronted their shared personal history and ancestry. She spoke of the conflict she faced with her mother after publishing her book, "The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey." \nWhile Derricotte's mother didn't want to recall the pain of the past, Derricotte saw that suffering was interwoven in her own story and ancestry and an inexplicable part of her writing. \n"I will always be a threat to my mother," Derricotte said. \nHer mother saw Derricotte bringing up a pain better left alone, but Derricotte said one's ancestors are honored by our telling their stories. \nMonique Harris of the Master's of Fine Arts writing program said it was good to see a woman of color speak on campus.\n"The courage to speak up is a powerful gesture in itself," she said.\nDerricotte read the poem "Black Bottom" from her book "Captivity", which spoke of her family's weekend journeys from the suburbs into the richly textured black community of Detroit's Black Bottom. \nIn explaining that her family returned to their home in the predominantly white suburbs, Derricotte described the "fence of silence" lining each house's property.\nThrough her poetry, prose, song and rapport with the audience, Derricotte gave members in attendance the opportunity to share her vision and soul. \n"I felt as though she was naked up on the stage, but I in my seat felt just as exposed as she was at that point," said Kristen Gentry, an MFA fiction student who attended the event.