Black Face / Art Or Erasure
by Emerson Amaya
Arizona State University
Emerson is a poet and first-generation Latina writer currently studying Creative Writing with a focus in poetry. Their work explores memory, family, and the intersections of joy and loss, often through visceral imagery and a tender attention to language. Rooted in personal history and cultural inheritance, their poems seek to both remember and release. Emerson is drawn to the small, ordinary moments that echo larger truths. They write to make sense of what was, and what still lingers.
BLACK FACE / ART OR ERASURE
The conversation starts in class,
a room filled with forced readings,
with voices tangled in Shakespeare’s lines.
We talk about Othello, the tragedy, the moor,
the weight of his skin, the way he is seen,
how a black actor takes the role
and how a white actor takes the role.
And then it comes—
Black face.
Someone hesitates before saying it.
Someone else shifts in their seat.
The professor waits, her eyes steady,
a Black woman watching
as we struggle to name what is wrong.
David Harewood, a Black man,
once said a white actor
should be allowed to perform Othello
in black face
if art demands it.
But who decides what art demands?
Who gets to say that history
can be worn like a costume,
that the pain of one
is the expression of another?
If it is only art,
why is it never the Black actor
asked to play Hamlet in pale paint,
or Lear with powdered skin?
Why does the transformation
only ever go one way?
What is art
if it requires the erasure of the living
to resurrect the imagined?
I think of my brothers,
one just old enough to vote,
the other about to graduate,
my sister still young enough
to believe the world listens.
If they saw a man paint himself
to resemble them,
would they call it art?
Would they recognize themselves
in the imitation,
or only in the absence of dignity?
The professor lets us sit in silence.
Then she asks—
Is Othello ours to reclaim,
or was he never ours to begin with?
Is his Blackness a role to slip on and off,
or is it the thing that makes the tragedy real?
A play written by a white man,
performed for white men,
but still held up as something
we are supposed to claim as art.
Is it art?
Is it ART?
Is IT ART?
IS IT ART?
And if it is,
then what is left of us?
The class exhales.
No one answers.
Interview with the Author
What pieces inspired you to start writing poetry?
One of the pieces that inspired me to start writing poetry was Root Fractures by Diano Khoi Nguyen. I remember being struck by how Nguyen uses fragmentation and visual form to mirror emotional rupture—how grief could live not just in what was said, but in what was left unsaid or erased. His poems gave me permission to approach memory and identity not as fixed things, but as things that could be excavated, rearranged, even mourned through language. Reading Root Fractures was the first time I felt like poetry could hold silence and absence as powerfully as sound—and that realization changed everything for me.
What theme do you find yourself constantly writing about in your works?
A theme I find myself constantly writing about is memory—how it lingers in the body, how it shifts over time, and how it weaves through family, language, and silence. I’m especially drawn to the ways joy and loss coexist, sometimes even in the same breath. My poems often return to ordinary moments—a girl peeling oranges in the kitchen, the hum of a summer evening—because those are the moments that feel the most lived-in, the most alive. Like Ocean Vuong, I try to evoke the five senses in a way that grounds the emotional weight of a poem in the physical world. For me, writing is an act of remembering and also reimagining—sifting through what was, and tracing what still echoes.
What do you think are important elements in thought provoking poems?
I think thought-provoking poems hold tension—they make room for contradiction, for complexity, for the things we don’t always have language for. They don’t just tell the reader what to feel; they create space for feeling to unfold. I’m drawn to poems that linger in ambiguity, that ask questions rather than answer them. For me, vivid sensory detail is also essential—it roots emotion in the physical world and makes the abstract feel tangible. A thought-provoking poem should haunt a little—it should echo after the reading is over, like a scent or a half-remembered memory. I believe in poems that risk vulnerability, that speak from the body as much as the mind.
What role do you think poetry has on our society today?
I think poetry holds space for what often goes unspoken. In a world that moves fast and prioritizes clarity or certainty, poetry invites us to slow down, to sit with complexity, to listen more deeply. It gives voice to those still searching for a place to belong, and offers grounding for those already living but still learning how to name their experience. Poetry doesn’t solve or fix, but it bears witness—it creates a language for pain, joy, longing, resistance, and transformation. It reminds us we’re not alone in our questions. More than anything, I believe poetry makes room—for nuance, for empathy, for imagining something more tender and more true.