In Dreams I Am a Person of Color

Abstract

This paper is a journey into my inner life as a Jewish poet whose family fled Europe because of Nazi persecution.  In dreams I encounter Black kindred spirits who spark a series of eight dream sonnets. They are aspects of Self.  They speak to the connections between Black and Jewish experience and culture. I share my experience of the transformational process of making art out of unconscious imagery, and also as an expression of intergenerational trauma. It is a potent way to work with and heal ancient wounds. I am influenced in this endeavor by August Wilson’s play, Gem of the Ocean, in which the aged matriarch, Aunt Ester, takes lost souls on an imaginal journey to the “City of Bones” deep in the ocean—the ancestors’ realm—where the spirits of those who did not survive the Middle Passage congregate. Aunt Ester knows a core truth: one must touch down to the burial ground in one’s cultural psyche to know the truth of one’s path in life. She is the spiritual guide who accompanies me. The form of my poems is influenced by the American sonnets of Terrance Hayes. My dream sonnets borrow Hayes’ intense, unrhymed, 14-line structure. Hayes also shows up in a dream, which becomes the first sonnet in the series. He is the creative animus who enables this work.

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Notes on contributors

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is an analyst member of the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute, where she has led a poetry writing workshop, Deep River, for many years, and the poetry editor for Psychological Perspectives. A widely-published poet, Lowinsky has won the Blue Light Poetry Prize, the Obama Millennial Award, and the Atlanta Review Merit Award. Her fifth poetry collection is Death and His Lorca.