Natural Birth

by Toi Derricotte

With insightful candour, Toi Derricote's poem explores the ways in which her confusion about love and sex and longing took away from the pleasures of pregnancy and motherhood.

Genres: Poetry, Memoir, Nonfiction

88 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1983

About the author

Toi Derricotte is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and four earlier collections of poetry, including Tender, winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton), received the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her honors include, among many others, the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, two Pushcart Prizes and the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists.

Derricotte is the co-founder of Cave Canem Foundation (with Cornelius Eady), Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Reviews

[Darryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toi Derricotte, an award-winning poet , professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation for up and coming African-American poets, wrote this collection of narrative poems in the late 1970s, when her son reached 16 years of age. It was originally published in 1983, and reissued in 2000 with a preface from the author.

In 1962, Derricotte was a college student in Detroit, a beautiful, bright and driven young woman and practicing Catholic. Early that year she became pregnant by her lover and future husband, and she had to withdraw from university. She was unable to return to her parents' house in Michigan, and traveled to a home for unwed mothers in a distant city during her seventh month of pregnancy. There was no room available at the home when she arrived, and she was placed with a nearby family until December, a month before her due date.

During her pregnancy, Derricotte read about the benefits of natural childbirth, and decided that she wanted to go through labor and delivery without analgesia. She did so, alone from her family, her lover, or the other young women in the home, and this powerful set of poems largely describes her excruciating experience during L&D, the unexpected numbness toward her son that she felt immediately after his birth, and with the loneliness, inadequacy and fear she experienced toward the end of her pregnancy. In this excerpt from "holy cross hospital", Derricotte poignantly describes the plight of three other pregnant women:

couldn't stand to see these new young faces, these
children swollen as myself. my roommate, snotty,
bragging about how she didn't give a damn about the
kid and was going back to her boyfriend and be a
cheerleader in high school. could we ever "go back?"
would our bodies be the same? could we hide among the
childless? she always reminded me of a lady at the bridge
club in her mother's shoes, playing her mother's hand.

i tried to get along, be silent, stay in my own corner.
i only had a month to go—too short to get to know them.
but being drawn to the room down the hall, the t.v. room
where, at night, we sat in our cuddly cotton robes and
fleece-lined slippers—like college freshmen, joking
about the nuns and laughing about due dates—jailbirds
waiting to be sprung.

one girl, taller and older, twenty-six or twenty-seven, kept
to herself, talked with a funny accent. the pain on her face
seemed worse than ours...

and a lovely, gentle girl with flat small bones. the
great round hump seemed to carry her around! she never
said an unkind word to anyone, went to church every morning
with her rosary and prayed each night alone in her room.

she was seventeen, diabetic, fearful that she or the baby
or both would die in childbirth. she wanted the baby, yet
knew that to keep it would be wrong. but what if the child
did live? what if she gave it up and could never have another?

i couldn't believe the fear, the knowledge she had of
death walking with her. i never felt stronger, eating
right, doing my exercises. i was holding on to the core,
the center of strength; death seemed remote, i could not
imagine it walking in our midst, death in the midst of
all that blooming. she seemed sincere, but maybe she
was lying...

she went down two weeks late. induced. she had decided
to keep the baby. the night i went down, she had just
gone into labor so the girls had two of us to cheer about.

the next morning when i awoke, i went to see her. she
smiled from her hospital bed with tubes in her arms. it
had been a boy. her baby was dead in the womb for two
weeks. i remembered she had complained no kicking. we
had reassured her everything was fine.

I highly recommend this superb collection of narrative poems, but would advise you to get the 2000 edition that contains Derricotte's insightful preface.

[Alina Matejkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Girl, Interrupted X The Pregnancy Pact X Mother but poetry if you’re into that kind of stuff. Which I am.

I appreciated Toi Derricotte’s honesty and candor. Appreciated isn’t even the right word, I felt validated in it. Even though major themes were loneliness and disconnection, it made me feel less alone in my own disconnect if that makes any sense? I feel that for myself and a lot of younger women, we’ve been spoon-fed a false narrative of motherhood by our mothers and grandmothers and the media that reduces and distorts birth as a short stint of pain before beauty. Like some storm cloud before a rainbow. It’s in her poem “transition” where she addresses this whitewashed narrative and her transition from naïveté to vowing to literally never love again. Felt.

The reason I’m also saying this is “Mother” coated isn’t just for the obvious mothering of it all either. I think, like “Mother”, there are biblical parallels here, starting off with Toi being told there were no rooms left for her left at the maternity home. And also that short poem about her baby daddy and the palpable internalized feeling of his Madonna whore complex. There’s probably more too that I missed. “Natural Birth” also at times gave elements of horror that I relate to “Mother”, honestly gruesome.

This inspired me to return to poetry reading/writing which I haven’t done in a really long time. Would recommend

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toi finds herself in an intensely real place in writing this book, and she handles it with grace, beauty, and a willingness to borrow down into the grotesque. Good read.

[jada alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this so much!!!

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really powerful

[Nour · Rating 5 out of 5]

“i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning, and the stars
blinked like a cat.”

In Knowledge of Young Boys

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short but powerful book about the author's experience of having a baby at age 19 is riveting and intensely affecting. Her images are powerful and unforgettable. Glad I was exposed to this (read it as part of a course I'm taking in poetry).

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Courageous and powerful poems.