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Content FOUR CONTEMPORARY BLACK WOMEN POETS: LUCILLE CLIFTON, JUNE JORDAN,
AUDRE LORDE, & SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS (A FEMINIST STUDY OF A
CULTURALLY DERIVED POETICS)
by
Doris Davenport
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
y
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1985
UMI Num ber: D P23103
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This dissertation, w ritten by
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Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents fo r the degree of
D O C T O R OF PH ILO SOPH Y
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D a te September
* ^ * • * * • V m
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
rpersott
C o t
ii
Acknowledgements
To adequately thank and acknowledge everyone who made this
dissertation possible, I would need at least fifty pages. Still,
there are some people without whom this work would have been
impossible. Therefore, this dissertation is dedicated to the
following people: Yemaye & Chango; Marjorie Perloff & Richard
Yarborough; Katharine (Mommy) Newman; Asungi; Jim Miller; Ethel
Davenport, Dolores Davenport, Pam Gober, Becky Perry; Gainesville
Jr. College; Claude Barnes,Jr. & Ann Bailey. Thank you.
(Oakwood, GA 8/17/85)
ill
CONTENTS
Chapter One: Introduction.....................................1
Chapter Two: Lucille Clifton's "Black and Going On Women" ....45
Chapter Three: Sherley Anne Williams's Blues ............... 82
Chapter Four: June Jordan's Black Feminist Satire ..............124
Chapter Five: Audre Lorde - Black Female Poet as "Mask" in THE
BLACK UNICORN ....................................................163
Conclusions. ...... 202
Bibliography 210
Chapter One: Introduction
*****
Despite the difficulty of documenting a Black American
literature tradition, I maintain that one can be postulated
and that it is possible to identify some elements which
scholars and historians must search for as they try to
define the common characteristics of that tradition.
- Darwin Turner
To examine Black women's literature effectively requires
that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities -
as individuals, as women, as human - rather than as one of
those problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this
society in place of genuine images of Black women.
- Audre Lorde
A Black feminist approach to literature that embodies the
realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics
of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the
works of Black women writers is an absolute necessity.
Until a Black feminist criticism exists we will not even
know what these writers mean.
- Barbara Smith
* * * * *
Part I: Contexts and Rationale
These three epigraphs provide an attitudinal context for
this study. Both Turner and Lorde address critical challenges,
omissions and disbeliefs. That is, Turner merely asserts that a
black American literary tradition exists. There would be no need
for such a statement if the concept had not been challenged, and
possibly, negated. The Lorde quotation addresses a related point:
if black women are not considered as human, how can their
literature be considered at all? Both statements, although making
different points, dovetail in their relevance to this study.
Finally, the Smith quotation suggests a much needed critical
perspective, one which will be utilized in this study, for
interpreting black women's literature. That is, not only is there
a black literary tradition(s), but one can make a similar claim
for the existence of a black female literary tradition.
The existence of both traditions - here taken for granted -
is not the major argument of this study. I am more concerned with
one aspect of both traditions: how race and sex influence Afro-
American poetics in the works of Lucille Clifton, June Jordan,
Audre Lorde, and Sherley Anne Williams. Most importantly,
throughout this study I will be employing a feminist approach,
analysis, and interpretive strategies. However, before looking
directly at the poets, a brief explanation of a cultural and
critical context is necessary.
For this study of contemporary poets, it seems feasible to
go back no further than the 60's, to what was called the "Black
Arts Movement." For the people involved in this movement,
assimilation or integration into white American society was no
longer desirable. A renewed pride in Blackness and separatism was
reflected in (if not dictated by) the literature. At one point,
there seemed to be a new anthology or new individual writer
published each month, since black was again in "vogue" and
selling.
The poets of the mid-60's and later reflected and sometimes
led the changes that occurred in the socio-political spheres of
black America, Since black was beautiful, they needed only to
write to, for, and about themselves. These writers no longer
cared about being neglected by the white literary world (or so
they claimed). Unfortunately, too many of these writers equated
blackness with maleness. In Amiri Baraka's (Leroi Jones) foreward
to the representative anthology Black Fire, for example, he
writes, "These descriptions will be carried for the next thousands
of years, of good and evil. These will be the standards black men
make reference to for the next thousand years. . . . The black
artist. The black man. The holy holy holy black man" (xviii).
Most of the writers in the anthology seem to share Baraka's
concerns and biases. More significantly, of the fifty-five
writers in the poetry section, only five are women; none of them
is one of the four chosen for this dissertation, even though they
had all published work by 1968. Unfortunately, however, too many
writers and editors agreed with Baraka that the black man
represented all of black culture. However, in spite of the
attitudes of writers such as Baraka, the black women kept
writing.1 Poets such as Sarah Webster Fabio, Sonia Sanchez,
Carolyn Rodgers, Jane Cortez and Nikki Giovanni attained
visibility and prominence, since they too foregrounded the
"blackness" theme. On the other hand, even after that "fad,"
they, and the poets considered here, kept writing and publishing.
And in the past fourteen or fifteen years, there has been a major
emergence of creative talent among black women.
In both prose and poetry, black women have been prolific.
In 1970, for example, we saw a significant emergence of new
attitudes and new talents. First, Toni Cade's anthology The Black
Woman: A Collection of Essays, addressed many issues and
shortcomings of the 60's, representing a major attitudinal change
among black women. In the same year, Toni Morrison's first novel,
The Bluest Eye, and Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange
Copleland appeared. Among poets, there were Mari Evans's I Am A
Black Woman, Audre Lorde's Cables to Rage, and two anthologies
edited by June Jordan. Toni Cade Bambara's short stories,
Morrison's second novel, and Nikki Giovanni's poetry, as well as
numerous works by other women, announced the 70's as a decade of
black women writers. Finally, there was the phenomenon of Ntozake
Shange's "choreo-poem," For Colored Girls Who Have Considered
Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, first performed in 1976 and
published in 1977. Reviewers and critics still debate the play's
message, meaning, and impact.
Just as Shange's play has continued to reverberate, so have
the works of other women. By now, the names and works of these
women are well known, some in several genres. (Shange recently
published a second novel, and Bambara, her first.) Several of the
women have achieved both critical and popular acclaim. Morrison,
for example, was featured on the cover of NEWSWEEK with her fourth
novel, Tar Baby, and Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The
Color Purple. In spite of this abundance of material, however,
only a few women critics and theorists have emerged to try to "do
justice" to the writers, as did Mary Helen Washington in the
anthology Black-Eyed Susans (1975). This was one of the first
works to isolate^ and consider thematic similarities in black
women's fiction, and its focus seems to have been prophetic.
Barbara Christian's Black Women Novelists: The Development of a
Tradition, 1892-1976 has a similar focus. But even earlier,
Barbara Smith's landmark essay, "Towards a Black Feminist
Criticism" (1977) signalled a call to which many black women are
increasingly responding.
Critical Context
Although the collection is not explicitly feminist, nor even
critical, Claudia Tate's anthology Black Women Writers at Work
(NY: Continuum Press, 1983) does provide a forum for fourteen
writers to speak on their lives and their work. Most recently,
Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation, 1954-1980, (1984)
edited by Mari Evans, addresses a similar need. As Evans says in
6
the preface, when the book was conceived in 1979, there was "very
little critical attention" for black women writers, and no "single
definitive volume of criticism that made available both
traditional analyses and examinations of the works of a
representative and significant segment of skillful Black women
writers" (xvii).
Evans's anthology is unique in that it offers the writers's
viewpoints, critical essays, and current bio-bibliographical
information. Yet, she mentions that while the critics were
enthusiastic about the novelists, very few of them wanted to do
"serious scholarly examinations" of the poets (xvii). Whatever
the reasons for the critics's reluctance, they contribute to a
further void, which this study attempts to address. To my
knowledge, there is no study, like Christian's, of the history and
continuum of black women poets. Gloria Hull comes closest to such
a preliminary study in her essay "Black Women Poets from Wheatley
to Walker" (1979) and its longer, revised edition, "Afro-American
Women Poets: A Bio-Critical Survey" (1979). Hull's major claim is
that there a tradition of black women's poetry; it has simply
been obscured and overlooked. Similarly, Erlene Stetson's
anthology, Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980
is the first to isolate, historically, the poetry of black women.
One of Stetson's motives for compiling this anthology was to
rectify the omissions of others:
One gets the impression that only the works of white poets
and black male poets deserve critical attention, while black
women's work takes the back seat as a minor variation of
"black poetry" or of "women's poetry." The result is that
the poetry of black women has not been seen as a complex
whole that can be analyzed in terms of style, structure, and
a coherent tradition. (xiii)
Consequently, in this anthology, Stetson chronologically presents
the most representative of the tradition of black women poets,
from Wheatley to the present. Her goal in doing so is to examine
black women poets as an autonomous group, deserving of critical
"isolation” and examination. The timeliness of my study, which
shares Stetson's goal, is apparent from a brief look at main
"trends" in Afro-American literary criticism.
Like the literature, the criticism has been affected by the
socio-historical realities of black folk in America. These
realities seemed to dictate, at one point, two identifiable
branches of black literary criticism, each complementing the
other. One was the critical survey of black images in works by
white authors and related subjects; the other was a general survey
of black writers as a race. This latter school became even more
pronounced during the 60's and 70's, as seen in works like Black
Fire, mentioned above, but in other essays and works as well. At
one point, a monolithic inflexible standard was prescribed for all
black artists. Gradually, however, the sheer volume and output of
the poets, as well as changing times and concerns, led to another
8
focus in poetry and its criticism: a greater concern with
technical and stylistic effects.
Especially useful from this perspective is Eugene Redmond's
Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical
History (1976). Redmond intends to provide a tool for studying
the "how" (folk origins, language, reoccuring themes) of black
poetry. As he observes, "The majority of persons who want to know
something about black poetry are not preoccupied with the craft of
poetry. . . . Instead, students and casual readers seem to be
more interested in the sociological (some say pathological)
aspects of the poetry" (14). His book is an attempt to provide
other areas for study, within a historical context.
A similar work, Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in
Historical Interpretation (1974) discusses black poetry in terms
of one cumulative "process" with "its own tradition" (Jackson and
Rubin xi). Although the authors acknowledge a mutual influence
among black and white poets in America, they contend that black
poets "are molded, too, by their own tradition, by voices from
their own black past, by a sense in black poet after black poet of
what black poetry was before each of them came to add his, or her,
peculiar bit to it" (xiii). This study is only one of many, after
the 60's, which make and document claims for the uniqueness of
black culture, including black English and black literature.
However, even as this claim was made, critics seemed almost
9
invariably to define the Afro-American "canon" as predominantly,
3
if not exclusively, male. This biased and one-sided perspective
has given rise to a black feminist focus on who among black women
constitute a major part of the tradition, or even, an autonomous
tradition. This focus, increasingly, is defined as a black
feminist literary critical tradition. Its emphasis, in poetry and
prose, is on literature by black women. For example, Gloria Hull
observes that the Harlem Renaissance period is almost synonomous
with "major" black male poets (Hughes, Cullen, McKay) while the
female poets, such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Grimke,
and Jessie Fauset, among others, are not considered major, if
considered at all ("Afro-American Women Poets" 170). She sees
that period as a "predominantly masculine affair" and observes
that the present emphasis on contemporary black female poets has
"ironically tended to obscure the already shadowy literary past by
suggesting that black female poets are something new" ("Black
Women Poets" 69).^
To other feminist critics, both black and white, all
literature and criticism has been a "predominantly masculine
affair," which has dictated the critical study of women writers by
other women writers. Frequently, the concerns of these critics
parallel and mutually influence each other; but more often, as
Deborah E. McDowell notes in "new Directions for Black Feminist
Criticism," "these early theorists and practitioners of feminist
10
literary criticism were largely white females who . . .
perpetrated against the black woman writer the same exclusive
practices they so vehemently decried in male scholars" (153). One
of the most dramatic examples of this exclusion, according to
McDowell, is Patricia M. Spacks's The Female Imagination. Spacks
weakly defends her exclusive focus on white women writers by
quoting a white woman psychologist who wrote that she has no
theory of the psychology of third world women and was "reluctant
and unable to construct theories about experiences I haven't had."
In turn, McDowell agrees with Alice Walker: "Spacks never lived in
nineteenth century Yorkshire, so why theorize about the Brontes"
(153).
While Spacks at least offers some excuse, however lame, many
others offer none.^ Like Stetson, McDowell writes, "the critical
community has not favored Black women writers. The recognition
among Black female critics and writers that white women, white
men, and Black men consider their experiences as normative, and
Black women's experience as deviant has given rise to Black
feminist criticism" (154). This concept of deviancy, or of
tangential commonality, is a variation of the racist male-
chauvinist themes of this society and of the literary world.
Black feminist critics like Evans, Tate and Christian explicitly
assert that black women's culture and reality is more than
incidental commonality with other women or black males. To them,
11
and. for me, the culture and reality encompass, among other things,
a singular "attitude" and'worldview. As Gloria Hull and Barbara
Smith observe in But Some of Us Are Brave:
Merely to use the term "Black women's studies" is an act
charged with political significance. At the very least, the
combining of these words to name a discipline means taking
the stance that Black women exist - and exist positively - a
stance that is in direct opposition to most of what passes
for culture and thought on the North American Continent.
(xviii)
Relatedly, they observe that "multilayered oppression" omits an
explanation of the creating and maintenance of "our own
intellectual traditions" (xviii). In this study, I share with
these women the theory that a primary context for black women's
literature, whatever the genre, is that of a black female culture
and reality.
The problem, in a work such as this one, is one of
semantics, perspectives, and definitions. That is, all too often,
as previously discussed, black culture is interpreted, perceived,
and defined in terms of black males. As even Calvin Hernton
observes, "black men have historically defined themselves as sole
interpreters of the black experience" ("The Sexual Mountain" 140).
As if Ma Rainey, Zora Neale Hurston, Judith Jamison and Varnette
Honeywood, among others, are not definers, contributors to, and
interpreters of "black experience." Whereas there are numerous
studies of male black English (ie,Liebow's On the Street Corner
and Jackson's Shine Swam On), there are none, to my knowledge, of
12
female black English - as if black women don't have our own code
£
words, mascons, and special ways of signifying.
Because of this sexist view of black culture, the notion of
the female half of black culture is sometimes considered as either
a joke, a personal insult, or an impossibility. In spite of that
view, this study examines aspects of black female culture as they
appear in the poetry of four contemporary black women poets.
Given my focus, there are only a few critical theories or
methodologies which are directly pertinent to this study.
Methodology / Rationale
Three of the most relevant and useful works for basic theory
and approach are those of Stephen Henderson, Elaine Showalter, and
Mary Helen Washington, Stephen Henderson's introductory essay in
Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973) suggests a critical
methodology, Henderson's criteria for judging black poetry are
the three broad categories of theme, structure, and saturation.
Theme is the "specific subject matter, the emotional response to
it, or its intellectual formulation." Structure (diction, rhythm,
figurative language) derives, for Henderson, from "two basic
sources, Black speech and Black music" (30-31). Saturation is the
reader's innate (or, "gut-level") "recognition that a poem deals
with the Black Experience, even though there are no verbal or
other clues" (62).
13
Just as Henderson's method and terminology are relevant for
examining the cultural ethnicity of the poetry, Elaine Showalter's
essay "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" is helpful in
examining the cultural gender (for lack of a better word) of the
poetry. In this essay, Showalter reviews the various kinds of
feminist literary criticism. One mode, which she calls
"gynocritics," studies, among other things, "history, styles,
themes, genres, and structures of female creativity" (185). This
model, in turn, is sub-divided into four areas which attempt to
account for differences in women's writing - the biological,
linguistic, psychoanalytical, and cultural (187). For her (and
for me) the fourth area is most viable, since it incorporates the
preceding three modes, and, unlike them, "acknowledges . . .
important differences between women as writers: class, race,
nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant
as gender" (197).
Both these works are useful, yet each also has limitations.
Whereas Henderson concentrates on ethnicity and neglects female-
male differences, Showalter foregrounds gender, but includes too
many other variables. Just as Henderson's view is overly
specific, Showalter's could allow for overwhelming multiplicity.
Despite these limitations, however, the theories of these two
critics are useful in suggesting an approach or methodology for
this study, which, in assessing both race and sex as determinants,
14
is slightly broader than Henderson's concerns, while more specific
than Showalter's.
A particularly relevant essay, Mary Helen Washington's
"Those Self-Invented Women," poses empirical questions which this
dissertation will attempt, partly, to answer. Washington covers
what is by now familiar territory, the critical neglect of black
women writers. However, her main focus is not on that problem,
but rather, on possible solutions, via suggestions and questions
about the writings of black women: "We need to know: what rituals
and symbols are essential to the black woman's self-discovery? By
what means does she come to know her own voice? . . . What are
the unique forms and purposes by which her literary tradition can
be identified?" (6). These and related questions concern me here.
For example, what signals do inform us that a black woman is
speaking or writing? What are the black woman's myths and
cultural-communal bases for her art? Where does her "voice" exist
before she finds and uses it?
Finally, one last work, The Culture of Southern Black Women:
Approaches and Methods (1983) provides a theoretical underpinning
for this study. This text, a researched and applied curriculum
guide, assumes that such a culture exists. One of the project's
assumptions, important to this study, is that women's art
"embodies their expressions, values, and beliefs" (Conklin, et.al.
1). Although the curriculum guide focuses primarily on the
15
South, its basic premises have a wider applicability, extending to
all Afro-American women.
My thesis for this theoretical and applied critical study is
that an examination of the style in the works of four black women
poets will reveal a coherent pattern of connections and, further,
substantiate the claim that there is a unique Afro-American
women's literary tradition grounded in a unique black female
culture and reality. In other words, this study is based in the
theory that gender and race - that is, the state of being female
and black - influence both the style and the subject matter of
these poets.
In considering the style of these poets, the context will be
their own work (including prose, when relevant), each other's
work, and finally, the context of other black women's work.
Consequently, they will not be compared with either black males or
white writers unless the women's texts invite such a comparison.
The goal here is to isolate and study traits that the women have
in common with each other. As Lena W. Myers puts it, "black women
are often in the company of other black women. That being the
case, simple deductive reasoning would indicate that black women
should be judged, if at all, in accordance with other black women,
not with their white counterparts" (Black Women . . . 20).
My methodology consists simply of posing basic questions
about the poetry, to reach conclusions or answers to these
16
questions. First I will do an overview of each poet's work,
looking particularly at poems that foreground being female and
black. Second, I will analyze how and why this "culture" becomes
a poetic determinant. Third, I will focus on one element of the
poet's style, the aspect which seems most representative of her
incorporation of black female culture. Ultimately, I expect to
reach conclusions not only about these poets, but conclusions
which should be applicable to both past and present black female
poets.
The four poets Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde and
Sherley Anne Williams were, chosen for three major reasons. First,
they are of the same "generation," which suggests that they would
share certain traits, and even an underlying value system.
Second, each of these writers is prolific in several genres and
therefore worthy of in-depth study; yet no such study has been
made. Third, and most importantly, the poetry of each of these
women contains a unique depth and complexity of style, which
suggests that a close reading of their poetry would be
insightful, revealing, and challenging. This study, then,
fulfills two major purposes: it is an original contribution to the
field of feminist Afro-American literary criticism and to women's
studies, and it is corrective, in filling a critical void.
Finally, these four women essentially constitute four case studies
17
of what is a basic, pioneering effort, not a definitive or all
inclusive one.
In order to provide a specific context and perspective for
the four main chapters, the remainder of this chapter will examine
the works of three significant "forerunners" who illustrate the
poetic convergence of gender and race.
18
Part II: A Context of Black Women Poets
Writing about early black women poets in the anthology
Shakespeare's Sisters, Gloria Hull notes "Black women poets are
not ''Shakespeare's sisters.' In fact, they seem to be siblings of
no one but themselves." She continues to state that these women,
forced to "support and nurture each other in an underground
sisterhood," were necessarily forced to develop their "own unique
tradition" ("Afro-American Women Poets" 165-166). Perhaps Hull is
referring to a phenomenon which Lorraine Bethel observes, in
different terms: "Unlike many of their Black male and white female
counterparts, Black women writers have usually refused to dispense
with whatever was clearly Black and/or female in their
sensibilities in an effort to achieve the mythical 'neutral' voice
of universal art" (" 'This Infinity of Conscious Pain' " 177).
Frances E. Watkins Harper, a "free" black woman (1825-1911),
considered the first major poet and novelist of the nineteenth
century, is a case in point.
Just as Rosa Parks is a founding mother of the sit-in
movement, Frances Harper is the "mother" of a tradition of black
feminist writings in that she constantly writes from a female and
black perspective. Although Harper is nineteenth century, her
concerns, her writings, and her political activism place her in
19
the twentieth century. As Barbara Christian observes in Black
Women Novelists:
As an abolitionist and a black feminist, Frances Harper had
been one of the leading figures in the national struggle to
free blacks- from slavery, as well as a long time
spokesperson for the many black women who were not yet free
to speak. She had spent her life lecturing against slavery,
had written ten volumes of poetry, had taken an active part
in the 1856 Women's Rights Convention, and had helped to
found the National Association of Colored Women. Many of
her newspaper articles, such as "Black Women in the
Reconstruction South" (1878), reflect her involvement with
the problems of black women in this century. (4)
Given Harper's concerns, she could hardly "dispense" with a
female-black perspective.
Like much nineteenth-century poetry, Harper's is
impassioned, didactic, and melodramatic. Her poetry utilizes
archaic conventional structures, rhymes, and diction. However, in
this respect, her poetry reflects the then prevalent "style" in
poetry. Ironically, the content is, nonetheless, as unconventional
as the style is conventional. For instance, Harper is especially
involved with the fate of black women - or rather, with how the
Victorian standards for women are set aside if the women are
black. This is particularly, though subtly, present in "The Slave
Auction":
The sale began - young girls were there,
Defenceless in their wretchedness,
Whose stifled sobs of deep despair
Revealed their anguish and distress.
And mothers stood with streaming eyes,
And saw their dearest children sold
Unheeded rose their bitter cries,
20
While tyrants bartered them for gold.
And woman, with her love and truth -
For these in sable forms may dwell -
Gaz' on the husband of her youth,
With anguish none may paint or tell.
(Davis & Redding 101-2)
This poem employs nineteenth-century diction ("Gaz', "streaming
eyes," "bitter cries"), syntax, stanzaic pattern, and rhyme
scheme. It is clearly impassioned, as well as didactic,
particularly in the third stanza. The stanzas also reveal
Harper's special concern with the fates of black women under
slavery, or, what might be called her feminism. More
particularly, each stanza argues for an obstensibly inalienable
right of all women. Stanza one implies that the young girls are
"defenceless" in the face of sexual harrassment and abuse. Their
rights to "purity" and chastity are being negated. Stanzas two
and three, respectively, deal with the denial of maternal and
matrimonial rights. Throughout, Harper argues that both as black
folk and as women, the rights of these folk are being violated.
She is quite aware of the prevalent attitude of the era: "The
problem was not whether black women were heroic, but whether they
were women at all" (Christian 33). Consequently, Harper reminds
the audience, in stanza three, that black women possess "love and
truth." These stanzas argue for black women's humanity and
"femininity," even as they argue against slavery. In fact, one of
Harper's favorite abolitionist personas is the slave mother. In
21
one poem, "The Slave Mother,"- Harper's diction becomes almost
gothic as she describes the separation of a slave mother from her
child:
Heard you that shriek? It rose
So wildly on the air,
It seemed as if a burdened heart
Was breaking in despair (Poems 6)
It might have been the prevailing modes which dictated Harper's
stance and diction in this stanza, but it also might have been
that she sought a language to approximate and reflect the subject
matter. That "shriek" which hangs "wildly on the air," for
example, suggests cruelty and inhuman torture. The next two
stanzas embody the shriek in a "shuddering fragile form" from
which a "storm of agony" emanates. Stanzas 1-3 dramatically build
up and lead into stanza four, where we learn that the person is a
mother, " pale with fear," trying to hide her son in her skirts:
He is not hers, although she bore
For him a mother's pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
Is coursing through his veins.
He is not hers, for cruel hands
May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
That binds her breaking heart. (Poems 7)
In these lines, Harper eloquently argues against the unnaturalness
of any system which can destroy a natural bond, like that between
a mother and her child. Or in other words, the "rights" of
slavery negate blood rights.
22
In another poem, "Eliza Harris," a more courageous slave
mother runs across a frozen river with her child in her arms:
She was nearing the river - in reaching the brink,
She heeded no danger, she paused not to think!
For she is a mother - her child is a slave -
And she"11 give him his freedom, or find him a grave!
(Poems 9)
This mother makes it across the river, to freedom. One subtle -
but obvious - point which the poem makes is that the woman's child
gives her the added incentive and determination to be free.
Whereas the mother in the preceding poem appears pathetic in order
to invite empathy, in "Eliza Harris," the woman heroically refuses
to be resigned to her fate. In both cases, however, slavery is
not just a crime, but almost a sacrilege, in negating these black
women's rights.
Along with her abolitionist concerns, Harper's poetry also
shows a concern with all women's freedom in the nineteenth
century. The strongest of these poems, "A Double Standard,"
features a narrative of love and betrayal. The woman in the poem
is not repentant but righteously indignant as she presents her
case in a series of rhetorical questions which trace the stages of
the affair. From her "standing all alone" in a "careless world,"
hence being subceptible to the male, to their different treatments
afterwards (she's "fallen"; he's "faultless."), she questions why
she is blamed, even as he is "feted and caressed." Instead of
23
blaming herself, this woman correctly blames the man, and the
hypocritical mores of society
Can you blame me if I've learned to think
Your hate of vice a sham,
When you so coldly crushed me down,
And then excused the man?
Yes, blame me for my downward course,
But oh! remember well,
Within your homes you press the hand
That led me down to hell! (Atlanta Offering Poems 14)
Through this persona, Harper effectively presents an indictment of
the nineteenth century's double standards enforced for men and
women, just as in other poems, she criticizes the double standards
enforced for black women vs. white women. And, like many poems on
slavery, this one ends with an appeal to a "higher authority."
The poem's last two lines, with modifications, were and are a
rallying point for most feminists:
I'm glad God's ways are not our ways,
He does not see as man;
Within His love I know there's room
For those whom others ban.
No golden weights can turn the scale
Of justice in his sight;
And what is wrong in woman's life
In man's cannot be right.
(Atlanta Offering Poems 14)
Harper argues as fervently for women's rights as she does
for abolition. That is, Harper's being both female and black
obviously prompted her to write about these related concerns.
Before 1863, perhaps, Harper was more concerned with abolition.
24
Yet, even in the abolitionist poems, she frequently focuses on the
abuses against black women. Sex and race clearly affected Harper's
choice of subject matter, if not her style. In spite of Harper's
achievements, it is common among critics to dismiss her poetry as
"un-original" and imitative. Whereas that might be true in some
cases, Harper is quite original, almost "radical," in her
perspectives. Her poetry, in fact, provides a context for later
black women, a tradition in which both gender and race are
significant and important determinants of the women's poetry.
Although the next few generations of poets after Harper are
less obviously "feminist” than she is, they frequently write from
a black-female perspective nonetheless. Whether dealing with the
limitations placed on women, as in "Letter to My Sister" by Anne
Spencer (1882-1975) or with the fashionably "exotic" black image
of the 1920's, as in the work of Helene Johnson and Gwendolyn
Bennett, the women always seem conscious of both their racial and
sexual realities. This consciousness, moreover, does not seem
schizophrenic (ie Dubois's "double consciousness" theory), but
rather, holistic. Being both female and black provides for a wider
range of subjects, styles, and possibilities. This is especially
seen in two of the most well-known and well-respected writers of
the modern period - Margaret Walker (1915 - ) and Gwendolyn Brooks
(1917 - ).
25
There are at least two reasons for the importance of Brooks
and Walker. They both provide stylistic and thematic innovations
in their poetry, thereby widening the range of topics and styles
for following generations. More importantly, both women
poetically, creatively, foreground the sensibilities of black
women by writing, as Brooks said poets should, from their
"milieu," from and about what they knew and saw, about and within
themselves. (And each of them wrote one novel, featuring a black
heroine.) With Walker, it is the rural southern scene; with
Brooks, black citylife, or "bronzeville" folk of Chicago. Also,
both poets provide psychological reinforcement, role models and
inspiration: "If/since they did it, maybe we can too."
Although Walker's poetic output is far smaller than
Brooks's, her historical influence and importance is almost as
great, due to her first book of poetry For My People (1942). One
critic says that the book "departed in theme and technique from
the prevailing mood of poetry by black women." It is also a
"departure" from the poetry by black men, possibly excluding
Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, and whites as well.
The achievement of For My People is, to put it plainly, what
Walker wrote about and how she wrote it. It is not so much that
she is the first poet to use black southern rural dialect and
culture, as she is one of the first modern poets to do it so well.
Her earliest forerunner might be Paul L. Dunbar, except that her
26
goals and effects are quite different from his. Helene Johnson
affected a black colloquial style, but hers has a note of
artificiality absent from Walker's. Similarly, Jean Toomer's Cane
was based on southern types; but apart from that, his work has
little in common with Walker's. Langston Hughes "pioneered" the
poetic use of black vernacular, but apart from the use of the
blues (a southern import) his idiom is urban black. Sterling
Brown's use of southern black vernacular differs drastically in
tone (in Southern Road) from Walker's. As for white poets, after
the plantation school and the attempt at folk poetry of whites
like Vachal Lindsay, no white poet even attempted to use black
speech poetically. Clearly, Walker's book signalled a unique and
"individual" poetic voice.
There are many elements to that voice, but this discussion
will be limited to one major element, Walker's adaptation of the
"call and response" method of delivery and performance to her own
female perspectives and vision. This aspect is a major element of
the southern culture from which For My People derives, as well as
a structural, stylistic, and thematic element which underpins and
unifies the book. "Call and response" describes a major "African
retention" among black folks in America. It consists of a solo
part or voice leading a song or chant, with a well-known communal-
collective response. It has spiritual, psychological, social, and
27
historical, as well as aesthetic resonance. In its written form,
it also suggests an analogy with oratory and rhetoric.
In For My People, the themes, derived from black history and
culture, function as "call and response." The poems, or the
narrator's voices, are the call; the readers, especially black
ones, provide the spiritual and intellectual responses.
Similarly, many poems in For My People use the style of the
traditional oral story teller which also depends on the audience's
recognition and response for maximum effectiveness. Finally, the
narrator's voice in For My People is a public-individual one,
addressing a collective and familiar reality shared by almost all
black folk in this country.
Such poems as "Dark Blood," "We Have Been Believers," and
"People of Unrest" have the tone and delivery of black preachers,
with the rhetorical elements of incantation, incremental
repetition, and inspiration. In "Since 1619," for example, a
"collective I" poses a series of questions: "How many years since
1619 have I been singing spirituals? / How long have I been
praising God and shouting hallelu- / jahs? How long have I been
hated and hating? / How long have I been living in hell for
heaven?" (26). These questions are a "call," the response comes
from the audience (congregation). This poem, like many others,
depends on the shared memories and experiences of its audience to
28
be totally effective. The title poem, "For My People," is a prime
example of this interaction.
The structure, technique, and other elements of this poem
have been compared to the works of poets from Whitman to Sandburg,
from Martin Luther King Jr. to lesser known black preacher-poets.
The poem is a history-in-poetry of Afro-Americans; its style
(alliteration, assonance, verse paragraphing, etc.) mark the poem
as one of the best in the "modernist" poetic tradition, as seen in
the first three stanzas:
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeat
edly; their dirges and their ditties and their blues and
jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown
god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone
years and the now years and the maybe years, washing
ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing
plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging
along never gaining never reaping never knowing and
never understanding;
• •
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when,
in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and
nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody
understood; (13)
If this were a sermon being delivered (as it is, on one
level), the church would be "happy," the aisles crowded with
shouting, moaning, people, screaming "responses" to the Word. For
a literary audience, the poem^s stylistic and structural devices
might generate a similar, though more muted, response even without
29
its knowing or having the alluded-to experiences. Throughout the
poem, the repetitions, alliterations, and assonance create an
orchestrated rhythm, as the poem builds up to a crescendo in the
concluding stanza:
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let
a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a se
cond generation full of courage issue forthj let
a people loving freedom come to growth. . . .
Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges
disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take
control. (14)
To extend the "church" metaphor a little further, by its
conclusion, this sermon would have converted a lot of sinners. As
Eugenia Collier puts it, about listening to someone read this
poem:
And when the resonant voice proclaimed the dawn of a new
world . . . we went wild with ancient joy and new resolve.
Margaret Walker's "For My People" does that. It melts away
time and place and it unifies Black listeners. Its power is
as compelling now as it was forty-odd years ago. . . . The
source of its power is the reservoir of beliefs, values, and
archetypal characters yielded by our collective historical
experience. It is this area of our being which defines us.
("Fields Watered in Blood" 499)
In other words, this poem is almost unique in Afro-American
literature. In "For My People," Walker becomes an archetypal
black voice as she speaks with a tone of nurturance, love, and
sustenance - qualities historically associated with black women,
and their attempts to preserve and continue the black race in
30
America. Walker's female perspective also appears in her "oral
tradition" poems.
In the oral tradition of story telling which Walker uses,
although there is only one person telling the story or speaking,
there is a background context of many other voices who have told
the same story (with variations). To quote Collier again, Walker
successfully utilizes another aspect of the black collective
"psyche," the folklore: "Here the voice is that of the tale teller
indigenous to Black America, especially the South, who reaches
back ultimately to the people who swapped tales around the fire in
ancient Africa" (503-4). And, as it is done in Afro-America,
Walker uses this mode for poems specifically about folk
characters, or legendary black heroic figures such as "Bad-Man
Stagolee," who would be familiar to black people.
Stagolee is a kind of human "mascon" in black culture and
legend. His life and exploits vary with the teller, as the
narrator observes, "But anyhow the tale ain't new." In this poem,
Walker uses another variation of southern black speech, the
colloquial or dialect of the "ordinary" (uneducated) person:
, . . . Stagolee just up and slew
A big policeman on 'leventh street
And all he knowed was tweet-tweet-tweet
• • •
But one thing's certain and two things sho
His bullets made holes no doc could cyo. [sew]
And that there cop was good and done
When he met Stagolee and that blue boy's gun. (35)
31
In the oral story-telling tradition, as Walker was well
aware, the person not only tells the story, but exhibits
linguistic and semantic skills. Since the story was familiar and
the audience would know it, the point of telling it is to exhibit
one's own verbal finesse, as well as to insure the continued
existence and longevity of the tradition, and of chracters like
Stagolee. Interestingly enough, Walker's "Stagolee" is devoid of
the braggadocio of sexual conquests with which most black males
endow him. Yet, Walker's poem is equally effective in fusing both
written and oral, traditions. Walker's perspective not only
modifies but creates other "genres."
That is, whereas Stagoless is a well-known oral-literary
folk hero, there are or were few folk heroines who were similarly
sung or written about, although they "existed" and were quite
familiar in black communities. Walker creates women who are
Stagolee's legendary counterparts, as in "Molly Means," a ballad
with supernatural elements, which fuses the genres of the folk
tale and the ghost story. Molly had seven husbands and was "a hag
and a witch / Chile of the devil, the dark, and sitch." It was
said that Molly could "charm a body or an evil place / And every
man could well despise / The evil look in her coal black eyes"
(33). Besides hexing and terrifying the living, she also calls
the dead, until she puts a spell on a young bride, whose husband
gets revenge by turning the spell back on her. The poem ends:
32
Sometimes at night through the shadowy trees
She rides along on a winter breeze.
You can hear her holler and whine and cry.
Her voice is thin her moan is high,
And her cackling laugh or her barking cold
Bring terror to the young and old.
0 Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Lean is the ghost of Molly Means. (34)
Molly is thereby incorporated into folk superstitions or
ghost (haint) stories, complete with the necessary props ("shadowy
trees" and hollers and moans). The poem "Kissie Lee" contains
another "bad" heroine. It recounts the story of how, when the
"young and good" Kissie was bullied, her grandmother gave her some
advice:
"Whin I was a gal wasn't no soul
Could do me wrong an' still stay whole.
Ah got me a razor to talk for me
An' aftah that they let me be." (38)
Kissie gets not only a knife, but a gun, with which she
could "shoot glass doors offa the hinges." For this and related
exploits, like shooting a man who "done her dirt," Kissie becomes
legend. The narrator of the poem remembers her as "the toughest
gal God ever made." Although "Kissie Lee" is admirable and
significant for its storyline and diction, it is even more
significant that Walker has Kissie learn survival skills from her
grandmother, not from a male.
Although Molly's and Kissie's female descendants appear in
later black poetry and prose, Walker's portraits are two of the
first and most original depictions of such "bad" black women.
Similarly, Walker is one of the first black women poets to deal
specifically with female "ancestralism" as it is sometimes called,
or female "herstory," as in her poem "Lineage." [This subject
provides the plot of her: novel Jubilee (1966).] This poem is
quietly meditative and personal, celebratory and self-questioning.
Its two-stanza brevity and simple descriptions belie its depth and
resonance:
My grandmothers were strong,
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seeds.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they? (25)
Since Walker is (apparently) referring to black women, the
poem is a variation on "call and response" regarding black
history, collectively and individually. But even without the
cultural or historical context, the theme of the poem is
contemporary. Suzanne Juhasz"s astute observation about Brooks
applies here: "throughout the poetry of black women . . . there is
a pride in womanhood that does not exist in the poetry of white
women until recently" (Naked and Fiery Forms 153). This pride is
observable in varied forms from Harper to Walker and Brooks; in
the contemporary period, it is a predominant theme. In the
sixties (as well as the twenties) it was poetically fashionable to
34
trace one's lineage back to nobly primitive and knowledgable
African queens and kings; Walker's "roots" are more immediate and
"natural."
The naturalness of the grandmothers in "Lineage" is
suggested by the poem's simple diction* The simple elegance of
the language parallels the women's elegant simplicity. The women
were physically strong, as seen in stanza one (lines 2-5). Their
mental and physical acumen is indicated by their "singing" and
"clean words." As for perfume, they smell naturally of "soap and
onions and wet clay." The poem is in fact only superficially
simple; it connotes a lineage of dignity, stamina, and grandeur,
which makes its last line doubly effective, by contrast: the
grandmothers represent a very high standard which the poet aspires
to yet falls short of. That standard, in a natural lineage of
black females and ancestry, also becomes a prominent theme and
stylistic feature in contemporary black women's poetry. As Joyce
Ladner suggests, black women provide absolute role models and
standards for other black women, in life, as well as in literature
(Tomorrow's Tomorrow 1971).
In fact, it is possible to see the voice in For My People as
that of a type of woman familiar in the lives of southern black
folk: the older, concerned, loving, caring "culture bearer" - a
woman who believes in her own people fervently, naturally, and
35
religiously. And, given that belief, she praises and chastises in
order to continue and preserve black life and culture.
Whereas Walker's achievement in For My People can be
directly traced to her use of the southern black idiom, Brooks's
depends upon her appropriation of all available idioms, but
particularly the adaptation of a black urban one. Because of its
diversity, Brooks's poetry evades easy categorization or
labelling. One critic says that her earlier poetry, particularly
Annie Allen (1949), "seems to have been written for whites"
(Madhubuti/Lee "Preface" 7). Another sees her as writing for black
folk and the "most celebrated black poet of all time" (Redmond
217). Yet another critic observes that Brooks "seems caught
between two worlds . . . What one seems to have is 'white' style
and 'black' content - two warring ideals in one dark body" (Baker
Singers of Daybreak 43). Each of these observations is
applicable, but only partly so. For example, even in the "white"
book, Annie Allen, the subject is a black woman. Similarly, it is
true that Brooks uses a range of styles, including a so-called
"white" style, but there rarely seems to be a "war" going on. It
is more accurate to see Brooks as "bilingual" or multi-lingual,
poetically speaking. But no matter what style she appropriates,
Brooks "has always written about women - how they see themselves,
as mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, as restricted or
fulfilled. . . . she presents the complexity of their [black
women's] existence" (Christian "Afro-American Women Poets" 123).
Brooks's first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) contains
a range of thematic and stylistic elements which reappear
throughout her poetry. Her styles are as varied as the people she
writes about: sad, humorous, cynical; colloquial, "literary," and
dramatic.^ Among other things, Bronzeville showcases Brooks's
8
ability to use colloquial diction and narrative. The techniques
enhance the force of her female personas. For example, the poem
"when Mrs. Martin's Booker T." concerns Mrs. Martin's response to
her son's disgrace. He "ruined" Rosa Mae and "wrung" his mother's
heart "like a chicken neck." Her concern is:
"Don't come to tell me he's dyin'.
Don't come to tell me he's dead.
But tell me if'n he took that gal
And got her decent wed." (8)
At least half the poems in Bronzeville are representative of
Brooks's particular kind of narrative poem, but "Queen of the
Blues" (40-43) also exemplifies Brooks's ability to deal with an
"archetype" of black culture, the black female blues singer, as
well as to incorporate the black blues idiom into her poetry.
Mamie (the queen) can "shake her body / Across the floor." But
although she is the queen, her song lyrics and thoughts reveal the
irony in this title:
"Show me a man
What will love me
______ Till I die._____________________________________
37
Now show me a man
What will love me
Till I die
Can't find no such man
No matter how hard
You try.” (41)
Moreover, most men disrespect her with undue familiarity and
crudeness, so she concludes:
Men are low down
Dirty and mean.
Why don't they tip
Their hats to a queen? (43)
Apart from the style used here, this poem, and the preceding
one, depict these women characters internally with a depth and
dimension rarely seen, especially in the many poems about blues
singers. Another variation on the colloquial, "Hattie Scott," a
five-poem series,(35-39) presents the personality, viewpoints and
lifestyle of Hattie, a maid. She is a woman with a great deal of
life, humor, and "spunk." In "the date," as she hurries to leave
her employer's house, she thinks:
Whatcha mean talkin' about cleanin' silver?
It's eight o'clock now, you fool.
I'm leaving. Got somethin' interestin' on my mind.
Don't mean night school. (36)
Her humor and defiance are also revealed in "at the hairdresser's"
where Hattie says,
Gimme an upsweep, Minnie,
With humpteen baby curls.
'Bout time I got some glamour.
I'll show them girls. (37)
An "upsweep" is also convenient for her short hair which refuses
to grow, although she has tried everything. As she says, "Long
hair's out of style anyhow, ain't it? . , , / So gimme an upsweep,
Minnie. / I'll show them girls" (37).
Brooks's second book of poetry, Annie Allen, marks a turn to
a "literary," allusive modernist style. Although the subject of
the book in an ordinary black woman, the sometimes extraordinary
language, densely abstruse and convoluted, makes it difficult to
identify the subject without close reading. Then, the book reveals
rich description, surprising playfulness, and a variety of humor
and wit, as well as solemnity. Annie, for example, is a
"thaumaturgic lass"
Looking in her looking glass
At the unembroidered brown;
Printing bastard roses there;
Then emotionally aware
Of the black and boisterous hair,
Taming all that anger down. (84)
Annie, the young girl, is "ripe and rompabout" albeit "buttoned
in," as she waits "for the paladin / which no woman ever had, /
Paradisaical and sad / With a dimple in his chin" (83). Here the
elaborate language parallels Annie's unlikely fantasy.
The narrator's tone and language change to reflect events
and experiences in Annie's life, such as when she attends a
funeral and ends up alone with the body: "She stuck her tongue
out; slid. / Since for a week she must not play 'Charmaine' / . .
. or 'Singing in the Rain' " (72). As Annie's life becomes more
solemn, so does the language. She "genuflects to love" and gets
married, and is "tweaked and twenty-four / . . . All hay colored
that was green" (93). Although this rather elaborate style
reoccurs in later Brooks, Annie Allen is perhaps the height of its
usage and one of the best examples of what Brooks could do with
that style, if and when she chose to. It is also, needless to
say, an example of what could be done poetically with a black-
female sensibility.
Sardonic, caustic, terse observation and criticism are
qualities often found in Brooks's work, particularly in The Bean
Eaters (i960). Two of the more famous poems in this vein are "A
Bronzeville Mother loiters in Mississippi. / Meanwhile, a
Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" and "The Last Quatrain of the /
Ballad of Emmett Till" (317-324). The poems deal respectively
with the white housewife who was allegedly insulted by Emmett Till
(visiting the south from Chicago, subsequently tortured and
murdered) and Till's mother. The white mother cannot easily
reconcile the fantasy of her ballad-role as "distressed damsel"
with the reality of a fourteen-year old black "villain." She
thinks the villain is "miscast": "The hacking down of a villain
was more fun to think about / When his menance possessed
undisputed breadth, undisputed / height." Her thoughts cause her
to doubt her own role and to feel repulsion for the "Fine Prince,"
her husband, who was instrumental in Till's death. This long poem
40
sharply contrasts with "The Last Quatrain . . . where Till's
mother "sits in a red room" and "is sorry" for her son's death.
The poems together are a masterpiece of understated sorrow and
sympathy for all the victims, including the white housewife, and
an unusual analysis of the white south's racism and habit of
lynching. Finally, of the poems about Emmett Till, Brooks's alone
deal with the perspective of the women involved.
It is easy, with Brooks's poetry, to slide into "socio-
literary" criticism, partly because her personas are so "real" and
three-dimensional, lending themselves to such a discussion, just
as they invite the analyses and critical vocabulary of the novel
or theater. The poems just quoted, for instance, are a "study" of
women's realities, from a class and race perspective. The poems
are also only two of many which foreground the perspective of
black women.. One of Brooks's most significant innovations,
stylistically and thematically, is this focus on the varied
lifestyles of black women.
Repeatedly, Brooks's protagonists are ordinary black women,
with varied backgrounds, economic levels, and personalities.
These women, as narrators and subjects, become an "element of
style" with Brooks, an element only faintly present in the black
poets before her, but everpresent in the ones after her. Brooks's
female personas are frequently presented, or present themselves,
from the inside out. Ironically, Juhasz sees Brooks's poetry as
41
lacking the "personalism or the engagement" of the feminist poet
because Brooks writes mainly about women as subjects, rarely about
herself (Naked and Fiery Forms 150-153). However, a slightly
broader definition of "feminist" might include Brooks's array of
black women-as-subjects, in that, stylistically, she allows them
to "speak for themselves" and for similar black women. Even more
ironic than Juhasz's observation, Mary Helen Washington says "In
her poetry all the heroes are men. . . . Brooks, in her poetry,
seldom endows women with the power, integrity, or magnificence of
her male figures" (" 'Taming all that anger down' " 255). Yet,
Annie Allen and others have their own type of "magnificence" and
"integrity." In fact, one of Brooks's most "powerful" personas is
that of the mother in "The Abortion." And, although few
contemporary poets have publicly acknowledged a debt to Brooks in
this area, Brooks obviously pioneered the use of a voice which
could later be adapted by contemporary black women to speak for
9
themselves. From meditative to narrative, to dramatic monologues,
Brooks's women speak of realities seldom acknowledged, much less
written about.
In other words, Walker and Brooks internally shaped the
history or tradition of black women poets, with the style and
content determined and chosen by the poets themselves. Yet with
them, as with Harper, the content derives from Afro-American
history and culture, with an especial - and logical - focus on
the female half. Theoretically* and logically, Brooks and Walker
would have had a particularly profound influence on aspiring black
women poets. But the point here is not merely the influence of
Brooks and Walker, so much as, one, they do write from a female-
black perspective and, two, even if subconsciously, this
perspective might have influenced later poets. To put this
another way, since being black and female is a poetic determinant
for these women, conceivably the same holds true for later poets.
The next four chapters, on Clifton, Williams, Jordan and Lorde,
respectively, will test this theoretical supposition.
43
Notes
■^Actually, this bias predates the 60's. Writing about the
critical reception of Gwendolyn Brooks's novel Maud Martha (1953),
M. H. Washington compares its reviews with that of Ellison's
Invisible Man: "Brooks's character was never held up for
comparison with any other literary character. Ellison's nameless
hero was considered not only 'the embodiment of the Negro race'
but 'the conscience of all the races.' " Meanwhile, Brooks's
reviews "deny any relationship between the protagonist's personal
experience and the historical experience of her people"(" 'Taming
all that anger down' " 258). However, with the current popularity
of women's writings, Baraka and his wife, Amina, recently co
edited an anthology of black women writers, Confirmation: An
Anthology of African American Women (New York: Morrow, 1983). The
introduction and the selections seem mainly to "confirm" Baraka's
opportunism, moreso than the women writers.
2
Some examples of the former are Zora N. Hurston's "What
White Publishers Won't Print" (Negro Digest 1947) and Sterling
Brown's "A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Literature"
(The Massachusetts Review 1966). As for examples of the latter
category, Benjamin Brawley's 1922 essay "The Negro as Writer" is
one of the earliest, but almost each year since then another essay
has appeared with a similar title, such as Gwendolyn Brooks's
"Poets Who Are Negroes" (Phylon 1950).
3
As recently as 1979, the anthology Chant of Saints: A
Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art & Scholarship (eds.
Michael Harper and Robert B. Stepto, Urbana:Univ. of 111. P)
included, only five women; the other thirty-odd authors are males.
Yet, in the book's foreward, John Hope Franklin asserts that Chant
"may well be regarded as a yardstick by which to measure the
evolution of Afro-American literature and culture, and as a
commentary oh what has happened in these areas since the
appearance of The New Negro in 1925" (x). Then, ironically, and
correctly, he notes an ‘ 'air of security, if not solidarity . . .
if not chauvinism" (emphasis mine) which permeates the book.
4
Jean Wagner's otherwise ambitious study Black Poets of the
United States: From Dunbar to Hughes (Trans. Kenneth Douglas.
Urbana: Univ. of 111. P , 1973) support's Hull's contention about
the Harlem Renaissance. Wagner makes no apology for studying only
the male writers, as they are the "most remarkable" writers of the
era. He condescendingly menions G. D. Johnson, G. Bennett, and
Helene Johnson in passing, in footnotes.
44
Just a few examples of this "myopia" (or racism) are Images
of Women in Fiction (ed. Susan K. Cornillon. Bowling Green Univ.
P, 1973) and Feminist Literary Criticism; Explorations in Theory
(ed. Cheri Register. Univ. of Kentucky P , 1975). All of the
writers in both these works are white women, and they do not
discuss one black woman writer, clearly indicating tht for them,
woman means white.
6
The word “mascon" comes from Stephen Henderson's
Understanding the New Black Poetry, where he uses the word to
describe "words and constructions" which "carry an inordinate
charge of emotional and psychological weight." Mascons are also
meaningful in "ways which defy understanding by outsiders" and
carry "a massive concentration of Black experiential energy" (44).
^Gloria T. Hull's "A Note on the Poetic Technique of
Gwendolyn Brooks" (CLA, 19, Dec.1975, 280-185) is a short but
thorough analysis of some aspects of Brooks's style.
g
Quotations from Bronzeville and other books come from The
World of Gwendolyn Brooks (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) which
contains the complete texts of her five books, Bronzeville (1945),
Annie Allen (1949), Maud Martha: A Novel (1953), The Bean Eaters
(1960), and In the Mecca (1968). The page references in the text
refer to The World of Gwendolyn Brooks.
9
Although many younger poets have acknowledged Brooks's
influence, particularly those whom she taught and knew in Chicago
and elsewhere, few have menioned a specific indebtedness to
Brooks's "feminist” voices.
Chapter Two: Lucille Clifton's "Black and Going on Women"
I write the way I write because I am the kind of person I
am. My style and my content stem from my experience.
. . . I am a Black woman and I write from that experience.
I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am.
- Lucille Clifton
* * *
Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York in 1936, but her
parents were southerners, from Virginia. Not only does she have,
then, a southern background, but she also traces her lineage, on
her father's side, back to a Dahomean great-great- grandmother.
As she tells it, she grew up in a loving home which she first left
to attend college but returned two years later with the bold
statement that she meant to be a poet.* In 1969 her claim was
actualized in the form of her first book of poetry, Good Times
(New York: Random). At that time, Clifton was thirty-three years
old and had "six children under ten years old" ("A Simple
Language" 138). However, her family obligations seemed to enhance
rather than deter her creative abilities: since 1969, Clifton has
published eighteen books for children, three more books of poetry
(Good News About Earth,1972; An Ordinary Woman,1974; and Two
Headed Woman, 1980), and an autobiographical memoir. Further, she
has received several NEA Fellowships, a Pulitzer Prize nomination,
and been named Poet Laureate of Maryland (1979). Additionally,
Two Headed Woman won the Juniper Prize from the University of
46
Massachusetts Press. Yet, Lucille Clifton's poetry poses an
enigma.
On one hand, she is a prime example of the critically
neglected black woman writer, even as she is an example of the
ability to produce despite this benign neglect. On the other
hand, although there are no major critical works on Clifton's
poetry, her name appears in different places such as an article on
"revisionist mythmaking," in a 1981 dissertation chapter on Third
World women's poetry, in an essay on the blues influence on black
2
poetry, and in an essay on "matrilineage" in women's literature.
Clifton's appearance in these works suggests that the critical
neglect is ending, but it also suggests the diversity of her
poetry. And even that diversity seems ironic - or a slight
contradiction.
Clifton's poetry deliberately covers a limited range of
subjects. Yet within that limit, the poetry includes a variety of
topics. And even though she prefers a "simple" style, it is a
constantly changing, multi-dimensional simplicity. Clifton's first
book, Good Times, establishes her perimeters, revealing her
concerns with the well-being of Afro-Americans and with being
easily understood. As Sherley Anne Williams notes in "The Blues
Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry," Good Times is "like
the blues . . . firmly based in a living black reality which is
more concerned with itself than with direct confrontation with
47
white society and its values" (132). Similarly, Joyce Johnson
says that Clifton "consciously elects to accentuate Black life
positively, thereby shaping - poetically - the reality of Black
people through emphasis on their strengths and beauty" ("The Theme
of Celebration" 70). On some levels, Good Times was influenced by
the 60's, but it also shows significant differences from other
Black Arts Movement authors.
That is, at a time when many black poets repeatedly sounded
alike, Clifton's voice is her own. In the midst of titles like
Black Rage, and poems which incite riots or exhort "kill all
honkies," Clifton's first book is unique. The title poem
3
admonishes "oh children, think about the / good times." Where
much of the BAM poetry is loudly aggressive, assaultive, and
overly political, Clifton's poetry is quiet, descriptive, and
subtly persuasive. She, like Brooks and Margaret Walker, writes
from internal dictates and standards, from her own "milieu." In
one of the most insightful and comprehensive essays on Clifton to
date, Audrey T. McClusky says that Gwendolyn Brooks is one of
Clifton's most important influences, as they share a "racial and
spiritual legacy" ("Tell the Good News" 143). Moreover, they
"share a sensibility rooted in the Black experience and in
Christian idealism" (143). Most importantly, "Lucille Clifton,
like Gwendolyn Brooks, gives identity and substance to the
everyday people in her poems by giving them names, and therefore a
48
history" (143). Like that of Brooks, Clifton's poetry invites a
range of critical observations which are more or less applicable
but sometimes miss the mark. For example, in all of Clifton's
poetry, she is concerned with the health and well-being of Afro-
Americans, even as her style remains based in black oral
tradition. However, even in her first book, Clifton reveals a
particular concern with the well-being of black women; their
"strengths and beauty" increasingly emerge as the poetic shapers
of her poetry. Ironically, while McClusky notes a familial
kinship between Brooks and Clifton, she fails to make an obvious
point: Clifton's most important predecessor and influence is a
black female poet, incidentally one of the greatest poets in
America. And, finally, Clifton does write about the "uncelebrated"
person, but this person is more often female than male. In short,
a large percentage of Clifton's poetry, like Brooks's, focuses on
black women, both thematically and stylistically.
Thematically, Clifton's poetry reveals a value system which
upholds the history, continuity, lineage and culture of black
women. Stylistically, the poetry draws on the colloquial speeeh
patterns of black women, which Clifton shapes into multi-faceted
images and allusions. The following discussion, then, will
consider these stylistic features as they appear in three
representative groups of poems: those involving historical
49
figures, those about contemporary women, and those about Clifton,
herself.
Because Clifton values and reiterates a gynocentric
continuity in herself and her poetry, the three groupings overlap
somewhat, sharing a thematic continuity. That is, the poems about
historical figures are also about Clifton's identification with
these women. This merging identity and sense of continuity is
most apparent in the poem "For deLawd." Although this poem does
not name a specific woman, it does identify a cultural-historical
type of woman, just as the narrator's speaking style identifies
her as one of these women.
For deLawd
people say they have a hard time
understanding how I
go on about my business
playing my Ray Charles
hollering at the kids-
seem like my Afro
cut off in some old image
would show I got a long memory
and I come from a line
of black and going on women
who got used to making it through murdered sons
and who grief kept on pushing
who fried chicken
ironed
swept off the back steps
who grief kept
for their still alive sons
for their sons coming
for their sons gone
just pushing (Good Times no.18)
Clifton's stylistic habit of compression and understatement
allows even her shortest poems to be discussed at length. With a
50
"long" poem like the above, the interpretive possibilities are
endless. However, perhaps the most salient aspect of this poem is
its tone. It sounds like a woman talking (or even grumbling) to
someone, possibly to herself. The style is conversational and
colloquial, low-keyed and matter of fact, yet defiant and
assertive. On a more subtle level, the poem's structure and
diction, its interlocking allusions and imagery, enhance its tone
in several ways.
Structurally, the poem pivots on lines eight through ten.
Lines one through seven deal with the personal, while lines ten
through twenty are both communal and private: she does what she
does (lines 1-7) because of prior black women who did what she
does (lines 10-20). Hence, she is enabled to live her life ("go
on about my business") while listening to Ray Charles, a well-
known pianist-siinger, with a distinctive style and appeal. In
line four, "my" signifies how important his music is to the
speaker's lifestyle, including "hollering at the kids," and
wearing her hair naturally (lines 6-7). Her hairstyle then
connects to the "long memory" and the line of "black and going on
women," an allusion to a cultural archetype. These women, depicted
in a matter-of-fact tone which complements their matter- of-fact
(but heroic) survival, "kept on pushing" against great odds and
trials such as "murdered sons." Meanwhile, like the narrator,
they went on cooking, ironing, sweeping, and being determined.
51
Somewhat reminiscent of Walker's poem "Lineage,
"For deLawd" acknowledges and incorporates specific aspects of
black women's culture, such as maintaining domestic and nurturing
habits even in the midst of death - an everpresent possibility for
their black children, particularly their sons. And, since the
women described in the poem provided role models, the narrator
emulates them.
The narrator exists and continues because they did; she is a
continuation of them. Likewise, not only does the poem exist
because they did and because of the narrator's sense of kinship
with them, but it also insures their continued existence. As
Sherley Anne Williams notes, " 'pushing,' a mascon of enormous
contemporary force, . . . is both the will to struggle toward a
long sought goal . . . and the double consciousness which blacks
have of this country and its institutions" ("Blues Roots" 133).
The word stylistically and thematically continues the poem's
movement as well. The poem, like the line of black women, keeps
on going. As Audrey McClusky observes, the poem "seeks to merge
the speaker's individual optimism and faith with a larger, well-
articulated historical tradition of women who, under adverse
circumstances, fought the good fight and kept on pushing." These
women are "like their counterparts in blues songs. . . . they
have learned to manipulate the chaos - not to control it - to
insure their individual and collective survival" ("Tell the Good
52
News" 145). A most apropos beginning for a discussion of
Clifton's poetry, this poem establishes a historical, cultural
context, as well as an appropriately vernacular style, which is
employed in other poems.
Individual and collective survival through kinship and
continuity with black women is the focus of the ppem "Harriet."
Whereas "For deLawd" emphasizes the collective traits of unnamed
but heroic women, "Harriet" invokes specific skills and abilities
from specific women. And, since the women are alluded to moreso
than explicitly discussed, a knowledge of black history is a
prerequisite for fully understanding this poem.
Harriet
if i be you
let me not forget
to be the pistol
pointed
to be the madwoman
at the river's edge
warning
be free or die
and Isabell
if i be you
let me in my
soj ourning
not forget
to ask my brothers
ain't i a woman too (An Ordinary Woman 19)
These lines address and allude to Harriet Tubman (1-9) and
Sojourner Truth (10-16) respectively.^ Harriet, the "Moses of the
Underground Railroad," allegedly held a gun on runaway slaves who
wanted to turn back. Similarly, in lines ten and thirteen, the
narrator plays off her knowledge (and the reader's) of Sojourner's
53
"real" name, Isabell, just as she puns on the word Sojourner in
line thirteen. Lines nine and sixteen at once divide these quoted
lines into two parts while unifying them structurally: both lines
are, reportedly, direct quotations.^
Black women's history provides the background and context;
Clifton provides or suggests the continuity in herself and the
text, which depends on these women for full interpretation and
meaning. In the last section of the poem, the narrator requests a
legacy from "grandmother," which is hard work, trust in the
"Gods," love for her children, and patience. The grandmother in
the poem seems to be, in fact, the narrator of the poem "Ca'line's
Prayer." In "Ca'line's praryer," an elderly black woman, possibly
an ex-slave, reflects on her present and past life. In two
stanzas, Ca'line speaks of herself as she is now, then as she was
as a child. The two stanzas juxtapose visual and psychological
images where the main comparison is dryness and sterility versus
wetness and fertility. In the first stanza she says, "I have got
old / in a desert country / I am dry / and black as drought."
Furthermore, she does not "make water" any more, "only acid / even
dogs don't drink," This image contrasts with the second stanza:
Remember me from Wydah
Remember the child
running across Dahomey
black as ripe papaya
juicy as sweet berries
and set me in the rivers
of your glory
Ye Ma Jah (Good Times no.19)
The contrast (sterility and old age versus fertility and youth) is
fairly obvious, but specific words and similes heighten the
juxtaposition. In the first line, for example, "Wydah" (or
Dahomey)) in West Africa is an area from which many Africans,
future American slaves, came. This information translates "desert
country" as America, where her color is a negative quality and
image ("black as drought"), but in Dahomey, her blackness was like
"ripe papaya"; at home she was "juicy as sweet berries." This
image of sensual, youthful life flows into the concluding lines
which identify the statement as a prayer. "Rivers" further
contrasts with the "drought" of stanza one, as well as emphasizing
Dahomey's fertility. It is also an allusion to, and connected to,
the last word of the poem, "Ye Ma Jah."
"Ye Ma Jah," or "Yemaye," is a major Yoruba-African deity,
fi
the Goddess of fertility, rivers, and women. In the poem,
structurally, Her name is the climax. It is a link to Dahomey,
home of the Yoruba people, and reveals that Ca'line invokes the
deity of her own country. Her requests are the fervent prayer of
an African woman who remembers her "roots." Finally, the
character Ca'line is another voice from black women's collective
pasts.
In "Ca'line's prayer," the narrator is specific and,
although "collective," drawn from Clifton's private history:
55
Ca'line was her Dahomean great-great grandmother. Whereas this
information is not absolutely necessary to understand or
appreciate the poem, it is significant that her blood relative is
the source of the poem. Moreover, it is equally impressive that
Clifton allows the persona to speak, convincingly, "for herself."
To again quote McClusky, "The female voice in Clifton's poetry is
her most sustained and her most introspective. Her female poems
reflect her personal journey toward self-discovery and
reconciliation. She traces her origins to the Dahomey woman who
was the founder of Clifton's family in America. Mammy Ca'line is
the link with Africa and a lost-found past" (143). Similarly, the
character of Aunt Agnes in the poem "Aunt Agnes Hatcher tells" is
a link with the personal and collective past.
In this poem, as in "Ca'line's prayer," Clifton manipulates
the language to present a credible persona with her own speaking
style, which reveals Clifton's poetic versatility as well as the
speaker's personality. An "oral tradition" poem, "Aunt Agnes
Hatcher tells" is conversational. Among other things, she reveals
herself as a respected authority figure by her wisdom and her
resevoir of oral history. She speaks of the Civil War, Clifton's
parents, and Clifton herself:
after the war when rationing was over
was a plenty names, people
shuffled them like cards and drew
new ones out the deck. (Two-Headed Woman 19)
56
Poetically and wittily, she describes one response of black folk
to freedom after the Civil War, That is, once names were no
longer "rationed out," people had handfuls of them to play with,
as suggested by the simile in lines three and four. The tone of
the quoted lines suggests that Aunt Agnes speaks from first-hand
knowledge. This section ends, "just / consider yourself lucky /
if you know who you are." In sections two and three of the poem,
Aunt Agnes is just as astute and precise in her comments about
Clifton's parents. In section four, she returns to antebellum
knowledge to assess Clifton:
4.about me
you
slavery time they would be calling you
worth your weight in diamonds the way you
slide babies like payday from that
billion dollar behind. (Two-Headed Woman 19)
Aunt Agnes's assessment of Clifton is a "backhanded”
humorous compliment in her hyperbolic allusion to the economic
practice of "breeding" slaves.^ "Worth your weight in diamonds"
metaphorically assesses Clifton's "value" by those standards. In
the last two lines, "like payday" and "billion dollar behind"
reinforce the monetary imagery, as well as, ironically, the
inhumanity of such a value system. Aunt Agnes is an important
cultural type, integral to the preservation of black culture and
history in general, and to Clifton's life and poetry,
specifically. "Aunt Agnes . . ." provides also, a good transition
57
to Clifton's poems on contemporary women. While Agnes Hatcher
speaks directly to Clifton, and is thus a contemporary, she also
represents a “historical" figure. She is at once a direct link,
through her existence and conversation, between the past and the
present.
In each of the preceding poems, one might argue that the
narrator's stance identifies the speaker as a black woman. On the
other hand, there are poems where the narrator's words, tone, and
imagery are strongly and unmistakably those of a black woman, as
in "Ms. Ann" where the historical imagery identifies the narrator
as a contemporary black woman, speaking to a white woman, about
their "herstories" together. First, the title suggests "Miss
Ann," a term used by black folk in America to refer to a definite
type of white woman. Clifton's changing "Miss" to "Ms." implies
that she addresses a contemporary descendant of the same woman.
This woman, usually the "boss-lady," was, to put it mildly, not
well liked because of her insensitive bigotry and her inhumane
requirements for black women who usually worked as her maids. So,
the title conjures up an image, a context, and an attitude toward
this white woman, as seen and experienced by a black woman.
In three stanzas, the speaker compresses almost four hundred
years of experience with Miss Ann, made vivid by the demeaningly
specific allusions and images:
i will have to forget
your face
58
when you watched me breaking
in the fields,
missing my children.
i will have to forget
your face
when you watched me carry
your husband's stagnant water.
i will have to forget
your face
when you handed me
your house
to make a home. (An Ordinary Woman 25)
Each stanza refers to a specific time in history, which the
images and diction make clearer and more effective. Stanza one is
an allusion to slavery, and it is significant that the word used
is "breaking" instead of "working" (line 3). Stanza two could
refer to a period just after slavery, but the task of "carrying
stagnant water" would be demeaning any time. Stanza three alludes
to black women's being maids or all-around "housekeepers" since
they make the house become "home." (The last two stanzas also
reveal that the black woman does what is, rightfully, the white
woman's job.) In each case, the image calls to mind a larger
"picture" of humiliating debasement of the black woman, as well as
the white woman's stance of detached involvement. The repeated
"your face" emphasizes that in each case she was there, condoning
or overseeing these actions. Because of all this, the poet
concludes that that "face" is unforgettable:
and you never called me sister
then, you never called me sister
and it has only been forever and
59
i will have to forget your face. (An Ordinary Woman 25)
Just as the preceding stanzas connote a socio-historical context,
so does this one. It brings the poem "up to date" by referring to
white women in the Women's Movement and their questionable quasi
political habit of calling all women "sister." In fact, in line
two, "then" seems to have a slightly greater emphasis, enhancing
the irony. Line three suggests, simultaneously, an eternity of
constant, ever-present inequalities as well as long past insult
and injustice; but even if the times and some white women have
changed, this black woman's mind has not. The last line seems
deliberately ambiguous. It could be read as "I will have to
forget your face as I remember it." It could also mean that
sisterhood with such a woman is impossible: "I will have to forget
you, period." The last lines, moreover, contain intense and
distilled collective anger. The speaker even seems to imply that
Ms. Ann is silly if she thinks the black woman will forget and be
her "sister."
One interesting aspect about this poem is that it does not
once use the word "black" or "white," but the text and the context
provide them, as well as the narrator's tone of criticism and
involvement. The narrator, a "collective I," addresses a
collective, familiar experience of many black, and white, women.
(Also, this poem is one of perhaps five in all of Clifton's books
that deals with whites at all.) Again, in this poem, the
60
narrator's stance and attitude is based in a sense of continuity
and kinship with other black women of all types and classes as
seen in the poem, "Miss Rosie."
Informative and descriptive, this poem begins with a title
(like "Ms. Ann") which uses an element of black culture. To use
Miss, or Mr., with a black person's first name is a sign of
respectful familiarity, used by younger folk to their elders
(especially in the South). Using a last name would be too formal,
while using the first name with no title would be disrespectful.
This information informs the narrator's tone (and the reader's
response) as she addresses Miss Rosie and vividly describes her:
When I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man's shoes
, with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up (Good Times no.5)
The "wreck" that was the "Georgia Rose” is physically and
mentally portrayed via specific, concrete imagery and figurative
language. Her appearance is, to put it mildly, shabby: wrapped
"like garbage" and wearing men's shoes "with the little toe cut
61
out." Her amorphous mental state is capsulized as she waits for
her mind "like next week's grocery." "Wet brown bag of a woman"
metaphorizes her overall being. This unrelentingly unflattering
description contrasts powerfully with lines fourteen and fifteen,
which repeat and emphasize (as if the narrator shakes her head)
Miss Rosie's former beauty. These lines, in turn, make the last
three lines more potent and meaningful. That is, the narrator
finds inspiration to survive or "stand" (contrasted with Miss
Rosie's "sitting") because of her sense of respect toward,
responsibility for, and kinship with Miss Rosie. Miss Rosie, then
is as inspiring as Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Finally, and
ironically, although Miss Rosie is a wreck, the narrator's
attitude toward her makes Miss Rosie appear almost heroic.
Kinship on another level is the theme of two other poems about
Clifton's contemporaries.
The style and content of "Sisters (for Elaine Phillips on
her birthday)" reveal it as at once a communal-private poem in its
use of rhythmical black English and vivid imagery. For example,
the poem begins, "me and you be sisters / we be the same." The
word "sisters" might immediately call to mind the poem "Ms. Ann,"
and its use of the word "sister." But just as the woman addressed
in that poem could never, almost, be a sister, there is no doubt
here that Elaine and the speaker are sisters. They "be the same"
because they have shared common experiences, attitudes, and
62
worldviews since childhood. The poem's last lines list some of
their shared background:
me and you
got babies
got thirty-five
got black
let our hair go back
be loving ourselves
be loving ourselves
be sisters.
only where you sing
i poet. (An Ordinary Woman 5)
In this last section the repeated ' ’got" (meaning “had," ’ ’turned,"
or "became," respectively) emphasizes the images of the two women
with children, aged thirty-five (or older). An example of extreme
and successful compression, the phrase "got black" suggests a
chnage in appearance, attitude, lifestyle, and general philosophy.
In line nine, "be sisters" emphasizes the poem's main point, and
it also has a double meaning: one is the sense of blood kinship,
and the other, the use of "sister" from the sixties, but in a more
profound sense. The last two lines of the poem finish two
"character sketches" or two images of these black women, even as
they define "sisterhood."
"to merle" is similar in interpreting "sisterhood" but
whereas in "Sisters," the parallel experiences are the base of the
kinship, in this poem, language is the base:
say skinny manysided tall on the ball
brown downtown woman
last time i saw you was on the corner of
63
pyramid and sphinx
ten thousand years have interrupted our conversation
but i have kept most of my words
till you came back.
what i'm trying to say is
i recognize your language and
let me call you sister, sister,
i been waiting for you. (Two-Headed Woman 9)
The black "hip” street-corner "jiviness" of the language used by
the speaker describes her "listener," Merle, who is tall, skinny,
brownskinned and "manysided." The next three lines abruptly
switch from the "real" or actual imagery to a mythical or
metaphorical location: the last time they saw each other was at
the "corner of pyramid and sphinx ten thousand years" ago. The
poem sounds increasingly like a private riddle in its flippant
seriousness. "Ten thousand years" is a hyperbole for the time and
experiences that have passed since they last saw each other.
Similarly, "pyramid" and "sphinx" suggest Egyptian (African)
timelessness and allude to Merle's "on the ball" personality. The
poem itself is proof that the speaker has "kept most of her
words." That is, words like these. As the narrator says, "i
recognize your language." The poem exhibits how well she
recognizes and can use that language which is why she says, "let
me call you sister, sister"; since the two black women speak the
same language and in that are kin, or sisters.
Finally, in addition to Clifton's poems invoking historical
figures and those to her peers, she also includes poems to younger
64
women — most notably, her own daughters. There is no such thing
as a generation gap, either forwards or backwards. Clifton sees
herself on a continuum. She is linked to the past through her
Dahomean ancestress; she will continue into the present via
younger women. This theme appears most strongly in the poem "this
morning (for the girls of eastern high school).1 1
In this poem, the predominant imagery is auditory, due to
the syntax, rhythm, and typography. The poem's tone is exultant
as Clifton celebrates herself in the high school girls:
this morning
this morning
i met myself
coming in (An Ordinary Woman 39)
She meets herself in a "bright / jungle girl," "a tall tree girl"
and "a me girl," among others. Each of these metaphors suggests a
different type of young black woman, and each girl exudes life and
liveliness. Because of this, Clifton identifies with each of them
and sings
i met myself
this morning
coming in
and all day
i have been
a black bell
ringing
i survive
survive
survive (An Ordinary Woman 39)
This poem not only shows Clifton's sense of kinship with the
young girls, but also her ability, again, with the language. In
i
65
keeping with its subject matter - young girls - this poem's style
is lively and lighthearted, just as the poems to ’'older" women are
appropriately meditative and reflective. The language, as much as
the content, reveals Clifton's sense of a cultural connection with
both older and younger black women.
Clifton's poems to her sons are not only weaker than those
to her daughters, they are also bereft of the deep sense of
identity which she feels with her daughters. Even in
"Admonitions," a poem which addresses all her children, this
difference emerges. In stanza one, she makes an abstract promise
to protect her sons. Stanza two, to her daughters, is much more
pointed:
girls
first time a white man
opens his fly
like a good thing
we'll just laugh
laugh real loud my
black women (Good Times 37)
In these lines, three smaller images equal one overall larger one.
First, . there is a visual image of a white male exposing (or
offering) himself to the "girls," immediately followed with the
auditory image of their response (and the narrator's): laughter.
The third image, a composite mental one, is the metamorphosis of
"girls” to "black women," even as the "good thing" becomes an
object of derision and laughter. This composite image also
becomes a specific strategy for survival which the mother shares
66
with her daughters. This legacy in turn suggests a socio-
historical context, that of white males' sexual abuse of black
women. As the speaker acknowledges this psychosis and provides a
strategy to deal with it, the strategy becomes a technical feature
of the poem. That is, before the girls or the reader can react
with fear, horror, or disgust, the narrator precludes such a
response with laughter, a stylistic and political strategem. On
one level, the poem says ’ ’This is how I handle such a situation.
This, since you are my children and black women, is what you must
do, too." In other words, what Clifton learned from other black
women is now, in turn, passed on to her daughters, the next
generation of black women.
In another poem, "Last Note to My Girls (for Sid, Rica,
Gilly and Neen)" Clifton calls her daughters "my more than me" (An
Ordinary. Woman 29). But "Lucy and her girls" most strongly
presents this concept on both thematic and stylistic levels.
lucy is the ocean
extended by
her girls
are the river
fed by
lucy
is the sun
reflected through
her girls
are the moon
lighted by
lucy
is the history of
her girls
are the place where
______ lucy_______________________________________ ____________________
67
was going (Two-Headed Woman 3)
As Joyce Johnson says, this poem's "employment of one line to
serve as the end of one statement and the beginning of another
communicates a theme of celebration" and "continuity through
generations" ("The Theme of Celebration" 74). She also observes,
The use of ocean and sun, river and moon as metaphors,
respectively, demonstrate, through traditional arche
types, the continuation of generations. Each line looks
at once backward to the preceding line (and by implication
to the preceding generation) and forward to the next line
or the present and future generations. The former is
extended and reflected through the latter.
("The Theme . . ."74)
These "traditional archetypes" are also primary aspects of nature.
Through this imagery, Clifton and her daughters create and
maintain a natural, self-sustaining, autonomous female world and
universe, one which is complete with its own cyclical "herstory."
** ** **
Clifton's poems primarily about herself show, among other
things, an identification with her mother and a concern with
9
Clifton's personal development and metamorphoses. As might be
expected, her perceptions of her mother change with her self-
perceptions, but the sense of identification is almost constant.
For Clifton, her mother Thelma is a touchstone, a role model, an
everpresent force which determines Clifton's reality. As her
daughters continue her existence into the future, so too Clifton
68
continues her mother's existence into the present. This sense of
continuity is most specific in the poem which begins
i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter
each of us
both wearing strange black gloves (Two-Headed Woman 4)
Besides the obvious matrifocal lineage and the quiet, meditative
tone, the poem also contains a specific and unique bond between
these three generations of black women. Although their extra
fingers were cut off, since they might "learn to cast spells,"
each of the women retains the magic of these fingers:
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother my live daughter and me
through our terrible shadowy hands
(Two-Headed Woman 4)
This conclusion is resonant on two levels. These lines reiterate
the women's particular lineage and also suggest that via their
hands, they literally "hold on" to one another. The ability to
"take what we want" has myriad implications. For one thing, the
three women's connection, and their power, is intact and ever
present, although invisible. For another, these three women are
even more rooted in a black female culture, enabled not just to
survive but to transcend, through their "shadowy" hands.
The poem "light on my mother's tongue" presents another of
Clifton's legacies from her mother:
light
on my mother's tongue
69
breaks through her soft
extravagant hip
into life.
Lucille
she calls the light,
which was the name
of the grandmother
who waited by the crossroads
in Virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.
light breaks from her life
to her lives . . .
mine already is
an Afrikan name (An Ordinary Woman 73)
Here, Clifton deals with the magical power of the word, or
"Nommo," as it is called in one African language. Nommo, or the
power of the word, is one of the most powerful and important
concepts in African culture, according to Janheinz Jahn. He
defines Nommo as "the life force" which controls all living things
and people. Moreover, "a new-born child becomes a muntu [a living
person] only when the father or the 'sorcerer' gives him a name
and pronounces it" (MUNTU 125, author's emphasis). As Clifton
describes her naming in the poem, her mother speaks her into life;
Clifton then becomes the power of the word. "Light" suggests not
just clarity, but prophetic divination. In line two, as her
mother speaks, naming her daughter Lucille, the light is
transformed by her tongue, or by her speaking word, even as her
daughter becomes the light by being born from her mother's
"extravagaant hip." In lines 6-13, Clifton reveals the importance
70
of her name: she is named after a courageous grandmother (on her
father's side) who shot her white lover (Generations 34). In
other words, the name Lucille, like "Ca'line," is another
connection to Africa which Clifton's mother provides as she names
her daughter. The grandmother Lucille was, in fact, Ca'line's
daughter. Therefore, Clifton, from birth, has an "Afrikan name."
* * A * * * * *
Nan Bauer Maglin identifies five interconnecting themes in
women's "literature of matrilineage." Two of these themes apply
to "light": the "recognition by the daughter that her voice is not
entirely her own," and "the need to recite one's matrilineage, to
find a ritual to both get back there and preserve it" (" 'Don't
Never Forget . . .' " 258). Clifton's voice in "light" comes from
and through her mother, just as her name does. The "ritual" -
both female and black - involves not just the naming but also the
poetic re-shaping and re-telling of the meaning of her name and
her birth. Similarly in "the thirty-eighth year" Clifton
recognizes that her life has been partly her mother's.
This long (for Clifton) two page poem provides the title for
An Ordinary Woman, but another poem in the book, "lucy one-eye,"
glosses "the thirty-eighth year" in stating that lucy "got her
mama's ways" (67). Her "mama's ways" in part inspire the
meditative and questioning tone of "the thirty-eighth year," in
which Clifton assesses her life's achievements and expectations,
71
including her mother's influence on her life. The poem's
beginning evaluates her physical state juxtaposing what is with
what was hoped for:
the thirty eighth year
of my life,
plain as bread
round as cake
an ordinary woman,
an ordinary woman.
i had expected to be
smaller than this,
more beautiful,
wiser in Afrikan ways,
more confident,
i had expected more than this. (An Ordinary Woman 93)
The first stanza's domestic similes (lines 3 and 4) graphically
and humorously describe what is meant by an "ordinary" woman.
(What could be more "ordinary" than bread or cake?) The second
stanza annotates the ordinariness: she meant to be "smaller,"
"more beautiful," and "wiser in Afrikan ways." The next three
sections of the poem describe and address her mother who "died at
forty four" and was "very wise / and beautiful / and sad." Her
mother's life and death profoundly affected Clifton; she says, "i
have wrapped me / in your skin / and made you live again." These
lines imply that Clifton emulated and recreated her mother, partly
in her daughters who "blossom and promise fruit like African
trees" (95). Partly because of them, she is a "perfect picture of
/ blackness blessed," but she had not expected "this /
72
loneliness." After acknowledging her situation and wondering if
it is "western" or a "final Europe" in her mind, she concludes
let me come to it whole
and holy
not afraid
not lonely
out of my mother's life
into my own.
into my own.
i had expected more than this,
i had not expected to be
an ordinary woman* (An Ordinary Woman 95)
Just as the beginning lines describe the speaker's physical
appearance, the concluding section describes her state of mind.
While she wonders if the loneliness is "western," these lines also
suggest that loneliness is an inheritance from her mother's life.
Just as she wanted to be more "African," she also wants her own
life, on her terms. McClusky calls "the thirty-eighth year" a
"female blues lament," and adds that the poem, "like the
traditional blues song, is a frank confrontation with self that
bears no trace of self-pity or bitterness" ("Tell the Good News"
146). Also, like some blues, the poem contains determination to
face, and alter, the blues-causing situation.
Even the title of Clifton's latest (at this writing) book,
Two-Headed Woman, indicates a major alteration and change from
being "ordinary." As the title poem says, she is "sensational,"
with "one face turned outward / one face, swiveling slowly in"
(23). In a sense, some of the major changes in the poet are a
matter of her perceptions: she sees and describes the
73
extraordinary in the ordinary. Three poems from Two-Headed Woman
illustrate this and are a marked contrast to the preceding poem in
content and style. All three poems deal with Clifton's physical
appearance in energetic, vivid language, which suggests a
complementary state of mind.
In "homage to my hair," the imagery describes both the
hair's texture and the poem's:
when i feel her jump up and dance
i hear the music! my God
i'm talking about my nappy hair!
she is a challenge to your hand
Black man,
she is as tasty on your tongue as good greens
Black man,
she can touch your mind
with her electric fingers and
the grayer she do get, good God,
the Blacker she do be! (5)
In the first line, her hair is personified as a lively, spirited
woman. As Joyce Johnson notes, this poem contrasts with "the way
it was" [where her hair was straightened] revealing a change in
attitude and stance in that the verbs "jump" and "dance" capture
the "character and validity of nappy hair" ("The Theme of
Celebration" 74). These verbs also capture the texture and feel
of that hair. Lines four through six use striking similes to
describe these aspects, as well as to teasingly flirt with a
"Black man." The flirtation, or invitation, appeals to the sense
of touch (line 4) and taste (line 6). In lines eight and nine,
her hair is almost magical in its abilities, and, as the
74
concluding lines state, age simply makes her hair livelier or
"Blacker," In the next two poems, age has a similar energizing
affect.
"Homage to my hips" is just that - a praise poem to
Clifton's hips. As in the poem to her hair, Clifton uses
multilayered sensual language and a rhythmical, fast-paced
repetitious style to get her points across. The poem works on two
levels, the literal and the figurative. Literally, it is a
physical description, and figuratively, the "hips" are a
synecdoche for her entire being: physical, mental, and spiritual:
these hips are big hips
they need space to move around in*
they don't fit into little
petty places, these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back,
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips,
these hips are magic hips,
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top! (6)
On a literal, descriptive level, the most important adjectives are
"big" and "mighty." But the literal and figurative levels fuse as
the size and might of her hips are described and personified by
their dislike of being crowded (or girdled and contained), of
"petty places," and of being "held back." Further, they are
"free" and have never known enslavement. All of these
characteristics or traits are associated, usually, with people (as
75
opposed to parts of people). The "power" of the hips and of the
poem builds up to a peak of sensual energy in the last four lines,
a testament to the supernatural power of these hips, so magical
they can "put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top!" The
last two self-confident lines wittily describe the sexual powers
of "these hips," powers which are extraordinary. In the following
poem, "what the mirror said," Clifton describes the extraordinary
aspects of her entire body and being.
Here, Clifton continues her self-affirmation by "repeating"
the mirror's words. Unlike the legendary magic mirror of "Snow
White," this one sees what is directly in front of it, although it
does use the metaphor of land. It begins:
listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you. (7)
The mirror speaks fluent black English, perhaps to reflect the
woman's black image. Further, it uses that language poetically,
in the best of the oral tradition (it sounds like it Is talking).
From the third line on, the mirror sustains the geographical
metaphor, reiterated with "city," "geography," and "map." It also
plays on words (line 10) as it says "somebody need directions / to
__________
76
move around you," implying that a person needs to be told how to
handle such a woman. Moving from the physical to the mental
level, the second part of the poem more explicitly reiterates this
point:
listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
he got his hands on
some
damn
body! (7)
The "personality" of this talking mirror and the tone of the poem
are hardly objective. Both are involved, impassioned, and almost
angrily assertive in their praise. Moreover, the play on words
with "noplace anonymous girl" calls up the history of black women
being called "girls" by white folks and black males, which the
mirror refutes. Also, a mirror of respect, it not only tells the
woman to "respect herself" but also demands that she get respect
from prospective lovers (or assailants), as seen especially in the
last three words of the poem. Here, the mirror is moved to swear
in its vehement affirmation. These words are humorous in their
possible interpretations. First, it sounds as if the mirror is
swearing at^ the woman. Secondly, "damn" could suggest "damned."
Finally, and most importantly, there is the play on words: the
double meaning of "some . . .body," meaning both Somebody (an
important personage as opposed to nobody) and some body, meaning
77
an incredibly well-built figure, or a "fine" one. Needless to say,
this body is not ordinary.
"What the mirror said" and the two preceding poems share
thematic, structural, and stylistic features. They are a private
"inventory" with a common tone and value system. That is, all
three reveal that Clifton has come quite a ways from being quiet,
lady-like or ordinary. In these poems, she is loudly, sensuously
female and black (or "colored" as Shange would say). All three
poems, moreover, structurally climax in sexual innuendo or
implication in addressing, alluding to, or mentioning a black man.
Finally, all three poems utilize black English to intensify the
imgery and the message, and in these poems, most significantly,
gender and race become elements of style.
* * *
In conclusion, a close reading of the poems by Lucille
Clifton suggests that both gender and ethnicity are primary
influences on her poetry. These influences seem deliberate,
rather than unconsious or accidental, as revealed in the kinds of
imagery used, and in their sources. In other words, Clifton's
poetry is undeniably "black" by Henderson's criteria. Certainly
it utilizes black speech patterns and black English or diction,
and the figurative language is "black" (for example the many
allusions to Africa and Afro-American history). Similarly, in
Showalter's terminology, this use suggests a cultural determinant
78
- a culture which is informed by a specific female and black
worldview.
As Henderson states and Showalter implies, it i£ necessary
to be a "culturally oriented critic" or to "go outside the poem"
to provide a context for a full appreciation and critique of the
work. I have tried to avoid doing reductive contextual readings,
but with Clifton's poetry, it seems necessary to deal with a
specific context, because the poems direct the reader to one. A
major theme in these poems is communality and continuity, self
belief, fortification, and celebration with other black women -
from Clifton's own female relatives to young school girls and
women such as Miss Rosie. Clifton's poetry is "saturated" in
female-black culture. A definite focus is discernible in these
poems: her concern is with women, moreso than men. Clifton sees
women as the preservers of the race, as cullture bearers, as the
ones who insure continuity and creativity. Although Clifton does
write poems about and to males, they are fewer and generally less
effective than the woman-oriented poems. Haki Madhubuti observes
that Clifton "brings a Black woman's sensitivity to her poetry . .
. of what it means to be a Black woman in America, and what she
brings is not antagaonistic, not stacked against Black men"
("Lucille Clifton" 157). Although that observation might be true,
it is a truth due to omission: Clifton, quite simply, rarely uses
black males (or whites) as poetic material.
79
Also, the preceding discussion answers some of the initial
thereoretical questions raised by Mary Helen Washington, regarding
Clifton's poetry. Black women provide not only inspiration for
the poems, but their content and style as well. This "culture1 1
definitely reveals a value system on several levels, and can be
broken down into specifics. First, black women are Clifton's
models in life and in poetry. Secondly, there are specific
mascons in the poetry, especially involving appearance and
"attitudes," which are only applicable or easily and readily
aceesible as poetic material to black women. Third, and most
importantly, Clifton's "simple' language is undeniably a female-
black style, as multi-faceted, as rich, and as complex as are the
lives of black women.
80
Notes
This information comes from Generations: A Memoir (1976).
Primarily a memorial for Clifton's deceased father, the book also
provides general family history and background from antebellum
times to the recent past. Clifton's father, Samuel Louis Sayles,
told her about Ca'line, his great-grandmother. According to him,
Ca'line "was born among the Dahomey people in 1822 . . . and she
always used to say 'Get what you want, you from Dahomey women' "
(14). Allusions to this statement or to Dahomey frequently appear
in Clifton's poetry.
2
Alice Ostriker's "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and
Revisionist Mythmaking" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 8.1 1982: 68-90) exemplifies the myopic racism of white
feminist critics. She calls her article a study of poetry of the
last twenty years, but typically mentions Clifton's poetry only in j
a footnote. Linda Koolish's dissertation, "A Whole New Poetry
Beginning Here: Contemporary American Women Poets" (Stanford, j
1981) suffers from a similar malaise. Although she devotes an
entire chapter to Third World women, she reductively considers
only the themes of "anger, power, and selfhood" in the poetry.
Clifton, one of the least "angry" black folk in print, is briefly
discussed in this chapter. Koolish's racial limitations, in other
words, distort her reading of the poetry. The other essays
mentioned, by Sherley Anne Williams and Nan Bauer Maglin,
respectively, are quoted from and cited in the text.
3
Good Times is unpaginated, and many of the poems are
untitled. Instead, they are numbered; the title poem is number
ten. Subsequent quotations from poems in this book will use first
lines as titles.
4
John Hope Franklin observes that Harriet Tubman was the
"most outstanding conductor on the Underground Railroad with an
inner strength which belied her physical frailty." She freed
"more than three hundred slaves, . . . tolerated no cowardice and
threatened to kill any slave who wished to turn back" (From
Slavery to Freedom 202-203).
^The anthology Cavalcade (eds. Arthur P. Davis and Saunders
Redding, Boston: Houghton, 1971) includes the biographical
information that Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree (or
Bomfree) around 1797. It also has the text of Sojourner's speech
81
made at the Women's Rights Convention (in Akron, Ohio, in 1852)
whose refrain is "And arn't I a woman?" (79-81)
^There are many sources of information about this deity, or
Orisha, as well as the other major six, who are sometimes called
the "Seven African Powers." One source is Migene Gonzales-
Wippler's Santeria: African Magic in Latin America (New York:
Julian P , 1973). This author also mentions that Yemaye is the
Goddess of maternity, and that "all matters concerning women's
affairs are solved with her aid" (118).
7
In From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin writes
"There seems to be no doubt that innumerable slaveholders
deliberately undertook to increase the number of saleable slaves
by advantageously mating them and by encouraging prolificacy in
every way possible." He notes that one Virginia planter bragged
that "his women" were "uncommonly good breeders" and that by the
age of twenty, some women had had as many as five children (131-
132).
8
This "type," as well as her male counterpart, "Mr.
Charlie," constantly appears in Afro-American literature. A few
examples are found in poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes,
and Mari Evans; Douglas Turner Ward's plays "Happy Ending" and
"Day of Absence"; and James Baldwin's "Blues for Mr. Charlie."
9
Clifton's poems which focus primarily on herself can
actually be subdivided into three distinct categories: those that
deal with her spiritual or inner transformations, those which deal
with her mother, and those which deal with her physical existence
or worldly expectations and experiences. The first category
shifts from an Afro-wearing John the Baptist in Good News About
the Earth to a Black Kali and an "Island Mary" in An Ordinary
Woman to her own mysticism in Two-Headed Woman. Some of these
poems are particularly strong and effective, but some of them are
so cryptic and solipsistic that they almost defy interpretation.
These, like the poems under consideration here, constitute a major
and distinct aspect of Clifton's poetry. Like the poems discussed
here, they deserve separate treatment.
82
Chapter 3: Sherley Anne Williams's Blues
In blues there is some kind of philosophy, a way of looking
at the world. . . . Blues is a basis of historical
continuity for black people . . . a ritualized way of
talking about ourselves and passing it on.
- Sherley Anne Williams
A A A
As a writer, Sherley Anne Williams is known for her
diversity and range: she has produced critical essays, a book of
literary criticism, short stories, a play, two books of poetry, as
well as a novel in progress.'*' But almost everything she writes
reflects her working-class background, her early childhood
experiences, and a concern with the lives of black women.
Williams was born in 1944 and raised in Bakersfield, Ca. Her
parents, Texans, were migrant workers. Like Clifton, Williams has
a "southern background," but there the similarity ends. From her
own comments in Midnight Birds (ed. M.H. Washington, 1980),
Williams's teenaged years were troubled ones. She felt isolated
and abandoned on all sides and could not confide in sympathetic
teachers who knew nothing of "being black, being on welfare," and
"being solicited for sex" by both black and white men (Midnight
Birds 195). A need to find books about black folk with whom she
could identify was one impetus, from her early years, for her
being a writer. The books she did find - autobiographies of women
83
entertainers - gave her solace, and role models, as these women
too had had to "cope with early and forced sex and sexuality, with
mothers who could not express love in the terms they so
desperately needed" (Midnight Birds 196).
Williams was also "rescued" by her sister Ruby ("Ruise") who
provided her with a "community" and with "models, both real-life
and literary" (Midnight Birds 196-7). By this point, a senior in
high school, Williams says:
I was more sophisticated in searching out black literature.
But nowhere did I find stories of these young heroic women
who despite all they had to do and endure laughed and loved, I
hoped and encouraged, supported each other with gifts of
food and money and fought the country that was literally, we
were convinced, trying to kill us. My first published
story, "Tell Martha Not to Moan" (Mass. Review, 1967?
anthologized in The Black Woman and elsewhere), has its
genesis in these years. Martha and her life are a composite
of the women who made up that circle. Their courage and
humor helped each other and me thru some very difficult
years. (Midnight Birds 197)
This quotation establishes a context of black-female bonding,
nurturance, and transcendence. It also reveals a primary source
for Williams's later writings especially her books of poetry, The
Peacock Poems (1975) and Someone Sweet Angel Chile (1982), and her
2
novel in progress. Finally, it suggests a "motive" for her
subsequent career in education and literature.
In 1966, Williams received a B.A. in English from California
State University, then did graduate work at Howard, finally
receiving an M.A. from Brown University. (A Ph.D., she decided,
was extraneous to her writing career.) She spent 1984 at the
84
University of Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship, and she is
Professor of literature at GCSD, where she has taught for the past
twelve years. (She is also the single parent of a teenaged son.)
Yet, in spite of her academic training, Williams remains true to
her roots, to her beginnings, and to her early literary
influences.
Apart from the women mentioned above, Sterling Brown,
Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston are Williams's most
important literary influences. She studied with Brown at Howard,
and about Hughes, she says, "no book affected my life so much as
reading Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred, for here
was my life and language coming at me" (Midnight Birds 198).
Williams probably refers here to Hughes's use of a black
vernacular style and his literary appropriation of the blues.
Yet, of the three writers, Hurston's influence seems the most
pivotal.
Williams notes that when she first read Their Eyes Were
Watching God, she became "Zora Neale's for life": "In the speech
of her characters I heard my own country voice and saw in the
heroine something of my own country self" ("Foreword" vii).
Williams could both learn from Hurston's use of folk material as
well as identify with Hurston's folk heroine, Janie Starks, and
her "individual quest for fulfillment." As she later put it, "It
was a deeper experience reading her [Hurston's] work than that by
L_.
85
Langston Hughes or Sterling Brown. . . . Zora Neale focused in on
a situation in a very different way from them. Hughes wrote
about the north, and Sterling is writing about farmers and
sharecroppers. Zora Neale's society sits in between, which is
precisely what my background is" (Tate, Black Women Writers 208).
Both the style and content of Hurston's novel were
significant influences. In the novel, Hurston uses her knowledge
of black culture and her anthropologist's training to utilize
black -English at its metaphorical, descriptive best.
Simultaneously, she tells the story of Janie Starks, an "ordinary"
working-class black woman. Finally, and most importantly, Hurston
must have validated Williams's own direction in writing: her
concern, like Clifton's, is with black folk, not with the
pathology of whites. Moreover, whereas Brown and Hughes both used
varieties of folk speech and music in their poetry, they rarely
used these forms to speak of themselves personally. In Their
Eyes, although Hurston is not speaking of herself, Williams must
have found a clearer direction to her own distinctive "voice."
Like her three literary mentors, Williams's style in poetry
and prose draws heavily on "folk" speech, mores, and lifestyles.
However - and in this she is closest to Hughes - the blues idiom
is a major stylistic voice in Williams's poetry. Even as Williams
used the blues, she - like Clifton - stood out from a then-
dominant trend. In the late sixties, certain spokespeople decided
that the blues were, among other things, "backwards** and
politically incorrect. As Ron Rarenga puts it:
Therefore we say the blues are invalid; for they teach
resignation, in a word acceptance of reality — and we have
come to change reality. We will not submit to the
resignation of our fathers who lost their money, their
women, and their lives and sat around wondering "what did
they do to be so black and blue . . .
("Black Cultural Nationalism" 36)
Even Toni Cade (Bambara) wrote, "Pitiful-po' me has been the terms
of our survival as illustrated by our blues - survival music. We
are somewhere else at the moment" ("Thinking About the Play The
Great White Hope" 238). Williams obviously shares Leroi Joneses
(Amiri Baraka) perspective. He sees the blues as the most
important, most authentic art form of Afro-Americans in that it is
the music of the masses and it "arose from the needs of a group"
(Blues People 82).
Further, Williams appropriates not just any blues, but the
"classic" blues as performed by Bessie Smith. Bessie's songs and
lyrics provide Williams with a way to utilize the blues to her own
end, even as Bessie herself (as much as Hurston) provides greater
access to a use of black female cullture. This is particularly
evident in part one of The Peacock Poems, "Any Woman's Blues," and
in part two of Some One Sweet Angel Chile, "Regular Reefer."
However, Williams's first published short story foreshadows her
interest in the blues, in vernacular black English, and in working
class black women.
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Thematically and stylistically, "Tell Martha Not to Moan"
(The Black Woman 42-55) is directly connected to The Peacock
Poems, Martha, an eighteen-year old single parent on welfare, is
expecting another baby by an itinerant blues pianist appropriately
named "Time." The story begins at its end: Time is gone, and
Martha's mother chastises her for being foolish, and pregnant
again. Told via flashbacks, Martha's story reveals a "blue note,"
or a blues motif: although Time is the musician, her story is the
stuff of which blues are made. While she is young and optimistic
enough to believe that Time will return, the reader is more
pessimistic. (That name is resonant and symbolic: time never does
return.) The girl "got the blues, and don't know it." When and
if she discerns her condition, she could be the persona in part
one of The Peacock Poems.
Martha reveals a complex mind and personality, along with a
"countriness" or niavete, because of Williams's stylistic
dexterity. Martha's use of black English is realistic and
historically convincing. When Time, the black nationalist, calls
Martha his "Black queen," she responds "Ah shit! I mad cause I
think he just trying to run a game. 'What you trying to prove,
fool?' I ask him" (Midnight Birds 44). Their exchange is lively
and witty, partly due to their "culture conflicts." Later (he
moves in with her that night, moves his piano in soon after), as
she listens to Time and his male friends talk she astutely
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observes that they are obsessed with "how they gon put something
over on the white man" (Midnight Birds 51). Finally fed up, she
tells Time "You always talking about music and New York City, New
York City and the white man. Why don't you forget all that shit
and get a job like other men?" (Midnight Birds 54). Martha is not
formally educated, but she is hardly dumb. Williams's style makes
this quite clear. Even though Martha's words may be considered
"illiterate" by some, they are also genuine, honest, and
immediate. Finally, Martha's way of expressing herself reveals a
distinctively black-female value system and perspective.
The persona in "Any Woman's Blues" is, like Martha, one of
the folk. Like Martha, she is a single parent. Her main concern,
like Martha's, is with a black male lover. Most importantly, the
persona in "Any Woman's Blues” shapes and focuses her story via
the blues which places it squarely in a context of black female
culture. In these poems Williams uses blues and a blues persona
dualistically. The blues persona is a mask which enables Williams
to present her own private autobiographical story and voice by
means of a more communal, public stance; in that, "Any Woman's
Blues" matches style to content as Hurston did in Their Eyes Were
Watching God.
"Any Woman's Blues" is a long blues with variations,
"sophisticated" folk poetry. Even as the narrator speaks
vernacular black English, she is carefully in control of the
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subject: the focus is love, or a search for love, and the ensuing
loneliness. Other than her son - the result of a failed love
affair - the persona mentions little else in detail. This focus
results in various "close ups" of the personals stylized emotions,
moods and attitudes. At the same time, the distancing renders the
narrator both anonymous ("any woman"), yet well-known. All this
is accomplished through the genres and styles used in the section,
which contains prose and poetry.
The style is mainly black vernacular, yet sometimes cryptic
and "literary." It is sometimes intellectual and cerebral; at
others, earthy, sensual, and overtly sexual. But the predominant
style, theme, and controlling tone is the blues. Moreover, like
many blues musicians and singers, Williams improvises. Her
juxtaposing lyrical blues poetry with narrative poetry throughout
the section is one example of her improvisation.
The structure and arrangement of the first pages in the
section establish an improvisational blues mode. An epigram
frames the section: "... every woman is a victim of the feel
blues, too . . ." The next page, the title page for the section,
o
has "Any Woman's Blues" (the section's title) at the top. That
song, by Bessie Smith, is the source of the preceding epigram.
Hence, Williams conjures up Bessie's music as a specific context
for the poems. The first poem of the section, a blues, appears
near the bottom of the same page. All this combined creates a
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blues mood, context, and background. The poem, especially,
establishes the personality of the speaker in the section:
Blues is Something to Think About
(the last verse of One-Sided Bed Blues)
and this the way that shit come down
My bed one sided
from me sleepin alone so mucha the time.
My bed one sided, now,
cause I'm alone so mucha the time.
But the fact that it's empty
show how this man is messin with my mind. (11)
The poem's title suggests not mere anonymity, but familiarity and
communality. It invites the reader, especially if the reader is a
(heterosexual) black woman, to identify with the tragi-comie
situation in the poem, and with those depicted in other poems,
which tell how and why her bed is "one-sided." The suggestive
image of a "one-sided" bed also establishes the theme of longing
and loneliness which pervades the section and which place the
poetry within the "classical" blues tradition.
According to Sandra Lieb, black women are the classic blues
singers. In her book Mother of the Blues (1981) she defines the
classic blues as more urban, and more "sophisticated" than its
earlier predecessor, "country" blues (56-60). Most importantly,
classic blues singers such as Ma Rainey focused almost exclusively
on love. Since the singers were mainly black women, then, the
classic blues present a "specifically female" point of view (xiv).
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Williams's first poem in the section is in the "tradition” of the
classic blues, according to Lieb's definition.
Structurally, the poem utilizes the three-line format of the
blues. And, like the blues, the second line repeats the first one
via incremental repetition, while the third offers "new"
information or an explanatioon. Stylistically, the poem employs
black English to approximate the oral-aural quality of blues
music: "mucha" for "much of" and "messin" instead of "messing.”
Line one suggests a spoken introduction - also in keeping with the
blues tradition. In addition, the poem's message is humorously
ironic. That is, the woman does not have to be alone. She could
get another man, but the one who is "messin with her mind" is the
one she wants. "Any Woman's Blues" also establishes that the
persona is a blues singer - hence, a member of the "lower" or
working classes and closer to black folk culture. And, as in many
blues, the compressed image of "one-sided bed" is suggestive,
requiring little elaboration or other details. The next few
poems, however, provide details in an oral story telling manner.
Throughout the section, narrative poems are juxtaposed with
blues. There are twice as many narratives as blues, each of which
restates the preceding narrative poems and introduces the group
that follows. The narrative poems provide the story line or plot;
the blues poems are lyrical interpretations and summations. For
example, the next two poems provide specific details of "the way
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that shit come down" and examples of Williams's ability to
manipulate narrative poetry.
"Say Hello to John" is the story of Williams's son's birth.
Initially, the poem seems unconnected to the preceding one, except
on a stylistic level. The use of black English heightens the
immediacy of a common - but ever unique - experience:
So in the night when I felt the water tween
my legs, I thought it was pee and I laid
there wonderin if maybe I was in a dream.
Then it come to me that my water broke and I went
in to tell Ru-ise.You been havin pains?
she ask. I hear her fumblin for the light.
Naw, I say. Don't think so. The veins
stand out along her temples.What time
is it? Goin on toward four o'clock.
Nigga, I told you:
You ain't havin no babies, not
in the middle of the night.
Get yo ass back to bed.
That ain't nothing but pee.And what
I know bout havin kids cept what she said? (14)
Here, Williams's "artful artlessness” enhances the poetry of
ordinary black-female conversation. The language is realistically
descriptive, with vivid, sensual images. The narrator's diction
reveals her as both inexperienced and unsophisticated. Her matter
of fact, reportorial tone gives the poem a quasi—comic effect,
especially when she reports Ru-ise's words (lines 10-14), and then
accepts them. However, the narrator is controlled and highly
selective as she reports.
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In stanza one, "water tween my legs" strikes just the right
(or "decent") note of intimacy and detail. It is sensual and
concrete enough to provide information, yet suggestive and
connotative. Given the woman's character, it seems natural for
her to say "pee" and not "urine" in line five. The narrator's
responses are also deliberately humorous. When Ruise asks about
her pains, she says she "Don't think" she's having any - as if
those pains could be mistaken or overlooked. When Ruise orders
the narrator not to have a baby in the middle of the night, the
narrator, in her ignorance, tries to obey (lines 11 and 12).
Like any good story teller, Williams in this poem
deliberately shapes her material. As for the pain of childbirth,
it "wa'n't bad / least no mo'n I eva expect to see / again" (14).
Ruise receives more space in the poem than the pain of childbirth.
Similarly, the drama ends with the doctor and her son, not the
baby's father, who, like the anonymous male in "Any Woman's
Blues," is invisible and unnamed. This fact further enhances the
possibility of this story's being any woman's story or blues.
In "If he let us go now," the narrator mixes external
reportage with her internal reactions to describe how the father
(still unnamed and "anonymous") in fact, lets her and their five
week old son go. Her intense thoughts contrast with the male's
actions and words to create emotional tension which the poem's
conversational tone and diction enhance. The male's actions and
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words are matter-of-factly presented. He is sketched in, so to
speak, to suggest the full-blown figure of a type of black male -
the "jive(ass) nigger.” An essential ingredient for this type is
his "cool" silence and lack of emotion:
let me strap
the baby in the seat, just don't say
nothing all that while . . .
I move round to
the driver side of the car. The air
warm and dry here. Lawd know what it be
in L.A. He open the door for me
and I slide behind the wheel. (15)
The sparse, bare language reflects the narrator's tension and
trauma. Her expectant, hesitant tone and movements make the man's
gallantry (line 7) seem callous and insensitive.
In the next lines, the baby's presence heightens both the
tension and the irony, as the narrator wonders about his thoughts
while revealing her own longing: "he won't let us go; he still got
time to say wait." Her passion, love, and need totally contrast
with the man's cool detachment. When he does eventually speak, it
is not to say what she longs to hear but a banal, trite goodbye:
I will him to touch
us now, to take care us, to know what
we need is him and his name. He slap
the car door, say, drive careful and turn
to go. If he let us go now . . . how
we gone ever take him back? I ease
out on the clutch, mash in on the gas.
The only answer I get is his back. (15)
These lines are both poignant and ironic. The woman's hopeful,
subdued tone and diction highlight the man's crass, juvenile, and
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irresponsible actions. His "slap" on the car door is essentially
a slap in the woman's face. Hence, the reader is forced to
identify with the narrator's feelings, since they have been
foregrounded all along. The concluding lines suggest that they
never "take him back" as other poems in the section show. However,
that does not mean that the narrator does not want him back. The
poem's final image - of unwilling motion and rejection - are
major and consistent ones in the remainder of the section.
The next five poems compress three years's time and
experiences as the woman and her son stay on the road. The
narrator is driven by a need to find a home and to find herself,
but also by the need to either find or to forget her son's father.
Other poems suggest that instead of one love affair, there are
several, each more or less unfulfilling. "This Is a Sad-Ass Poem
for a Black Woman to be Writing" maintains a blues note, although
it is not written or structured as a blues. It continues the
sensual, sexual motif of the first blues poem:
You expend yourself —
something - within me
and I pant beneath
you, open, heaving.
You withdraw; I close
and stillness and breath,
bodies burrowing
into damp sheets are
the only sounds in
the silence. Silence:
Good jive, a light rap
and fly speech over
a public table. (18)
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The persona's word choice emphasizes the meaninglessness of
this encounter. The diction is vivid but matter of fact, sensual
but not erotic, and somehow, repulsive. The first lines suggest
that their only contact is physical. The male "expends"
something; she pants and heaves. Significantly, there is nothing
to say after such an exchange. The poem is a "sad-ass" one
because of this anonymous and unfulfilling sex with another
anonymous black male. Finally, the poem suggests the lengths the
woman goes to to alleviate her longing and loneliness. The woman's
son eventually contributes to her loneliness with his questions
about his father ("Time" 21-24). Because of the memories
triggered by the child's questions, his mother's response is
frustration and concealed anger: her cheeks are "ridged with rage"
(24). However, her responses and experiences translate into
wisdom in the second blues and title poem, "Any Woman's Blues
(every woman is a victim of the feel blues, too)."
In keeping with the section's eireuituous, spiral structure,
this poem summarizes the preceding narrative poems, and echoes the
first blues poem. The prefacing epigram is this poem's subtitle,
a literary and musical coda. The first stanza reiterates the
theme of loneliness but with variations:
Any Woman's Blues
every woman is a victim of the feel blues, too
Soft lamp shinin
and me alone in the night.
Soft lamp is shinin
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and me alone in the night.
Can't take no one beside me
need mo'n jest some man to set me right. (25)
Although the woman is "alone in the night" these lines shift
imagery and focus. The image in the first blues was a "one-sided
bed"; the focus was sexual longing. Here the image of a "soft
lamp" suggests clarity and a desire for companionship, not just
sex. The woman's need for "mo'n jest some man" suggests change
and growth since "Sad-Ass Poem." In fact, this poem deals with
reassessment and is a more "intellectual" than emotional blues, as
seen in the next two stanzas.
Although these stanzas utilize the blues structure, they are
more expositive than lyrical, as if the woman's thoughts are more
important than the lyrics. For example, stanza two extends the
theme of loneliness to a theme of general dissatisfaction:
I left many peoples and places
tryin not to be alone.
Left many a person and places
I lived my life alone.
I need to get myself together.
Yes, I need to take myself to home. (25)
Besides summarizing her constant movement (from the west coast to
the east coast and back again) the first four lines contain not
just incremental repetition but also ironic repetition. Lines one
and two imply that the woman's movements were because of her
loneliness while lines three and four imply that the movement
exacerbated instead of alleviating the problem. The constant
movement and search produced the knowledge of the last two lines.
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In this stanza and the following one, the narrator
deliberately becomes very literary as opposed to "oral." Unlike
the smoothness of the first stanza, these lines are hard to
"sing," The first line is even awkward to say due to the "p" and
"s” alliteration. The structure reiterates a blues background and
context while primarily emphasizing the narrator's former
displacement and state of mind. The next stanza is even more
awkward as a song and the thought is more abstract and cryptic:
What's gone can be a window
a circle in the eye of the sun.
What's gone can be a window
a circle, well, in the eye of the sun.
Take the circle from the world, girl,
you find the light have gone. (25)
The blues are known to be suggestive, connotative and metaphorical
but hardly to the extent of these lines. The "circle in the eye
of the sun" could be almost anything, from a lover to an
existential meaning to life, It could even be a tongue in cheek
nonsense phrase. "Girl" redeems the stanza by recalling the blues
folk context of sharing an experience with an audience. The final
stanza bears this out, and returns to an oral style:
These is old blues
and I sing em like any woman do.
These the old blues
and I sing em, sing em, sing em. Just
like any woman do.
My life ain't done yet.
Naw. My song ain't through. (25)
The first four lines acknowledge a line of "old blues" and
women blues singers. The lines invoke a cultural context which
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would make the preceding stanza acceptable, if not totally
understandable. The "split verbs" of black English ("These is"
and "woman do") authenticate the woman's point: she knows how to
"sing" these blues and she can improvise, "just like any woman."
As with many of the old blues, the poem-song ends on a positive,
somewhat formulaic note of survival, determination and renewal.
As Albert Murray says,
The folk craftsman is not primarily concerned with turning
out something never before seen or heard of. He is
concerned with doing what is expected of him, with showing
how well he can do what he has been taught to do, with
maintaining standards.
(Stomping the Blues 204)
In this last stanza particularly, Williams returns to conventional
standards of the blues, showing how well she has learned the art,
particularly after her innovations of stanzas two and three. And,
since her "life ain't done yet" she continues her story in a
narrative mode, emphasizing her search for the man.
A complex poem in four parts, "Drivin Wheel" is one of the
most representative of this type. Here, the narrator is again
with a man. The lovers' surroundings and conversation are almost
stereotypical: a "darkened bedroom, the double bed, / the whisper
of the city night, / against it her voice, husky, speaking." Her
words suggest that they are in the midst of a lovers' quarrel:
I am through you wholly woman. You
say I am cold am hard am vain. And
I know I am fool and bitch. And black.
Like my mother before me and my
sisters around me. We share the same
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legacy are women to the same
degree.
Not circumstance: history
keeps us apart. I'm black. You black. And
how have niggas proved they men? Fightin
and fuckin as many women as
they can. And even when you can do
all the things a white man do you may
leave fightin behind but fuckin stay / the same (30)
This poem repeats and extends the sensual imagery of "one-sided
bed blues," and "Sad-Ass Poem." From an empty bed, to a tousled
bed and silence, and now, finally, to an argument which seems to
have been "in the air" all along. This poem annotates and
explains the longing of the blues-poems while adding another
dimension to that longing.
The woman's words focus the situation in a specific racial
historical context. The couple could be "any black couple"; their
argument, like the blues, includes other black women and men. As
she says, her mother and her "sisters," - other black women - have
"the same legacy," a legacy of troubled relationships with black
men. Her words imply that history is a vicious never-ending
cycle, a no-win situation for both the men and the women, as shown
by her graphic, brutal word choice. (Similarly, the typography
suggests that she speaks haltingly, since this is a "touchous"
subject.) Whereas the males prove themselves by "fightin and
fuckin," for the women "its havin babies and how / well we treats
a man and how long we / keep him" (30-31). Although they make up
in part four of the poem, it is a tenuous peace; the "question
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will always / be present, so too the doubt it leaves in its wake,
, . . History is them; it is also theirs to make” (34). This
open-ended conclusion emphasizes possible hope and change for this
couple and other black couples. This possibility of creating a
new kind of history and tradition carries over into the last poem
in the section, a blues.
"Blues is Something to Think About" grows directly out of
the first blues poem, whose introductory line becomes the title
here, emphasizing the circularity and growth in the blues and in
the narrator. Also, the poem restates and re-writes the first
blues as it comments on the implied historical context:
A traditional statement about
a traditional situation
with a new response,
Or,
another ending for
One-sided Bed Blues
I say I'm lonesome now,
but I bet' not be lonesome long
Yeah, I'm lonesome now,
but I don't need to be lonesome long;
You know, it take a do-right man
to make a pretty woman sing a lonesome song. (37)
Here (lines 1 & 2) "traditional" has two meanings: that of the
blues-music tradition and that of history (or, the situation), as
in the preceding poem. In a sense, the classical blues tradition
is an outgrowth of that "history" between black women and black
men. This poem, though, offers a "new response" to both, altering
both the song and the situation. For example, the earlier version
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of "One-Sided Bed Blues" is a lament. The narrator expresses her
feelings and leaves it at that. Here, however, she acknowledges
her loneliness, but asserts, "I bet' not be lonesome long." Lines
nine and ten reiterate a defiant stance and the "new" information
in the last two lines is assertive. These lines are new in
comparison with the first song which ends with an explanation only
- the man was "messin with" her mind. This song ends by
suggesting that only a "do-right" (cf Aretha Franklin) man can
"make a pretty woman sing / a lonesome song." These concluding
lines imply that the woman is more confident; her "pretty woman's"
bed will not become "one-sided." This poem suggests activity and
optimistic assertion, compared to the passivity of the first one.
The poem is a statement of intent. As Janheinz Jahn puts
it, "The blues are sung, not because one finds oneself in a
particular mood, but because one wants to put oneself in a certain
mood" (MUNTU 224). The mood in which Williams wants to put
herself (and the reader) is even clearer and stronger in parts two
and three of The Peacock Poems.
Part one, in a sense, is open-ended. Although this last
blues song is optimistic, it suggests circularity. As the woman
said earlier, her song "ain't through." But when she jLs^ through
in The Peacock Poems, a larger design is apparent. The book
begins with longing, loneliness and frustration and ends with
peace, contentment, and continuity. No longer looking for the
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perfect lover, the narrator finds a "home" in her son and in
herself. The conclusion, moreso than the last blues poem in
section one, really suggests maturity and multi—dimensional
growth. Both these elements carry over into Some One Sweet Angel
Chile.
II
Williams's second book is more complex and intricate than
the first, although there are important links between the two.
The second book also features colloquial black English, the
language of the folk; however, in Angel Chile, she manipulates
even more diverse styles. Relatedly, Angel Chile maintains a
concern with black women's culture, and with matching style to
content. And even moreso than "Any Woman's Blues," Williams
selectively shapes and focuses the material in "Regular Reefer."
Part two, "Regular Reefer," of Some One Sweet Angel Chile is
a poetic biography of Bessie Smith, a tribute to her life and
music, a re-telling and re-interpretation of both. As with "Any
Woman's Blues," narrative is the dominant mode, but several voices
tell the story, rather than one. The arrangement and variety of
the "voices" suggest a theater piece, but the main voice, on
several levels, is Williams's. She performs in and directs her
own play, fusing biographies of Bessie, Bessie's music, and most
importantly, Williams's own perspectives. Williams fuses
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narrative and blues, documentary bits and interpretation to
recreate Bessie in a determinedly heroic, historical light.
At the same time, the recreation presents an image of
Williams, who has, at least for now, found a literary "home" in
Bessie. Although this relationship is evident throughout the
section, it is clearest in the poems which deal with a connection
and kinship between Bessie, Ma Rainey, Bessie's niece Ruby, and
the poet herself. Structurally, this connection is a variation of
call and response; each woman "responds" to the other in terms of
specific motifs, repeated images, and "mascons." Bessie's music,
for example, is a structural and thematic motif which links all
four women. Also, the fact that the women speak in their own
"words" and styles enhance the immediacy and strength of their
kinship.
Bessie, for example, speaks of some primary relationships in
her life: with Ma, with her husband (Jack Gee) and her family, and
with her music. Ma and her music, however, constitute the primary
relationship. She speaks of her singing and her first encounter
with Ma in the following poem:
fifteen: i looked in her face
and seed the woman
I'd become. A big
boned face already
lined and the first line
in her fo'head was
black and the next line
was sex cept I didn't know
to call it that
then and the brackets
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round her mouth stood fo
the chi'ren she teared
from out her womb. And
yo name Bessie; huh.
she say. (Every one
call her Ma o' 01
Lady) Bessie, well.
Le' me hear you sang.
She was looking in
my mouth and I knowed
no matter what words
come to my mind the
song'd be her'n jes as
well as it be mine. (40)
Bessie's unselfconscious, natural diction makes her first
impressions and hindsight knowledge more forceful. Her simple but
eloquent language heightens her sophisticated astute analysis.
Lines one through three contain a self-revealing description.
Ma's "big boned face / already lined" is an older, mirror image of
Bessie's, even though Ma is only a few years older than Bessie.
Identifying with Ma's experiences (lines 5-13) as well as her
music, Bessie recognizes herself in Ma, seeing Ma as "the woman
I'd become." Lines three through nine make the revelation even
more significant, implying that Ma's face is lined because she is
black and female. Although the fifteen year old Bessie could not
have known this, her words reveal that she lived to know the same
"lines." Ma's whole life, including her child-bearing, is written
on her face. Bessie reads and interprets. Ma's words (lines 14-
18) are matter of fact, almost dismissive but Bessie, in the last
six lines, is more knowledgeable. The last lines suggest
alchemical transformation, not just influence; not mere
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identification, but continuity. Ma's "song” influences Bessie,
just as Bessie will later influence her niece Ruby and Sherley
Anne Williams. In fact, these last lines describe Williams's own
relationship to Bessie. They also repeat the mostif of sight or
"looking" from the first three lines.
Bessie's account of this historical meeting is understated,
but it notes major traits which she and Ma share: their
appearance, their overt sexuality, and their music. Moreover,
Bessie shows a great deal of self-confidence and courage in
"standing up" to Ma. According to Sandra Lieb, Ma Rainey was an
awe-inspiring person:
While expressing such sexual boldness in her lyrics and
performance, Ma Rainey also represented a new kind of female
symbol in black popular entertainment, . . . she was a
Mama, an authority generative, nurturant, yet sexual, who
combined eros and homeliness, sex appeal and self mockery,
pathos and humor; the mythopoeic establisher of tradition, a
black culture-heroine. . . . While white culture frequently
views heavy women as ugly, and mothers as asexual, Ma Rainey
could be both big and sexy, both maternal and erotic.
(Mother of the Blues 170)
While this accolade may be overstated, it balances Bessie's words.
She is kin to not just any singer, but the blues singer. And
whereas Bessie is never a mother figure in these poems, she
carries on Ma's tradition of sensuality and her "uplift" of darker
skinned black women.
Bessie, like Ma, was a dark-skinned woman in an era when
"high yaller" was preferable. Yet both women made their color an
107
asset instead of a liability. Bessie is unapologetic about being
dark-skinned, as seen in the following poem:
Rome Georgia: Dear Sister, enclose
is money as promised.
Sorry it is not as
much as you ast but
the job with the Miller
troop didn't work as ex
pect. Mr. Miller
run a brownskin show
and say I am black
which they know when
they hire me as I
don try to hide it
(smile) . . . (43)
Lines 5-13 refer to a producer, Irvin C. Miller, who was
"colorstruck": "It was her complexion that bothered Miller; she
was several uncomfortable shades too dark for the producer . . ,
whose proud motto was: 'Glorifying the Brownskin Girl' "
(Albertson, "Bessie Smith" 8). Yet, instead of Bessie's feeling
slighted or inferior, she exhibits confidence and humor (lines 9-
13). She continues to say that she is going on to Atlanta with
"Ma and them." As in the previous poem, Bessie's diction enhances
the immediacy and credibility of what she says. Her "black and
proud" attitude carries over into her songs.
An untitled blues based on Bessie's "Young Woman's Blues"
illustrates Williams's ability to speak as and for Bessie, to
"collaborate" with her on lyrics, while maintaining the song's
integrity. The song is both Williams's and Bessie's, as Bessie's
108
song was both hers and Ma's. Again, Bessie's self confidence is
emphasized:
I ain't no high yella
I'm a deep killa brown
I ain't no high yella
I'm a deep killa broan
Tip yo hat as you enter, Daddy,
and again as you go down.
You can call me a hussy
cause I likes the road
Call me a hussy
but I'mo keep on travellin this road
I'm a good woman and
I can get a good man any place I goes. (44)
The first stanza reiterates Bessie's being a "deep killa brown,"
as well as her sexuality. (Actually, in "Young Woman's Blues,"
before the first four lines above, Bessie makes her point even
more strongly as she sings, "I'm as good as any woman in yo
town.") The second stanza shows a confidence which disdains the
opinions of others. After all, she can always get a man.
Just as Lieb describes Ma, Michelle Russell describes
Bessie:
Bessie Smith redefined our time. In a deliberate inversion
of the Puritanism of the Protestant ethic, she articulated .
. . how fundamental sexuality was to survival . . . With
her, black women in American culture could no longer be
regarded as sexual objects. She made us sexual subjects,
the first step in taking control. She humanized sexuality
for Black women. ("Slave Codes" 131)
In these poems, Bessie - and Williams - also humanizes dark-
skinned women.
109
Bessie addresses her jealous husband about two of her (and
Ha's) trademarks in " ... a rowboat out on the stormy seas ..."
One trademark is the way they sing and "walk men"; the other is
their challenging the "color line" among black people. Although
she pleads for Jack's understanding, her point is that neither of
her trademarks can be relinquished:
I was walkin mens when I met you,
honey; it ain't been no harm in that.
It wouldn't be blues if I didn't trance
mens to my side. Ma showed me that.
She can walk a man around a tent -
even the ones think they so cute.
This nigga bragged he didn't deal in coal.
I taught him degrees, baby; that's the truth.
Them yellow bitches in the chorus got something
to laugh at now that don't mean me no harm.
Ah, baby - Jack - that walk is a mark
in the family; it's got to be carried on. (48)
The ability to "walk mens" and "trance" them is inseparably
connected to Bessie's stage presence and performance. As Chris
Albertson says, "Bandleader Sy Oliver recalled seeing Bessie
'hypnotize' and 'walk' a man from her audience during a show in
Baltimore. 'That man was completely mesmerized by Bessie's
singing, and as she slowly walked backwards, looking straight at
4
him, he followed.' " Bessie sees this walk as an important legacy
in its own right, just as, in stanza two, she sees it as a triumph
for darker skinned women (or, "coal"). The walk is so powerful
that it negates the color prejudice. So, for once, "them yellow
bitches" laugh with Bessie, not at her. Most importantly, that
110
walk marks a lineage, her "family," as she says. It will be
carried on.
The other voices in the section suggest that Bessie was as
magnetic a presence as Ma Rainey. They all attest to her
commanding presence, her beauty, and her self-confidence. In
"Recollections," an unnamed man remembers seeing Bessie at a
recording session, where her appearance evoked admiration and
respect. She was "fine as fine could be" and "all woman":
The white mens didn't know how to
take it. They flash a look at
Bessie and she jes settin
there with them fine legs crossed, one
shoe danglin off the end of
her toe. Aw, man! Bessie was
jes natchally what her
song say: some sweet angel chile. (56)
Near the end of the poem, words fail the speaker. The memory of
Bessie is so overwhelming that he simply quotes her. ("Some sweet
angel chile" comes from Bessie's "The Reckless Blues,which also
provides the book's title.) Ruby Walker is similarly impressed,
although not at a loss for words.
Jack Gee's niece, Ruby, joined Bessie's troupe in 1924 and
performed and travelled with her off and on until Bessie's death.
Since she had first-hand information about her aunt, Ruby is
considered one of the most important people in Bessie's life.
(Ruby also provides the opening epigraph and title for this
section. When asked if Bessie smoked pot, Ruby's response was no,
"nothing like that - / just / REGULAR REEFER." 37) In the poem
Ill
"The Empress Brand Trim" Ruby recollects her first sight of
Bessie. Thematically and structurally the poem parallels Bessie's
recollection of her first seeing Ma:
ruby reminisces:
He was still Uncle
Jack to me the first
time they came to New
York and I knew she
was special cause he
didn't run his women
in front of us kids.
She rehearsed that first
record right there in
our parlor and I
stayed out of school to
watch her. I didn't know
it then but my whole
life changed. She didn't look
no older than me -
bigger and darker,
sure, but no older,
and I was a teen
ager- a pretty
girl; I sang; I danced.
She carried herself
like she didn't know she
was black - buying dark
glasses in Chicago
cause fans recognized
her in the streets or
that night in Concord -
she chased the Klan out
from behind our tent;
said she hadn't never
heard of such shit.
She loved womens and
mens. The womens was
on the Q.T., of
course, cause Jack wouldn't play
that. But wasn't nothing
he could do about
the mens. She'd go to
a party and pick out the
112
finest brown. "I"mo
give you some Empress
Brand Trim. Tonight you
pay homage to the
Pussy Blues made."
And they always did. (50-51)
Ruby"s words flow naturally and almost endlessly as her thoughts
move from one incident to another. Her vivid and original use of
slang enlivens both her presentation and her story, even as it
reveals Ruby as "streetwise" or "hip."
Yet, Ruby's seemingly random speech is really focused and
structured. Ruby's words cover her first reactions to Bessie,
Bessie's proud blackness, and her proud sexuality, respectively.
In stanza one, Ruby seems somewhat jealous and petulant. But, as
when Bessie met Ma, Ruby's "whole life changes." To the young
(and lighter skinned) Ruby, Bessie is ugly - perhaps because she
is black. However, stanza two discloses that Bessie "didn't know
she / was ugly" since she was quite popular, and very courageous
(lines 25-33). The last stanza describes Bessie's sexual habits,
including her closet lesbianism and her "unique" approach to men.
Finally, the last lines (42-45) show that Bessie used her title,
"Empress of the Blues," to extract royal treatment from men: "And
they always did." The men "pay homage" not just to her body, but
to her music as well. Ruby's memories, in turn, enhance Bessie's
image as a unique, heroic black woman.
In fact, Williams successfully controls all of the voices in
the section so that they focus on a heroic Bessie Smith. And when
113
Williams speaks about Bessie, she maintains that focus. Moreover,
she centers her homage or testament around several prominent
motifs in the section, further strengthening the sense of lineage
and kinship which she feels with Bessie.
Just as sight is crucial to Bessie and Ma, and Ruby and
Bessie, it is an important and viable link between Williams and
Bessie. In two poems, Williams speaks about and to photos of
Bessie, assessing and interpreting Bessie's life and her own. The
first poem, "Bessie on my wall," is also the first poem in the
section "Regular Reefer." It explains the section's purpose and
focus, including why and how the section exists:
39. Bessie on my wall: the thick triangular
nose wedged
in the deep brown
face nostrils
flared on a last
Bessie singing
just behind the beat
that sweet sweet
voice throwing
its light one me (39)
Here, Williams is as profoundly affected by Bessie's photo as
Bessie was by Ma's presence. The first stanza is selectively
descriptive. It emphasizes Bessie's African features, her "thick
triangular nose" and her "deep brown / face." Bessie's color, as
discussed, is an important aspect of her life and music,
particularly to Williams. The last two lines, in fact, directly
connect to Bessie's music. In stanza two, Williams animates the
114
photo by imagining Bessie's style of singing: "just behind the
beat." And, finally, the concluding three lines, obviously,
describe Williams's response to Bessie and Bessie's music.
Williams transforms her "sweet sweet voice" into "light" and
perception. The "light" is the poetry of "Regular Reefer." In
this case, the photo is only a small, symbolic representation of
Williams's love and appreciation for Bessie.
The other poem about a photo of Bessie is more analytical.
"From a picture taken at the start of her career" begins with a
description of Bessie holding pearls in "long fingered hands . . .
close / to the breast." The remainder of the poem is
interpretive, not merely descriptive:
the strength to
break the strand
a smile to
break the heart
and the lines
that bracket
the long lip's
end.
this is
no yearbook
pose.
her pearls
were the last
jewels she sold. (45)
"Strength" (line 1) means more than physical strength in Bessie's
hands; it also connotes her spiritual strength as seen in the
following two lines. The "smile to / break the heart" reiterates
Bessie's charisma and charm. The next four lines echo Bessie's
words about the "lines" on Ma Rainey's face. Williams reads these
115
lines as Bessie read Ma's. Consequently, the last six lines are
interpretive. Williams sees Bessie's holding on to her pearls as
a sign of ownership and pleasure. This fact, in turn, makes the
last few lines poignant.
Having studied Bessie's photos and her biographies, Williams
poetically recontructs Bessie's life, which indicates a high
valorization of Bessie, just as it shows Williams's identification
with Bessie. More particularly, because of that sense of kinship,
Williams considers another angle to Bessie's life as a black
woman. In one of the most complex poems, "I Want Aretha to Set
This to Music,* * Williams's relationship and identification with
Bessie is so close and intense as to equal a fusion with her.
That is, Williams perceives similarities in her life and Bessie's
and extrapolates from her life to Bessie's.
In the first stanza, Williams again speaks to Bessie,
perhaps via a photograph. The stanza reiterates two motifs of the
section, but from a different angle:
I surprise girlhood
in your face; I know
my own, have been a
prisoner of my own
dark skin and fleshy
lips, walked that same high
butty strut despite
all this; rejected
the mask my mother
wore so stolidly
through womanhood and
wear it now myself (39)
116
Again, as Bessie saw herself in Ma Rainey, Williams sees herself
in Bessie. The phrase "surprise girlhood" suggests an accidental
discovery; the succeeding lines imply that Williams sees
"girlhood" in Bessie's face as she sees it in her own: hidden or
suppressed, but nonetheless there.
Lines 3-9 repeat the two motifs of (Bessie's) dark skin and
her walk, but with a twist. To be a "prisoner" of dark skin
connotes societal prejudices. Similarly, that "high butty strut"
implies defiance, in spite of prejudices. Williams identifies
with and shares Bessie's "dark skin" and her defiant attitude.
Lines 8-12 identify a specific likeness in the "masks" worn by
Williams's mother, Bessie, and Williams herself, implying an
obvious "family resemblance."
The last two stanzas explore and question the meaning of
that mask for Bessie, even as Williams herself remains "masked,"
stylistically, in the poem. (Her words are convuluted and
cryptic, unlike the direct and open statements of the preceding
voices.):
I see the mask, sense
the girl and woman
you became, wonder
if mask and woman
are one, if pain is
the sum of all your
knowing, victim the only game you learned.
Old and in pain and
bearing up bearing up
and hurt and age These
are the signs of our
117
womanhood but I'll
make book Bessie did
more than just endure. (53)
First, that Williams ean "sense" Bessie's life heightens their
kinship, and that "sense” also informs Williams's speculations and
projections. Lines 4-8, for instance, suggest that both she and
Bessie, as dark skinned black women, were unnecessarily victimized
and therefore in pain. Hence, a "mask" is required to render them
less vulnerable. The final stanzas verify this interpretation.
"Bearing up" suggests Clifton's "pushing" but with greater effort
and weariness. "Our womanhood" (lines 12-13) suggests a special
sisterhood between Bessie and Williams and, possibly, a similar
bond among all black women. Still, the poem ends on a note of
triumph: "But I'll make book Bessie did / more than just endure"
translates as "I'll bet on it." And since Williams, from the
evidence of these poems, more than "endured," Bessie did also. To
further emphasize that point, a bass cleft note follows this poem,
then "one-sided bed blues." At least two of the poem's stanzas,
slightly altered, appeared in The Peacock Poems. Now, absorbed
into Bessie's life/song, they further support the idea that Bessie
did "more than endure," since she lives in her own music, as well
as in Williams's songs and poems. And if Aretha Franklin did set
this poem to music, as the title requests, both Williams and
Bessie would attain a different kind of immortality, due to
Aretha's unique singing style.
118
Both in "Regular Reefer" and "Any Woman's Blues," Williams
responds to Bessie like another blues singer, identifying with
both Bessie's lifestyle and lyrics. Bessie informs both her style
and content, her phrasing and creativity. Bessie is at once a
creative role model and an inspiration. Linda Hopkins's words
apply equally to Williams: "I ain't Bessie, but / it's a whole lot
of Bessie in me." There is so much of Bessie in Williams that she
identifies, in the last poem in the section, with Bessie's death.
This poem, "down torrey pines road" (64-5), simultaneously
describes a highway in California and the one in Clarksdale,
Mississippi, where Bessie was fatally injured when her ear drove
£
into a parked truck. The poem conflates and fuses the two
highways, states, and women, as the poem's diction parallels a
"road" - winding and circuitous. For Williams, this highway is
something like Mississippi
that stretch of highway
outside Coahoma close by
Clarksdale and the Jim
Crow ward in the hospital
that used to be there. (65)
In the next stanza, she defiantly "dares" the curves to show her
"the / rear-end of some truck." No truck appears, and as the poem
ends, she comes out of her trance, somewhat: "This is not / the
road to Clarksdale. I say / over and over / what my name is not"
(65). This conclusion implies that she repeats Bessie's name over
and over, like a chant or invocation. Hence, Bessie's name
119
lingers and is sustained, the last note of the poem, and of the
section.
"Regular Reefer" is poetic proof that Williams totally
immersed herself in Bessie Smith, from biographies to her blues.
Only such a complete and comprehensive approach could produce this
poetry. It also attests to Williams's identification with Bessie's
achievements, joys, and sorrows as a black woman. Williams
reveres, celebrates, and maintains Bessie's existence. Her tribute
to Bessie is also a tribute to black female culture.
i
* * *
In most of her prose, particularly the non-fiction, Williams
takes care to emphasize her concern, generally, with both black
males and black women.^ Her cultural nationalism, however, is
more specific in her poetry. Both The Peacock Poems and Some One
Sweet Angel Chile bear out the prefacing epigram; but in both
books, the blues is a "ritualized" way for her to talk about black
women - most noticeably herself and Bessie Smith. Her use of
blues as "ritual" appears in her structuring of "Any Woman's
Blues" and "Regular Reefer." There are actually only three blues
in each section, but they are the centripetal force for the poems.
The blues enabled Williams to find a viable persona for her poetic
autobiography as well as to find several authentic personas to re
create the story of the "Empress of the Blues."
120
The blues are a ritual which facilitates Williams's "self-
discovery" as a black female poet. Yet, ironically, when asked if
being black and female influenced her perspective as a writer,
Williams downplayed these factors: "I don't think I keep my being
black and female self-consciously in mind. I just assume that
whatever I write comes from that perspective" (Tate, Black Women
Writers 207). But, her being black and female seems to have
consciously dictated her choice of style and subject matter in
both her books of poetry.
That is, in both books, Williams consciously structures and
shapes her material. It can not be accidental that the males
(except her son) in The Peacock Poems are unnamed and anonymous
nor that the book focuses primarily on romantic love from the
perspective of a black working class woman. Additionally,
Williams had to deliberately and consciously emphasize an almost
"raw" vernacular style in "Any Woman's Blues" to emphasize the
blues mode. Then too, she reveals, through subject matter and
style in "Regular Reefer," that she selected Bessie, studied
Bessie, then shaped her material accordingly. It even seems
feasible to say that a part of Bessie's attraction for Williams
was her being a black (not high yaller) woman. But even in her
first short story, and in her comments about its genesis, Williams
negates her later statement. Alice Walker's comments about her
own writings apply to Williams as well:
. * . in my own work I write not only what I want to read -
understanding fully and indelibly that if I don't do it no
one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to
my satisfaction - I write all the things I should have been
able to read.
("Saving the Life" 13)
And what Sherley Anne Williams wanted to read was and is works
about working class black women's culture and reality. That most
definitely is what she writes.
122
Notes
^Williams's name and critical works appear in numerous
scholarly books and journals. She is on intimate terms or
acquainted with major African and Afro-American critics and
writers. Her poetry and fiction are well-known in both black and
white literary and academic circles. Yet, as of this writing,
there is not one scholarly essay devoted to her poetry.
2
The novel in progress, tentatively called Wanted, is
scheduled to be published in January, 1986 (William Morrow).
Based on her short story "Meditations on History," about a runaway
slave named Odessa, the novel continues Odessa's tale. Odessa's
could easily be one of the stories Williams wanted to read when
she was a young girl.
3
Three of Bessie's biographies are Paul Oliver's Kings of
Jazz: Bessie Smith (1959; New Yorks A.S. Barnes, 1961), Carman
Moore's Somebody's Angel Chile: The Story of Besssie Smith (New
Yorks T.Y. Crowell, 1969), and Chris Albertson's Bessie: A
Biography (New York: Scarborough, 1982). Williams seems to have
studied all these works, as well as assorted others.
My primary sources for this background material are
Albertson's Bessie: A Biography, and his booklet, "Bessie Smith:
Biography and Notes on the Music" (Alexandria, Virginia: Time Life
Records, 1982) which accompanies a three record reissue of
Bessie's songs. The information about Bessie's mesmeric walk
comes from Albertson's booklet, p.14.
^The lyrics of "Reckless Blues" were obstensibly written (or
at least, copyrighted) by Bessie, according to Albertson. What
Bessie sings, however, is "I ain't good looking / but I'm
somebody's angel chile."
6While riding to Clarksdale, Miss., on Sept.26, 1937,
Bessie's car crashed into a truck parked on the side of the
curving road. Bessie's right arm was almost severed at the elbow,
and she had serious internal injuries. She died from loss of
blood at the "Jim Crow" hospital in Clarksdale, creating
controversy over whether or not she could have been saved if taken
to the nearer white hospital (Albertson, Bessie: A Biography 214—
224) .
^In fact, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-
Black Literature (New York: Dial, 1972) is a critical study of
123
only male writers. This book shows that Williams was affected by
the sixties" tendency to aggrandize black males while slighting or
making "second class citizens" of black women. In keeping with
changing times, however, Williams recently published a "feminist”
essay: "Poppa Dick and Sister Woman: Reflections on Women in the
Fiction of Richard Wright" (in American Novelists Revisited:
Essays in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Fritz Fleischmann. Boston: G.K.
Hall, 1982. 394-415).
124
Chapter Four: June Jordan's Black Feminist Satire
You could probably characterize my worldview as apocalyptic
- or, let's just say that I believe, as Aretha sings the
song, A CHANGE IS GONNA COME . . . And so I continue: a
Black woman who would be an agent for change, an active
member of the hoped for apocalypse.
- June Jordan
**************
Of the four writers being discussed here, June Jordan is
most influenced by the Black Arts Movement ideology. Jordan's
emphasis on "apocalypse" recalls the importance of "revolutionary"
art. On the other hand, her political activism, in her life and
in her writing, is similar to Frances Watkins Harper's, especially
in her commitment to change. Like Harper, Jordan rarely
bifurcates her concerns with both sexual and racial justice.
These concerns, like Williams's interest in black literature, stem
partly from Jordan's early environment.
She was born in 1936 in Harlem and raised in Bedford-
Stuyvesant. Although poor, Jordan's parents sent her to private
schools, and the contrast of that white world with her black one
raised questions which she sought to answer (Jordan "Notes" 98).
She later attended Barnard, hoping to make a connection between
these two "apparently unrelated worlds," but that quest was in
vain: "Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feelings of pain
and confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street,
my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter
125
the political and economic realities underlying our Black
condition in America" ("Notes" 100). Yet, ironically, while at
Barnard, Jordan met and later married a white male. By 1960,
Jordan was "a very young twenty-four-year-old, interracially
married, the mother of a two-year-old son, and living in the
housing project in Queens" ("One Way" xv). Four years later,
Jordan was considerably older, wiser, and more politicized.
In 1964, Jordan was asked to write an investigative essay
about the possibility of there being a "long hot summer" in Harlem
that year. She concluded that there had to be such a summer, but
her findings were orverruled. Jordan was not only correct, but an
unwilling eyewitness of the riot and a week later, her husband
left her ("Letter" 23). Writing and more political activism
became her recourse from multi-levelled despair, anger and
frustration. Six years later, Jordan had completed her first book
of poems, Some Changes (Dutton, 1971), two poetry anthologies, and
a novel, among other writings. However, the events of 1964 were
not the catalysts for her writing career - she had been a writer
for almost all her life.
As a very young child, Jordan was impressed with the power
of the word as depicted in Genesis: "the idea that the word could
represent and then deliver into reality what the word symbolized -
this possibility of language, of writing, seemed to me magical and
basic and irresistible" ("Foreword" x)« Before Jordan was ten, she
126“
had read Shakespeare, Poe, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others,
as she tried to define a way to be a "great poet" - one of her
childhood ambitions ("Thinking About My Poetry" 127). Jordan soon
outgrew some of her early models because they were either archaic
or irrelevant, but her concern with learning and polishing her
craft was a lasting one.
Her essay "Thinking About My Poetry" (1977) details her
search for excellence, as well as her eclectic tastes in authors
as inspiration and as role models. Near the end of the sixties,
for example, in her concern with being accesible to her audience,
she tried to aim for a "collective voice," but later decided that
such an approach was "deceitful" and that she should attend more
to her own individual voice, "without pretending to be more that
the one Black woman poet I am" ("Thinking About My Poetry" 126).
Jordan's literary influences range from the children she taught,
to Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes, as well as many white
authors. Yet, her final (at that point) stage of development and
of influence was with women poets:
Toward the end of my twenties and continuing through my
thirties, the poetry of women, contemporary and past, became
fundamental to my spirit, and joined Black poetry as part of
the literature I was willing to respect and wanted to
incorporate into my being. Emily Dickinson, Jane Cooper,
Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Marge Piercy, Alice Walker,
Honor Moore are some of the women who have awakened me to
another dimension of love, and of struggle . . .
(particularly today's poetry as it issues from the embattled
lives of feminist poets and writers) . . .
("Thinking . . ." 129)
127
Jordan, who presently teaches English at SUNY Stonybrook,
has written and edited over fifteen books, including film scripts,
drama, and six books of poetry. Her work has been published in
periodicals from the New York Times and Essence to Partisan
Review. Some of her awards include a Rockefeller Grant in
Creative Writing, the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, and an
NEA grant. Jordan is, obviously, a mutli-talented person whose
interests and concerns influence her life and her writings on
every level. Yet, her poetry, like Williams's, has been neglected
by the critics. She prefaces her essay "Thinking About My Poetry"
with a comment about this neglect:
Things That I do in the Dark, my selected poems spanning
twenty years, was published in 1977. Only Freedomways and
the New York Times reviewed it; no other Black periodical,
and not a single feminist periodical acknowledged the book.
It was an unexpected silence that pushed me to further re
examine my assumptions of community, since at that time I
was a contributing editor for First World and Hoodoo (both
of them black jurnals) and Chrysalis (a feminist magazine).
I decided to pretend that somebody wanted to know how I came
to be a poet, and what I had in mind, poem by poem. (122)
Things That I do in the Dark was Jordan's third book of poetry.
Her first two, Some Changes (1971) and New Poems: Poems of Exile
and Return (1974) were almost as neglected, except for a few
reviews. Although there is hardly any justification for such
neglect of a writer-political activist of Jordan's statue, part of
the neglect might be due to the kinds of poetry Jordan writes.^
Jordan's poetry (and prose), reflecting her political
commitments, are "issue-oriented." The poetry lampoons
128
politicians such as George Washington, Richard Nixon and more
contemporary figures; more importantly, she also writes poems of
praise and solidarity with Fannie Lou Hammer, Castro, and other
Third World people and countries. In either case, a primary
motivating factor is her desire for a more human, humane, healthy
and wholistic life for all people. The poetry reflects Jordan's
value system and identification with the Third World, Black
Nationalist, and Women's Movements. Moreover, Jordan's desire for
change emerges in the form of satire - particularly in poems which
deal with the latter two movements which, to some people, are
antithetical or contradictory. Not, however, to Jordan.
Jordan says that being a feminist means as much to her as
being black: "I must undertake to love myself and to respect
myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-
respect" ("Where Is the Love" 142). Perhaps because this was
initially a statement made at a Black Writer's Conference, where
Jordan did not want to further alienate the partly hostile
2
audience, the definition is rather mild and conciliatory. Her
satirical feminist poetry is much stronger. In the poems to be
discussed here, Jordan's feminism includes love, but it also
involves a strong, caustic criticism of those - from the racist-
sexist society to her own parents - who would deny humanity and
self-determination to her and other women. The poems reflect her
attitude that "as a Black feminist, I cannot be expected to
129
respect what somebody else calls self-love if that concept of
self-love requires my suicide to any degree" ("Where Is the Love"
143). In her poetry, this understated warning is a major source
of content and a primary determinant of her style. In mode, this
poetry is predominantly satirical, featuring such traits as varied
tones (irony, sarcasm, nonchalance), reversals, incremental
repetition, and signifying, all frequently presented via
colloquial (urban) black English. Moreover, the satire is
governed by a female and black perspective and value system, and
frequently presented through black-female personas. It is, in
fact, a kind of humor defined by one theorist as "feminist": "It
is a humor based on visions of change . . . The persistent
attitude that underlies feminist humor is the attitude of social
revolution - that is, we are ridiculing a social system that can
be, that must be, changed" (Gloria Kaufman, "Introduction" 13).
While this quotation applies to Jordan, her humor is also
particularly black, and peculiar, frequently, to black women. By
focusing on the system's absurdity, her humor challenges and
3
negates America's racist and sexist practices. This humor is
based on a "common experience between the joke teller [satirist]
and the audience," which transforms "personal expression into
collective expression," thereby creating a sense of "particularity
and group identification" (Levine, Black Culture 359). The
130
perspective of a black feminist, then, could render absurd what
her oppressors see as supreme.
This perspective criticizes the system, and uses the
laughter as a form of self-defense and as an educational tool.
What can be laughed at can be ignored, challenged, dismissed, and
changed. (Clifton's advice to her daughters about how to deal
with white males is an example of this poetency of laughter.)
More importantly, Jordan's brand of satiric poetry forces her
would-be oppressors, or erstwhile enemies, to hear harsh truths -
to reconsider themselves, and their images. Much of Jordan's
poetry could be placed in a sub—genre of satirical black
4
literature which includes a developing one of black women's
feminist satire."* Hence, this chapter focuses on Jordan's style
and perspective as revealed in the satirical, feminist poems from
her two books of poetry, Things That I Do in the Dark (1977;
Boston: Beacon Press, 1981) and Passion: New Poems 1977-1980
(Beacon, 1981).**
The source of Jordan's feminist satire is a black female
cultural and political basis, whether the poems are about issues
which affect all women or those which particularly apply to black
and other Third World women. In either case, Jordan finds a tone,
persona, and style to reflect her contempt for systems which
f
"demand her suicide." Of the issues pertaining to all women,
131
Jordan addresses general misogyny, the dehumanization of women as
mindless sex objects, and - relatedly - the issue of rape.
Misogyny - or male hatred of women - is an attitudinal
disease based on sexual, biological differences. Although that
attitude has been repeatedly challenged and debated, it and its
derivative, sexism, has been especially under attack from
feminists in recent years. June Jordan contributes to this attack
from several angles in the poem "SOME PEOPLE," a statement that
questions the absurdity of misogyny. Short and concise, its
impact depends on intended reader responses. The speaker assumes
that everyone is familiar with the biologically biased concept
which her words negate:
Some people despise me be
cause I have a Venus mound
and not a penis
Does that sound
right
to you? (Things . . . 195)
Here, the speaker flippantly addresses the presumption of
biological inequity, the basis of an elaborate network of sexist
beliefs, practices, and institutions (all alluded to in stanza
one). In case the silliness and wrongness of such inequity is
vague, stanza two clarifies and reiterates the point.
There, "sound" has a double meaning. First, the belief is
illogical, and second, "Venus," although rhyming with "penis," is
aesthetically preferable - it sounds better. The second stanza
also challenges the reader not to agree with the implied negative
answer to her question. The stanza's structure, in fact, suggests
that "right" (line 5) is said with a pause before and after,
allowing for laughter at such a ridiculous notion. That
widespread belief, and the need to change it, generates other
poems on its more specific manifestations, one of which is that a
form of misogyny has been internalized by some women. That is,
certain women "hate" other women, although, in the process, they
devalue themselves. Jordan parodies this type of woman in "Memo:"
(Passion 82).
The first person narrator in "Memo:" is to feminism what
Anita Bryant was to gay rights. The narrator begins by ridiculing
a woman who has decided that it's okay to "spend time with other
women." The speaker wonders what that means: "Her mother? My
mother?" but proceeds to make herself- not the other woman, look
small and silly. She has always "despised" her woman friends, and
never let them become "intimates," because
. . .Why
should I? Men are the ones with the money and
the big way with waiters and the passkey
to excitement in strange places of real
danger and the power to make things happen
like babies or war . . . (Passion 82)
This woman's "honesty" is her downfall. Her words present her
value system and a "personality profile." She is quite "upfront"
about her dislike of women (line 1), suggesting she assumes
similar values in her listener, and that she is proud of despising
133
women. It is an understatement to say that the speaker is "male-
oriented." In the above lines though, the speaker literally
"hangs herself."
The woman seems simpleminded because of her non-stop manner
of speaking and what she says. Because men have money and know
(of all things) how to deal with waiters, she sees men as a means
to an end: power and "excitement." This woman likes how men "make
things happen" on any level, "like babies or war." It would never
occur to her that she could do any of these things alone or in
partnership with men. Nor would it occur to her to change
anything about herself. She concludes,
. . . They must be morons: women!
Don't you think?
1 guess you could say
I'm stuck in my ways
as
That Cosmopolitan Girl. (Passion 82)
The speaker says other (all?) women are "morons," but the poem's
ironic point, especially the last line, is that she is a moron.
This line re-informs the entire poem. A "Cosmopolitan Girl" is
obviously one who reads and lives by the magazine of the same name
- hence, her superficiality, pettiness, and self-hatred (which she
does not see, or sees as directed at other women). Such a woman
would, the poem says, (un)naturally think and talk in this manner.
Such a woman and the system which made her is also ridiculous.
In this poem and the others to be discussed, Jordan is a
first-rate "classical" saatirist, although, according to J.A.
Cuddon's sexist definition, Jordan ironically does not exist:
The satirist is thus a kind of self-appointed guardian of
standards, ideas and truth; of moral as well as aesthetic
value. He is a man (women satirists are very rare) who
takes it upon himself to correct, censure and ridicule the
follies and vices of society.
(A Dictionary of Literary Terms 599)
Cuddon's bias and ignorance aside, his definition applies to
Jordan, who as a black feminist satirist does "ridicule the
follies and vices of society," particularly those which are the
result of sexism and racism.
Society, for instance, generally condones women's oppression
as mindless sex objects, from billboards to accomplices in their
own rapes. In her committment to changej Jordan ridicules that
particular "vice." Just as she exposes the oppressive mentality
of a "cosmopolitan girl," she exposes a similar mentality in
males. Two poems ridicule the idea of "male territorality" as it
is verbally applied to women. In both poems, the men see the
narrator as simple, passive, and available, since she is in fairly
close proximity, "hey, Baby: You married?" presents a young black
male; "An Explanation Always Follows" deals with an older white
male.
"hey, Baby: You Married?" (Passion 20-21) features "Willie
at the Golden Grill," where he and the narrator talk above the
135
jukebox music. Young Willie tries to impress the woman with his
(grandiose to him) schemes and dreams. He is
planning "to
break into business here
in Saratoga
at the racetrack or
whatever"
at 25
he's got 5 years before a marriage
hits him although
it could happen to you sooner
than you plan . . . (20)
By simply repeating his words, the narrator corrects and censures
Willie. Whereas he sees his plans (lines 1-5) as impressive, the
narrator (and the reader, particularly any woman who's ever been
similarly accosted) sees them as naive, amorphous, and hilariously
improbable. Since the narrator only reports Willie's words, the
poem suggests that he talks nonstop about himself.
Meanwhile, they "do a slowdrool dance" as the woman notices
that Willie is "thin underneath the regulation blue / baseball cap
/ peaked carefully above the pretty eyes / and not much taller
than I am" (20). His small size and height emphasize his youth,
and the "regulation blue / baseball cap" suggests that,
emotionally, Willie is immature. As they dance, Willie shares his
expertise and worldly knowledge about the best disco and "best
Deejay in New York State!" where he happens to be the bouncer:
"Come up to THE RAFTERS
any Wednesday/Friday/Saturday night"
he says
"And"
136
he emphasizes quietly
"It'll be on me!" (21)
Again, the narrator, by merely reporting Willie's words, satirizes
him. Because of his youth, in fact, the narrator is kind - even
as she ridicules his stance. Although his "rap" or approach is
i
more ludicrous than seriously oppressive, it stems from a |
mentality which the narrator finds absurd. (The poem's title is,
after all, Willie's ultimate point, although un-stated in the
poem.)
That mentality is also responsible for the much more j
i
oppressive approach of the white male in "An Explanation Always
Follows" (Passion 26-27). Willie is, on one level, "cute." The ;
1
*
white male, on most levels, is quite unattractive, repulsive, and j
t
vulgar. These qualities are emphasized by the setting, and the !
narrator's thoughts and perceptions, juxtaposed with the male's
t
words and actions. In a transient but attractive travelers' ;
i
locale, the woman and the man are accidental breakfast companions. |
i
I
She is a sardonic observer and increasingly reluctant companion, j
describing how the "man with steep / European accent" eats: j
i
I
savoring the fruit he ;
does not masticate the morsel I
quite discreetly/I j
must avert my eyes or j
witness the entire process: tongue j
teeth and peach enmeshed I
degenerate (26) |
i
Apparently, the man chews with his mouth open, more than likely 1
I
with the accompanying noises. "Discreetly" suggests that since the !
137
man is so ill-mannered, the speaker must have manners for two.
Still, though, she sees enough to witness the entire "degenerate"
process.
The word "degenerate" means "come apart" but also "low,"
"base," "less than human." The word is an appropriate pivot from
the description of the man's eating habits to that of his
conversation which is more repulsive:
Now comes volunteer expatiation on alledgedly
famous porn districts in Germany
(The Reeperbahn in Hamburg
Brewer's yeast and potency
yesterday's sperm count) (26)
The words add verbal insult to visual injury, as suggested by the
terse words "volunteer expatiation" (reminiscent of Brooks). As
in "hey, Baby" the narrator ridicules the male by wryly reporting
his words. Then too, on his right hand, "only four of the five /
fingernails" are "apparently clean" (27). At last, the boor
notices the woman's uneasiness: " 'Why,' he questions me:'Don't
you want to be seduced?!' " (27).
Given the woman's perceptions of this man, "seduction" is
the farthest thing from her mind. Since the poem deliberately
juxtaposes her mind with his, at its conclusion, the woman and the
reader can only see the man's crude, insensitive stance as
ridiculous. This poem, like the preceding one, mocks the man's
sexist, oppressive assumptions. Although both males can be
laughed at, Jordan's points are serious. Such male attitudes
138
("eminent domain") in fact, lead to physical attack, rape, and
even death.
One reviewer says, "Irony is basic to Jordan's perceptions
of a violent, antiblack, antifemale culture. This irony is the
expressive vehicle of her outrage and sense of the absurd" (Joan
Larkin, "Women's Poetry" 78). This irony is particularly apparent
in Jordan's poems about rape. "Case in Point" in fact deals with
two specific aspects of "phallocracy": socially sanctioned
"silence" for women (meaning they have nothing of worth to say)
and rape. The poem's ironic, cynical tone matches the viciousness
of these two concepts. It begins with an observation from the
narrator's friend, who, based on her experiences, says, "there is
no silence / peculiar to the female." The narrator continues:
1 have decided I have something to say
about female silence: so to speak
these are my 2^ on the subj ect:
2 weeks ago I was raped for the second
time in my life the first occasion
being a whiteman and the most recent
situation being a blackman actually
head of the local NAACP (Passion 13)
These lines introduce the speaker and her purpose while providing
a context not only for female silence, but also for female
passivity, receptivity, acquiescience, and submission. The lines
also allude to the fact that many rape victims d<3 remain silent,
although more from self-protection than from lack of something to
say. Meanwhile, even as the lines sardonically give a background,
they foreground a cynical humor in "so to speak" and "my 2^ on the
139
subject." These phrases imply that when she speaks (on silence,
no less) her words will not be valued very much.
Lines 4-8 are sarcastically allusive. "Whiteman" connotes
the history of anonymous whites raping black women. On the other
hand, even an obstensibly reputable blackmale who is "head of the
local NAACP can embody a rapist's mentality. (The black male also
raises the ironic issue of "civil rights" for black people but not
for black women.) The remainder of the poem describes the second
rape:
Today is 2 weeks after the fact
of that man straddling
his knees either side of my chest
his hairy arm and powerful left hand
flat to the pillow while he rammed
what he described as his quote big dick
unquote into my mouth
and shouted out: "D'ya want to swallow
my big dick; well do ya?"
He was being rhetorical.
My silence was peculiar
to the female. (Passion 13)
The woman's detailed description vividly portrays not only
her attacker but the immediacy and experience of the attack as
well. In lines 2-6, the words "straddling," "powerful," "forcing,"
and "rammed" parallel the rapist's act. Despite this brutality,
however, the woman's sense of humor and survival is intact, as
seen by her "quote big dick / unquote." The direct quotation
strengthens the observation in the last three lines: with her
mouth choked and throat gagged by this rhetoric-spouting penis,
then her silence is peculiarly female. Just as the poem's
140
beginning has a parallel context, so does its ending. That is,
female "silence" is due to male-originated physical, spiritual,
and mental gagging. On the other hand, males sometimes have
reasons for raping women. " "The Rationale" or "She Drove Me
Crazy" " (Passion 11-12) presents some of these reasons.
In " "The Rationale"," the narrator is a black male who
defends himself - and condemns himself - with his explanation. To
begin with, the circumstances were conducive to his crime:
"Well, your Honor,
j it was late. Three a.m. Nobody on the streets.
| And I was movin along, . . .
j suddenly there she was
! alone
j by herself
gleamin under the street lamp. 1 thought
J "Whoa. Check this out? Hey, Baby! What's
; happenin?," I said under my breath. (Passion 11)
The man describes an all too typical situation: a woman alone
i anytime, especially late at night, is perceived as available.
j Given all this, the man turns predator. He tries to "walk past
| but she was / lookin so good." Besides that,
the beautiful lines of her
body sittin out there
alone
by herself
made me wild. I went wild. But
I looked all around to see where her
owner/where the man in her life could
probably be. (Passion 11)
These are standard excuses for urban male guerilla warfare against
f women. The victim is responsible for the crime; since she was
! "lookin / so good" and beautiful, he had no choice but to go
141
"wild.” Lines 6-8, to the narrator, are perfectly logical, but to
the reader, totally illogical. To him, the woman has no rights,
except the primitive territorial rights extended to her by a male
Howner." To a woman, this concept is both ludicrous and
infuriating.
Then, the narrator loses control: "I couldn't resist. / What
did she expect? She looked foreign / besides and small and sexy."
She was "asking for it," to this man. Yet, he is most ridiculous,
as he and the poem climax:
I forced her open and I entered
her body and I poured myself
into her
pumpin for all I was worth
wild as I was
when you caught me
third time apprehended
for the theft of a Porehe." (12)
In this poem, Jordan sustains an extended metaphor. Most readers
of the poem think - as they are meant to - that the man is
describing a woman. Jordan's satire, in this case, successfully
defamiliarizes a common situation because of how she controls and
sustains the male's words: his excuses, his expletives ("hey,
Baby"), his penultimate behavior are all familiar. And because
the man is so true to life, it in possible to laugh, but the joke
is partly on the reader. The conclusion is an effective reversal,
as well as a logical one. That is, since males designate many
inanimate objects and abstract qualities as female (from ships to
142
hurricanes and muses), it is conceivable that this theft is sex-
related. In other words, the mentality that leads to stealing a
Porche is the same one which could lead to rape and vice versa.
II
Jordan relies most heavily on a black-female cultural basis
in the poems specifically about and by black women. This basis
informs her feminist stance and the various satirical voices in
the poems as she presents viewpoints which have been censored,
suppressed, or denied. As she says, after she spoke out against
the invasion of Lebanon, she realized she'd encountered "the
ultimate taboo. It wasn't that my viewpoint was different - I
wasn't supposed to have one" ("Feminism" 17). As both a black
person and a woman, Jordan implies, this society says she has no
opinions about anything, including her own existence. Yet, as can
be seen in the poems to be discussed for the remainder of this
chapter, Jordan definitely has opinions. Additionally, she speaks
or gives voice to opinions shared by many black women.
Each of the following poems presents a black female persona
whose primary rhetorical devices are juxtaposition and reversal,
nonchalance, irony and sarcasm. The style matches the speaker,
and each speaker, concerned principally with self-definition, is a
feminist. That is, each of these women has a positive, self-
assertive, healthy definition of herself and her priorities. She
also has the courage and ability to insist that her voice be
143
heard, respected, and adhered to. And, in each case, the speakers
in these poems employ some form of satire - including signifying
and "tonal semantics."
Signifying has been defined as an "indirect insult."^ Used
purely for entertainment or as a form of enlightenment, signifying
can also be a directed insult, geared toward a definite reaction
in the listener/reader. Geneva Smitherman's term "tonal
semantics" is an important part of signifying, and of Jordan's
poetic style. According to Smitherman, "tonal semantics" has to
do with the "use of voice rhythm and vocal inflection to convey
meaning in black communication" (Talkin and Testifyin 134). She
adds that tone in black English is "highly functional":
That is, since there is an interaction between what is
said, how it is said, who says it, to whom it is said, and
the sociocultural context in which it is said, listeners are
affected by all this information - not just the "pure" words
- in interpreting a speaker's utterance. (136)
In the following poems, tonal semantics is one of the most
important elements as the personas address self-definition via
whites, via black males, and, finally, in terms of black women's
rights or the negation of all oppressions.
"What Would I do White?" (dated 1966), shows a definite
influence of the Black Arts Movement, particularly in its tone of
contempt for white people. However, while other poems in a
similar vein lean on bombast and expletive, Jordan's depends on
ridicule and hyperbole. The poem's narrator answers the title's
i
theoretical question in terms of an imaginary, exaggerated
depiction of her life as an upper-class white woman. The narrator
posits that poor children would look at her "like foreign /
writing in the sky" (Things . . . 103). She would be just that
distant, strange, and alien. In addition, she says, "I would
forget my furs on any chair / I would ignore the doormen at the
knob / the social Sanskrit of my life." The hyperbolic, sarcastic
tone ridicules the theoretical, symbolic white woman, and
capitalism (which the woman symbolizes). She continues to say
that she would "inspire big returns to equity / the equity of
capital I am / accustomed / to accept / like wintertime" (103-
104). The black woman, then, envisions this white woman as the
inspiration for capitalism; hence, she is quite cold and
unfeeling, "like wintertime." Finally, the black woman concludes
that if she were white, she "would do nothing. / That would be
enough" (104).
The narrator's tone, diction, and attitude indicate clearly
that she has n<3 desire to be this white woman, since that woman's
existence is ridiculously devoid of any real meaning. The poem
reveals that, all things considered, this black woman prefers her
reality. The narrator in "Memo to Daniel Pretty Moynihan" does
too. She reveals this perspective in a particularly virulent form
of signifying addressed directly to Moynihan, who made the mistake
of presuming to speak on black folk, during the black sixties,
145
from his white male bias and limited perspective. Worse still, he
unnecessarily "put his mouth" on black women. As Paula Giddings
puts it, Moynihan further complicated issues about black people in
the "misogynous late sixties and seventies":
The Labor Department document entitled "The Negro Family:
The Case for National Action," published in 1965 . . .
better known as 'The Moynihan report' (after its author,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan), perpetuated the misconception that
the success of Black women, not racism, was responsible for
the problems of Blacks.
(When and Where I Enter 324)
Moynihan's "Black Matriarchy" theory generated as much controversy
as did William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. Several
people agreed with Giddings's analysis that the report was "not so
much racist as it was sexist" (329). Jordan's position is evident
in her poem "Memo » * . ," a rebuttal of Moynihan's perspective:
You done what you done
I do what I can
Don't you liberate me
from my black female pathology
I been working off my knees
I been drinking what I please
And when I vine
I know I'm fine
I mean
All right for each and every Friday night
But you been screwing me so long
I got a idea something's wrong
with you.
I got a simple proposition
You takeover my position
Clean your own house, babyface.
146
l
1 (Things . . . 117)
The speaker here is a black working-class woman and one of
! those obstensible "matriarchs." Her use of black English enhances
I
: her defiant tone, as she juxtaposes her reality with Moynihan's.
i
j What he "done" means nothing to her, since she does the best she
! can. Consequently, she rejects his brand of "liberation" (line 3),
as well as his concept of pathology.
t
• In lines 5-10, the woman "gets Moynihan told," as she
‘ negates his theory. Her situation has improved since she works
off her knees, whereas previously, she worked on her knees,
<
! scrubbing floors, etc. Her use of rhyming black English
j emphasizes her signifying, especially in lines 7-8. Then, the
| woman examines Moynihan, with her own theory: "something's wrong
! with you" and, by extrapolation, with others like him. In the
last three lines, the woman implies that as he takes over her
j position, of being his own maid, she will take over his: of
I redefining and speaking for herself, since she is better qualified
i for this job. The last line is particularly loaded, as it implies
' ■ that his house, or family, is sick, not hers. The man and his
I
| theory are rendered ridiculous through both direct and indirect
I
signifying, from the use of "pretty" in the poem's title to the
use of "babyface" in the last line.
That "Memo . . ."is admittedly an "occasional poem" hardly
detracts from its relevance and appeal to black folk who do not
suffer from "historical amnesia." Similarly, Jordan's poems of
black feminist self-definition via black males are eternally
applicable and timeless, since the issues are chameleon, but
reoccuring. Just as the autonomy of black people is an alien and
threatening concept to certain whites, the realities and autonomy
of black women are either insensitively overlooked or perceived as
threatening by some black males, as seen in the following two
poems.
"From The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem #1"
presents the issue of black female-male relationships. The poem's
form - black dramatic monologue - appropriately reinforces the
concept of "talking back." Miss Jones's words reveal, in her
juxtaposition of romance and reality, a strong sense of self and a
sense of humor. The poem begins with romance and fantasy:
Well I wanted to braid my hair
bathe and bedeck my
self so fine
so fully aforethought for
your pleasure
see: (Things . . . 39)
The narrator's tone undercuts the typically serious situation of a
woman waiting for her male lover. The alliteration in the first
five lines humorously embroiders the language: its fanciness
reflects the woman's intentions. Her hyperbolic style peaks in
the next lines - she wants to do all this in anticipation of a
theoretical phone call:
THEN
I wanted to pickup the phone
and find you asking me
if I might possibly be alone
some night
(so I could answer cool
as the jewels I would wear
on bareskin for your
digmedaddy delectation:)
"WHEN
you comin ova?" (39)
O
The style and tone here are a form of black urban English
elaborately describing the man's ritualized question (lines 3 & 4)
and the speaker's pose or front (lines 5-8). Although quite
excited, she is prepared to be "cool" or to play it off; yet,
there is nothing detached or cool about her enthusiastic response
in the last two lines.
The next section is realistic in contrast to the fantasy of
the first one, as the speaker addresses this man and, through him,
a particular situation:
But
I had to remember to write down
margarine on the list
and shoepolish and a can of
sliced pineapple in casea company
and a quarta skim milk cause Teresa's
gainin weight and don' nobody groove on
that much
girl (40)
"But" introduces a devastating catalogue of responsibilities and
chores. The detailed grocery list and explanations overwhelm the
reader (especially if the reader is female) just as her activity
overwhelms the narrator. Among other things, she has to sort and
wash clothes, then watch the faulty washing machine, and meanwhile
149
take care of her sick, feverish son, who requires constant
attention and orange juice, both of which she is running out of.
This catalogue annihilates the earlier fantasy: the woman has no
time for herself, much less for any man's "delectation."
The main problem and the catalyst for her speech is the man
who has "temporarily shownup with a thing / you says a poem and
you / call it / 'Will the Real Miss Black America Standup' " to
which she replies, "Well / I can't use it." The man adds insult
to injury, as she makes plain in the concluding lines:
and the very next bodacious Blackman
call me queen
because my life ain shit
• • •
I'm gone scream him out my house
be
cause what I wanted was
to braid my hair / bathe and bedeck my
self so fully be
cause what I wanted was
your love
not pity
be
cause what I wanted was
your love
your love (41)
Lines 1-8 reject the glorification (popularized by black men
during the sixties) of black women as amorphous, generalized
"queens," while their less queenly, specific day-to-day realities
were overlooked. As the poem's ending shows, this woman knows the
difference between fantasy and reality, and pity and love.
Finally, Miss Jones represents many black women. That is, she is
single (Miss), ordinary (Jones) and interested in real love
(Valentine). The stance she takes in the poem, then, is a
realistic one which is meant to apply to other black women in
similar situations.
Angelene Jamison, writing about Carolyn Rodgers's poetry,
makes an observation which is particularly relevant here. In this
poem and others, Jordan, like Rodgers, "is able to re-create and
reinterpret a wide range of experiences of Black women from a
Black woman's perspective. There are no earth mothers or African
queens or matriarchs . . . instead there are real women struggling
to make sense of their past and present" ("Imagery in the Woman
Poems" 378-379). Miss Valentine Jones, for instance, struggles to
make sense of her life, as well of her black male lover. Her
struggle renders his poetry and stance ludicrous. Similarly, the
poem "1978" deals with another, more loaded issue for black women
and men, that of feminism.
In the late sixties and seventies, feminism was considered
"divisive" to the black race. After all, one argument went, only
white males and black women were "free" anyway. To some black
folk, feminism was a "white girl's thang" and to others, a petty
bourgeois movement. Finally, many black males saw the feminist
movement as a personal threat. Jordan matter-of-factly addresses
such a male in "1978."
As shown above, two of Jordan's main stylistic devices are
juxtaposition and reversal. Both devices are used in "1978," a
151
poem that deals with events which apparently occurred in the year
1978. It consists of four stanzas with parallel content and
structure, and it is written in a fast-paced style which enhances
the final juxtaposition in stanza four. Each stanza describes a
woman who is connected to the speaker, and thereby to each other,
by her similar ideas, experiences, and subsequent empathy for each
other:
The woman who left the house this morning
more or less on her way to Mississippi more
or less through Virginia in order to pack and get back to
New York on her way to the People's Republic of
Angola
was stopped in Washington D.C. by an undercover
agent for the C.I.A. offering to help her with
her bags (Passion 24)
Besides giving information, such as that the woman is a freedom
fighter under surveillance, the language contributes to a sense of
activity. From lines 1-5, the woman is "more or less"
circuituously moving through four places to reach her ultimate
goal, Angola. The abrupt one word line "was" stops the poem's
movement, just as the C.I.A. stops the woman. Yet, the narrator
is obviously still in touch with her, as she is with a similar
woman in stanza two:
The woman who came to the house tonight with
her boy baby Che on the way to Philly
for a showdown with Customs that wants to deport both
of them to Venezuela because Che's
father months ago ducked out
entirely
she
just offered to make me chickweed tea
for my runny nose cold (Passion 24)
152
Again, the language parallels the woman's movements. (And,
in both cases, the action begins and ends at the narrator's
house.) This woman is still capable of empathy for her friend, as
seen in the last three lines, although she is harassed by serious
problems (desertion, deportation, a boy baby). The woman's offer
of tea shows her concern for the narrator, just as her being at
the narrator's house at all shows the narrator's concern for her.
Each stanza emphasizes this mutual nurturance and connectedness in
a way that almost negates the odds against the women. This
bonding and friendship is most ironically presented in the last
stanza:
"I have loved you assiduously" Trazana Beverly's voice
advertising for colored girls cracks me up on my
way to the airport / assiduously on the fm (yeah Zakil) on
my way to pick up Louise wiped out by Cambridge where
she proved the muse is female on
paper
and
all this stuff going on and my lover wants
to know
am I a feminist or what and what does the question
mean I mean
or what? (25)
The narrator herself is in motion, as she enjoys Shange's success
while responding to Louise's triumph and exhaustion (lines 1-6).
As before, the stanza pivots on a single word, "and," to introduce
a final juxtaposition and the ultimate point of the poem. These
lines suggest that "all this stuff" should prevent the lover's
inane and superfluous question. Coming when it does, the question
and the lover appear insensitive and trivial. The women in the
153
poem, for example, are all "political activists," from the Pan-
Africanist to Shange, the feminist playwright, and, most
especially, the narrator herself. Finally, the poem's content,
pace, and language suggest the "women's movement," and there is no
doubt that the reader is meant to sympathize with the women and
the movement, and not with the insecure, insensitive lover.
In an insightful article, "Changing Concepts of the Black
Woman" (1973), Frances Foster contends that black women writers
are responsible for a "new psychological image" of black women:
"There are certain subjects which are primarily directed to other
Black women. These include attempts to establish an identity as
woman and to present more honest evaluations of the Black woman's
place in society" (448). Among other techniques, these writers
create protagonists who are a "composite of many women" and they
frequently utilize an "archetypal voice" wherein a personal
experience is also a "shared" or collective one. All of these
observations are applicable to Jordan's satiric feminist poetry.
For instance, both "1978" and "Miss Valentine Jones . . ." address
issues "primarily directed to other Black women." Since the
experiences in both poems are applicable to many black women, the
voice can be seen as "collective." However, Jordan most fits
Foster's description in her poems which defy or negate all
external oppressive definitions of Black women. Since the poems
focus on defining black women's multifaceted rights on their
154
terms, they are particularly satiric, "outraged," and defiant, as
seen in the last two poems to be discussed. "A Short Note to My
Very Critical and / Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades" deals with
self-definition on a different, broader scale than does "1978."
In this poem, the woman presents a catalogue of "charges"
made against her by her friends and comrades. For example, they
said she was "too light," then, "too dark." On the other hand,
she is accused of being "too different" and again, "too much the
same." The charges stem from society's need to categorize people
- particularly black women. This process is sometimes painful and
frustrating but Jordan's style makes it mainly absurd. The poem's
incremental repetition and variations speed up the pace while
deliberately juxtaposing contradictory charges which undercut what
"they" say:
Then they said I was too young
Then they said I was too old
Then they said I was too much a nationalist
Then they said I was too silly
Then they said I was too angry
Then they said I was too idealistic
Then they said I was too confusing altogether:
Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant
or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight
or are you gay?
And I said, Hey! It's not about my mind. (Passion 78)
Lines 7-9 imply that the woman's politics, her diet, and her
sexual preference are all very serious issues of equal importance.
The narrator's tone (including the internal rhyme scheme in line
9) implies that they are all silly. The ironic reversal in the
155
last line turns the tables. Categorization is neither an issue
nor a problem for the speaker, as she self-confidently rejects
others' definitions. The narrator in "Poem About My Rights"
(Passion 86-89) also negates external definitions on a much
broader scale.
One reviewer says "Poem About My Rights" is perhaps "the
most passionate" poem in Passion because it "traces the outrage of
racism and sexism by connecting rape and apartheid to legal
definitions that defend these injustices perpetrated by political
and economic control" (Melba Joyce Boyd, "The Whitman Awakening"
228). The poem's style also enhances its "passion" and intensity.
The poem moves rapidly back and forth from the personal to the
political, from one woman's predicament to a similar one shared by
Third World countries. From start to finish, the poem moves
swiftly, with many staccato sections. The subject - rape and
colonization - cause the style and the relentlessly sarcastic,
angry tone. Although the subjects are familiar ones, Jordan's
unique approach defamiliarizes the subject, as she begins with a
situation shared or known by most black women:
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can't
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point
the point being that I can't do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin . . . (86)
156
Here, Jordan details and foregrounds what most women
unconsciously take for granted, making her point through how she
speaks. The breathless pace and repititions (lines 3-6) heighten
the absurdity and irony: the situation is wrong, yet the speaker
is forced to act as if she is. Both racism and sexism curtail her
freedom whether in the city or the countryside. From there, the
speaker's thoughts of male harrassment turn, as in real life, to
the possibility of rape and from that, to imperialist
"penetration." If attacked, no matter how she begs nor how
brutally she is treated, she will be considered wrong. Similarly,
Third World countries are "penetrated" and denied their rights:
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being where I was/wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola . . . (86-87)
The intense language details how a woman (or Third World country)
has no rights, and in lines 1-3, parallels the act. The words,
like the act, are harsh, hard, and abrasive: "stabbing" /
"screams" / "smashing"; "bastard"; "hammer" / "head." Similarly,
the alliterations speed up the pace, matching the frenzy of the
situation. These lines "batter" the reader with their ferocious
condemnation of imperialism-rape. Lines 6-9 re-phrase the
157
wellknown practice of "blaming the victim," a practice which
extends to Third World countries.
At one point, the speaker reiterates, "Do You Follow Me : We
are the wrong people of / the wrong skin of the wrong continent"
(88). The constantly reiterated "wrong" shows the prevalence of
this attitude. For example, her father said she was wrong for not
being a boy. Her mother said the woman was "wrong" because she
read books. The absurdity of being thought constantly "wrong" by
everyone culminates in these lines:
( V
I am very fjailiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad / I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me (89)
Again, the style suits the content. Just as the situations
outrage and oppress the speaker, the first eight lines literally
dominate the word "me." On the other hand, the structure enhances
the sarcasm: it is impossible for one black woman to sustain such
a weight. Paradoxically, the structure also implies that the
woman is not at all "crushed" as she should be, but is, in fact,
sneering at them all. Moreover, she does not stop there. For
thirty-two lines more, she details, re-states, and reiterates her
point: "I have been the meaning of rape / I have been the problem
everyone seeks to eliminate . . ." (89). However, unlike some
158
victims who internalize their oppression, this woman does not.
The poem concludes
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent . . .
I am not wrong;Wrong is not my name
and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life. (88-89)
Given the avalanche of "wrongs” preeding this section, the ending
is an unexpected reversal, like an apparently passive rape victim
turning on her attacker. Line three, whose underlining implies
that it is shouted, is a battle cry. Line four does not so much
redefine the speaker as reclaim her: her name and destiny belong
to her, which is the same thing that colonized countries are
saying when they fight back. Finally, the poem itself is intended
9
as an act of resistance, particularly in its final three lines.
Clearly, this poem's narrator is a feminist who uses a range
of tones (from "Horatian" to "Juvenalian") to satirize the
parallel wrongs of rape and imperialism. Similarly, it is obvious
that both gender and race produced the content and style of this
poem. Moreover, only a politicized black woman could have written
or spoken such a poem. (NO male identifies with being a possible
rape victim; very few whites take imperialism personally or as a
direct threat to their well-being.) That is, Jordan's cultural
basis, her political perspectives, and her being a feminist
159
satirist all combine to produce a poem which works successfully as
both propaganda and art.
* * * * *
The basis of Jordan's feminist poetry is obviously a healthy
sense of herself. Jordan's poetry does not present black women as
"doubly oppressed" mute mules. Her poems show a wide spectrum of
black women who are all healthy, assertive or defiant, and
articulate.
Not all of Jordan's poetry is feminist nor satirical. Yet,
in the poems discussed here, feminism dictates the content. That
is, the human rights of women is a major concern for feminists.
t
Jordan reiterates this concern by emphasizing the many ways in
which these rights are curtailed, from internalized misogyny to
verbal harrassment by males and possible rape. Relatedly, since
Jordan is black, she has a historically-informed analysis of both
sexism and racism, as particularly seen in "Poem About My Rights."
More importantly, Jordan's style in these poems, as with Clifton's
and Williams's, is influenced by a female and black culture.
This culture is apparent, first, in a value system which
underpins Jordan's poetry, a system which includes a satirical
perspective. Black women in Jordan's poetry, as in real life,
frequently see "others" (particularly whites and black males) as
absurd rather than as Absolute Omnipotent Oppressors.
Consequently, her poems achieve the two satiric effects of an
160
"insider's ridicule of the outsider," and "an explosion of freedom
as [s]he breaks out of (or discomforts) a stultifying, over
codified society" (Ronald Paulson, "Introduction" ix). Secondly,
female black culture influences Jordan's style. Her forte is
mimicry and parody, in that she creates authentic sounding
personas who speak a convincing, realistic vernacular black
English. Like other societal critics, she expresses a wide range
of opinions on myriad subjects. As she says, "My life has been
about the de-ghettoization of my opionions and my experience. I
am a Black woman, and as far as I'm concerned every issue is a
Black issue and every issue is a woman's issue" ("Feminism" 17).
Which is another way of saying that every issue is a feminist
issue for Jordan.
As Paula Giddings says,
The fundamental goals of White Feminists have been histori
cally defined through the Black movement. This was evident
in the abolitionist movement, the southern antilynching and
interracial movements, the struggles of Black women to per
form dual roles in the forties and fifties, and the civil
rights movement.
So, the relationship between race and sex, one linked
by the Black woman, means that her role is of the utmost
importance. History suggests that it is only when her
convictions are firm in this regard can a society - one born
in the depths of racism and sexism - be transformed.
(When and Where I Enter 348)
Jordan's political activities, including her poetry, belong to a
tradition of black women activists who always crusaded for change.
Jordan's convictions are firm and transformation or apocalypse is
a major force in her satirical - feminist poetry.
161
Notes
^It might not be her poetry so much as her accompanying
political demands and expectations. For example, in the preface
to Black Women Writers, Mari Evans has a very cryptic note about
Jordan's exclusion. She says that she and Jordan could not "speak
the same language" and she was "unable to make the arrangements
that would have ensured her presence" ("Preface" xix).
2
Jordan prefaces her essay "Where Is the Love" (in Civil
Wars) with several statements about the hostility engendered by
the topic "Feminism and the Black Woman Writer" at the National
Black Writers Conference at Howard University in 1978. She says,
"I knew that the very scheduling of this seminar had managed to
divide people into camps prepared for war . . ." (140).
3
This is a paraphrase of a concept discussed at length in
Laurence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness : Afro-
American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1977). This political function is only one of many that he
discusses as he documents his case for humor as another indicator
of the autonomy of black culture. (Subsequent page references
included in text.)
4
Here, I am alluding to works such as Hughes's The Ways of
White Folk, many of Gwendolyn Brooks's poems (such as "The Lovers
of the Poor,” and "Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat"), sections of
Ellison's Invisible Man, many poems and plays of the late sixties,
and Ishmael Reed's novels.
5
This "genre" includes Toni Cade Bambara's short story
"Medley," much of Ntozake Shange's poetry and prose, and sections
of Walker's The Color Purple, among others. These works parody
and ridicule certain attitudes and practices of black males toward
black women. For example, Bambara satirizes their "man-to-man"
rituals of verbal display around women. Celie, in The Color
Purple, tells a would be suitor that all men, when naked, look
like frogs, to her.
6
Things That I Do In the Dark includes poems written over a
span of almost twenty years, and contains poems from the
previously published books, Who Look At Me (1971), Some Changes
(1971), and New Poems: Poems of Exile and Return (1974).
Therefore, it is possible to consider Jordan's poetic changes and
developments, but that is not the major concern here. (Specific
references to both books will be included in the text.) Just
recently, Jordan published a sixth book of poetry, Living Room:
New Poems (New York: Thunder's Mouth P , 1985). In this book, the
major themes and the predominant focus has to do with
international politics, subsuming and incorporating domestic and
personal themes. Drastically different in style and tone from the
poems discussed in this chapter, this book is mainly prosaic,
with a tone of serious indignation. There is very little humor or
satire although, given Jordan's broad definition of feminism, the
book ijs feminist.
^Levine (Black Culture) uses this definition, which he
borrows from Claudia MItchell-Kernan (Language Behavior in a
Black Urban Community) in his discussion of black humor.
g
Scholars of black English have begun to differentiate
between varieties of the language: urban vs rural, and northern vs
southern, for example. Jordan's inclination, naturally and more
accurately, is toward northern (New York) urban black English
which, among other things, tends to be faster paced.
9
"Against the Wall," a short essay in Civil Wars (147-149),
parallels the contents of this poem. It begins with Jordan
ironically considering tht the same full moon shines over New York
and South Africa. She thinks about taking a walk, but considers
that "the writer is a woman, and Black, besides," which means that
she "will be perceived as provocative/irresponsi
ble/loose/insubordinate . . ." (147). Comparing her situation in
New York to that of apartheid in South Africa, she observes, "What
is the difference between demanding that I carry a 'pass,' . . .
and terroist curfews imposed upon my movements because I am
female?" (149). Like the poem, the essay ends on a note of
resistance: she takes her walk.
163
Chapter 5: Audre Lorde — Black Female Poet as "Mask" in The
Black Unicorn
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital
necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the
light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward
survival and change, first made into language, then into
idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we
help give names to the nameless so it can be thought. The
farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our
poems, carved from the rock of our daily lives.
- Audre Lorde
* * *
Audre Lorde, like Jordan, belongs to a long line of black
women writer-activists, a line which includes Francis Harper and
Ida B. Wells, among others. She too is a fighter against
oppression of all kinds, as she refuses to deny or overlook any
aspect of her being. She is, as a lecturer and essayist, almost
always engaged in issues which are both private and political. As
she puts it, since she is a "Black lesbian feminist socialist
mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial
couple," she is "a part of some group defined as other, deviant,
inferior or just plain wrong" ("Age, Race, Class" 114).
Consequently, social protest and art are one to her: "I can't say
it is an either/or proposition. Art for art's sake doesn't exist
for me, but then it never did . . . I loved poetry and I loved
words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of
changing my life . . ." ("My Words" 264). For a large part of the
feminist literary world, Audre Lorde (b. 1934) needs little
164
introduction, because of her wellknown essays which include
extensive personal autobiographical information. Additionally,
her three prose works - The Cancer Journals (1980), Zami; A New
Spelling of my Name (1982) and Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches (1984) - provide biographical information.
Like Jordan, Lorde's interest in poetry started at an early
age although ironically, she did not talk until she was five years
old, when she started to read. Later, she memorized poems and
used them to speak for her emotions (Zami 21). Then, when the J
poems of others were inadequate to express her feelings, she J
started to write her own poems while an adolescent ("An Interview"
82). Once she started to write and speak, she became quite
prolific in both areas. Yet, although Lorde has a lot to say
about most things, she is strangely quiet about her literary
influences. From the content of her work, however, it seems that
Lorde's major inspiration was her own life experiences, from
childhood experiences as a little fat girl, the darkest child in
her family, to adult teaching experiences.
According to Lorde, her mother, Linda, was one of her
earliest poetic influences. Her mother's use of her own island
dialect (she was from Carriacou, Grenada) alerted Lorde to the
beauty and potential of words (Zami 31-34). Even though Lorde and
her mother grew apart, she remained one of Lorde's major
inspirations in her poetry (although Lorde almost never uses a
165
dialect, and only rarely, extremely colloquial English). While in
high school and later, Lorde attended meetings of the Harlem
Writers" Guild, but there, she felt she was "tolerated but never
really accepted," in part because of her lesbianism ("An
Interview" 91). One major pivotal point in her career as poet
occurred when she was a writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in
Mississippi (1968). Her interaction with the black students there
was evidently challenging, stimulating, and rewarding. At
Tougaloo, she realized that her true vocation was teaching and
writing, not being a librarian. Lorde's experiences politicized
her; they in turn influenced her poetry, creating a reciprocal
dialectical relationship between her experiences and all of her
writings. And, although Lorde says she has always been "outside,"
she has also been "inside" in terms of her publishing history.
Lorde's poetry was anthologized as early as 1963. Her first
book of poetry, The First Cities, was published by Diane di Prima
(New York: Poets Press) in 1968. Dudley Randall's Broadside Press
published her third book, From a Land Where Other People Live in
1973, albeit deleting one overt lesbian love poem ("An Interview"
98-99). Since then, Lorde has published five more books of poetry.
The most recent of these, The Black Unicorn (1978) and Chosen
Poems Old and New (1982) were published by Norton.* In the past
ten years, Lorde"s prose has been increasingly published by
feminist presses and she is one of the founding members of Kitchen
166
Table: Women of Color Press. Her work is constantly anthologized
in collections of black poetry, women's poetry, and lesbian
poetry. Yet even if publication came relatively easy, critical
acknowledgement (as with Williams and Jordan) has not been so
easily attained.
Lorde says that she is ignored by white critics because she
is a "non-categorizable black," and "In the forties and fifties my
lifestyle and the rumors about my lesbianism made me persona non
grata in Black literary circles" ("My Words" 262-263). A
"unilateral definition of 'Blackness' " prevented her from having
the recognition which she should have had. She echoes Jordan as
she says,
I consider myself to have been a victim of this
silencing in the Black literary community for years
and I am certainly not the only one. For instance,
there is no question about the quality of my work
at this point. Then why do you think my last book,
The Black Unicorn, has not been reviewed, nor even
mentioned, in any Black newspaper or Black magazines
within the thirteen months since it appeared?
("My Words" 263)
Since Lorde wrote this statement (in 1979) some black
magazines and black critics have reviewed The Black Unicorn, as
have numerous lesbian-feminist publications. Yet, each review
reveals a limitation in approaching the book; each critic responds
to the aspect of Lorde which s/he finds most familiar or least
threatening OR to the least familiar and most threatening one.
Just as Lorde's gender, race and politics inform her poetry,
167
these factors also weigh heavily in the critics' responses. One
(white?) male critic says that most of the poems are "ugly" and
"bad" and he wonders why Lorde "drags in a plethora of African
mythology" (Michael T. Siconolfi, "Poetry" 327). Andrea Benton
Rushing, a black critic, praises Lorde's use of African history
and mythology and her combatting negative stereotypes of black
women ("Books" 43). The lesbian-feminist reviewers generally
I
praise the book for its lesbian-feminist aspects. J
l
It is easy and tempting to use Lorde's prose to interpret I
j
her poetry. One reviewer, in fact, says that quite a few of
Lorde's essays were poems first (Gina Rhodes "Audre Lorde" 10).
Because of Lorde's status and experiences - including that of
being a masectomy survivor - it is tempting to read the poetry as
purely autobiographical. Moreover, Lorde has an uncanny ability
to cast each of her experiences in political terms. As she says
about surviving a masectomy, "Growing up Fat Black Female and
almost blind in America requires so much surviving that you have
to learn from it or die. . . . I have been in training for a long
time" (Cancer Journals 40). Lorde somehow manages to turn even
being one-breasted into an asset, rather than a liability: she is
a "warrior" rather than a victim. Like the women in Jordan's
poems, Lorde is constantly engaged in self-definition and re
definition. Her openness about her own life's pains and triumphs
is a large part of her charisma and power in women's communities
168
across America. She repeatedly emphasizes her multifaceted
existence - but always, it seems, beginning with being "black and
female." That is, these are the first two determinants of her
worldview and also the primary determinants of her poetry. Yet,
precisely because Lorde Ls so multifaceted, the poetry is either
reductively viewed or used to annotate the prose, or vice versa.
To date, as with the other three poets discussed here, there has
been little discussion of Lorde's poetic style.
Some topics appear and reappear in her poetry, such as
overtly political concerns (ie., the survival of black folk), her
children, and her relationships with women and the rest of the
l
world, and her identity as a writer, or what her "voice" will be.
Yet, her style changes noticeably, from a romantic, imitative,
rather trite style in some of her earliest poems to that of a
black nationalist in From A Land Where Other People Live.
However, one consistent element about her style is that it is
predominantly "literary" as opposed to folk. That is, several
scholars of Afro-American literature distinguish between an oral
2
or folk branch and a literary branch. The former includes black
speech patterns, spirituals and blues, and folktales. The literary
branch had its start with Phillis Wheatley, although it has been
variously defined and interpreted over the years. (Brooks's Annie
Allen for example, is certainly more "literary" than "folk.")
Unlike the three previously discussed poets, Lorde definitely
169
belongs to a "literary" branch of Afro-American literature,
particularly in The Black Unicorn. Her literary and overtly
intellectual focus appears in the book's title, its structure, and
most of all, in the dominant persona in the book, that of a
"mask." First, the title is a literary allusion to a fictional,
mythical invention, and implies that the book, therefore, will
deal with myth and legend. Second, Lorde provides both a glossary
and a bibliography, adding to the "learned," didactic nature of
the book - implying that it was partly researched. Finally, and
most importantly, the book's tone and style equal a voice-as-mask,
particularly in part one.
Lorde defines this mask in part one of The Black Unicorn
through using African myth and religion. She appropriates Africa
as thoroughly as Toomer did the South to create a mask which draws
on a tradition which is both Afro-American and African. Dunbar's
"We Wear the Masks" is one of the most well-known and succinct
statements in life and literature for black Americans. Because of
racism, black folk were forced to "grin and lie," to dissimulate
and hide what they really thought and felt. Relatedly, the mask
was used for protection, as in the folk saying, "got one mind for
white folk to see / got me another mind to deal with me." In
other words, the mask was a means of both concealment and
empowerment, enabling black folk to preserve what was precious to
themselves. On the other hand, in Africa, the mask is
170
ritualistically used, as a means of power and empowerment, wherein
the person is subsumed in the power of the mask, or of the Deity
which the sculptured mask represents. According to Janheinz Jahn,
a mask's effectiveness is determined "not so much by the degree to
which it resembles a man as by the degree to which it does not
resemble him" (MUNTU 170). Furthermore, the mask must be animated
by "Nommo," the magical power of the word (172). Relatedly, Jahn
observes that "In the light of African philosophy, the loas are
forces, and in 'possession' man takes these forces into himself,
intensifies the force which he himself is" (MUNTU 61).
All of these observations are important to Lorde's voice in
The Black Unicorn wherein she both creates and assumes a mask via
the power of her word. Moreover, she invokes the Orishas (loas)
in a form of intellectual and emotional possession, in order to
intensify the force of what she says. Finally, Lorde's "mask" is
that of black woman as Goddess - High Priestess and Warrior Poet.
Consequently, the tone of The Black Unicorn is consistently
pedantic, urgent, oratorical, defiant, and authoritative. Lorde
speaks from the stance of the black woman as "mystic":
transcendental, cryptic and sometimes undecipherable. (The mask
is not to be understood by just anyone, although it is to be
revered, respected, and taken as "real" and powerful, by all.)
The style of these poems is cerebral, intellectual, "learned."
They are stylized and lyrical rather than narrative, and
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frequently solipsistic. Lorde defines and assumes the mask in
part one of The Black Unicorn and speaks from it in the other
three sections. The focus of this chapter, then, is part one, and
variations of that voice, particularly in the love poems.
Andrea Benton Rushing says, "There is no simple way to
explore the poems in this volume [The Black Unicorn], Steve
Henderson's excellent framework in Understanding the New Black
Poetry is tangential here because Lorde does not evoke Afro-
American music and rarely . . . employs specifically Afro-American
speech. Instead, she employs her characteristic blend of black
and feminist themes and perspectives" ("A Creative Use" 115-116).
This observation is partially accurate, but it suffers from too
narrow a definition of Afro-American speech (one based in an oral
tradition). That is, in The Black Unicorn - particularly in part
one - Lorde's voice is especially Afro-American because it is so
"saturated" in Africa. Moreover, although Lorde is rarely
colloquial, she does speak from a black and female culture -
which, for Lorde, includes being a feminist. (Rushing suggests
"feminist" and Henderson's criteria are incompatible.)
The poems in part one have reoccurring, interlocking and
overlapping names, syntax, and images which reinforce one major
overall image - that of a black female ritual mask. As Lorde
says, she turned to "African myth/legend/religion for the true
nature of female power" ("An Open Letter" 67). In the process,
172
however, she also transforms the myths and legends, beginning with
the book's title and title poem. And even there, she assumes a
cryptic mask. For example, unicorns are usually white, or they
were, when "seen" by Anglo-Europeans. A black unicorn, then, is
3
something different. The title poem provides a frame and a
context, a new background for the rest of the poems in the
section. The poem, in essence, "re-claims" (in feminist
terminology) the myth of the unicorn from white-European-
patriarchy. That is, the primary characteristics of the European
unicorn were its elusiveness and its affinity for virgins - \
i
therefore symbolizing chastity and purity, or a male obsession I
!
with virginity. It seems to have most meaning for males as a J
passive symbol. The black unicorn, on the other hand, is alive,
energetic, and active - not a means to an end, but an end in
itself:
The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow
or symbol
and taken through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury. (3)
It is hard to tell here whether the persona speaks of^ the
unicorn or as^ the unicorn. But it is clear, from the poem's
syntax (especially the use of the present tense in lines 1 and 2)
and authoritative, definitive tone that the unicorn is not merely
a "shadow or symbol." In lines 3-8, the European ("cold country")
173
myth is corrected and dismissed. The image depicted here, of both
the unicorn and the poem, is that of an assertive black female
entity, whose fury is "deep in her moonpit / growing." The poem
concludes:
The black unicorn is restless
The black unicorn is unrelenting
The black unicorn is not
free. (3)
Although the entire poem has an insistently "restless" and
unrelenting tone, these lines are as elusive as the European
unicorn. "Not free" suggests both a lack of freedom, and,
possibly, that the unicorn will not be had for nothing. The tone
implies, also, that the unicorn intends to he free, particularly
of old stereotypes and misconceptions. On that level, the unicorn
does "symbolize" Lorde's voice and mask as she redefines European
myth and turns to Africa for further redefinition.
In the other poems of part one of The Black Unicorn, the two
major overlapping and interlocking images are the black Mother-
Goddess Creator and the black Female Warrior. Obstensibly, Lorde
finds her lineage, herself, and her poetic voice in these two
predominant images. Yet, these poems, even as they define that
voice, further erect a mask. For example, the Goddess Seboulisa
and the Dahomean female warriors were both one-breasted, as is
4
Lorde. Further, these amazon warriors lived, like most lesbians,
separate and apart from men. However, unlike their functions,
Lorde"s role as a warrior poet is unclear, more cryptic. While
174
Lorde assumes a kinship with the Dahomean warriors and hence with
Dahomey, her kinship is quite different from that of Clifton, who
traces her lineage straight back to Dahomey. Whereas Clifton
eulogizes and praises her lineage, Lorde mythologizes her kinship
in the poem "Dahomey11:
It was in Abomey that I felt
the full blood of my fathers' wars
and where I found my mother
Seboulisa
standing with outstretched palms hip high
one breast eaten away by worms of sorrow
magic stones resting upon her fingers
(10)
One male critic, apparently intent on a psychological reading of
The Black Unicorn, sees the book as Lorde's attempt to become or
be like her biological father. He says "the image of the unicorn
indicates that the poet is aware that Africa is for her a
fatherland, a phallic terrain" (Jerome Brooks "In the Name" 220).
This critic cites the first two lines of this poem to support his
dubious point. The first two lines might mean male African
ancestors (who fought many wars, particularly against colonial
oppressors). However, Seboulisa is a far more important image in
the poem.
According to the glossary in The Black Unicorn, Seboulisa is
the goddess of the town Abomey, as well as a "local representative
of Mawulisa" (121). Mawulisa, in turn, is the Dahomean "female-
male, sky-goddess-god principle . . . represented as west-east,
night-day, moon-sun" and "regarded as the Creator of the
175
Universe," including the other deities (Vodu, Loas, or Orishas).
This divine mother, in other words, is a major elemental
supernatural Power, as well as a reconciler of so-called
opposites. The goddess's diverse powers seem particularly well
matched to Lorde's multifaceted life and poetry.
Lines 4-7 describe what seems to be an interpretation of a
real statue of the goddess or, possibly, an imagined one. In
either case, it is not clear why "worms of sorrow" have left her
one-breasted, nor why the stones on her fingers are magical.
Whether the image is real or imagined, the goddess Seboulisa is
invoked as a model and inspiration for Lorde, who poetically
assumes Seboulisa's world and powers:
Thunder is a woman with braided hair
spelling the fas of Shango
asleep between sacred pythons
that cannot read
nor eat the ritual offerings
of the Asein.
My throat in the panther's lair
is unresisting. (10)
The language and the imagery here is convuluted, compressed, and
based in West African rituals and customs. That and the cryptic,
allegorical style almost defy analysis. Yet, in the first two
lines, "fas of Shango" are at once a hairstyle and a method of
divination; "Thunder" is both the woman's hair and the god
Shango. Beyond that, it is difficult to interpret the lines,
except in the case of the last two, which read "backwards," in
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this increasingly self-reflexive poem, and suggest initiation,
that of Lorde's into Dahomean culture.
The last section extends the idea of initiation via the
head. Whereas before, a woman (Lorde) wore religious braids, now,
Lorde's head is just as "divine," wearing drums, and less
cryptically speaking of her power with words. This suggests a
post-initiation power, or that she is now possessed, one with
Seboulisa:
Bearing two drums on my head I speak
whatever language is needed
to sharpen the knives of my tongue
the snake is aware although sleeping
under my blood
since I am a woman whether or not
you are against me
I will braid my hair
even
in the seasons of rain. (10-11)
The image of two drums on her head echoes the Shango
divination-braids, which in themselves are a "language." Because
the drum is for Africa a major means of communication with a
language of its own "two drums" suggests two or more languages.
In the last five lines, "braid my hair" is at once a mild, but
culturally significant gesture, as well as a "signifying" one in
that the braids can become the fas or language of divination.
Similarly, in line 7 she will talk and write ("braid my hair") in
spite of supporters or detractors, represented by the deliberately
vague, non-referential "you." Finally, "whatever language is
needed" describes the languages^ of The Black Unicorn. That is,
177
the persona in this poem, as in others in part one, uses "Nommo"
to activate a mask.
The newly discovered and very powerful "mother" is a major
source of this mask, giving the poetry an "elemental" force, as
well as a somewhat surreal tone. But the main point is that Lorde
subsumes herself into an image of a daughter of the West African
Goddess-Mother(s), In term of that image, "feminist" seems a bit
mild, although such a daughter is naturally a feminist. In terms
of the poetry, Lorde becomes eclectic enough to select what she
needs to define her voice and imagery, seen most strongly and
cryptically in "From the House of Yemanja."
Here, "House" means both devotees and daughters of Yemanje, j
as well as Lorde's spiritual dwelling place or home. Yemanje, as
mentioned before, is the ultimate or highest mother, the Yoruban
conterpart of Mawulisa (Seboulisa). Lorde uses the names
interchangeably, since their primary functions and attributes are
the same. The poem begins with imagery that suggests both
ordinary domestic reality and supernatural divine reality:
My mother had two faces and a frying pot
where she cooked up her daughters
into girls
before she fixed our dinner. (6)
Perhaps because of Lorde"s troubled relationships with her mother
(particularly discussed in Zami), Joan Martin reads these lines as
mainly autobiographical. She says that Lorde deals with an
absence of love: "Witness the daughter, now grown, looking back
178
on her childhood and seeing herself as unwanted, undeserving,
lonely, and alone" ("The Unicorn" 282). Martin sees in this poem
"the incredible presence of discordant images, self-hatred, bitter
alienation, and the almost surrealistic sense of nonexistence by
I
the poet" (282). Perhaps. But given the context, "mother" seems |
to primarily refer to Yemanja, just as "two faces" refers to
Yemanja; the "discordant images" describe Yemanja^s dual nature.
The "surreal" tone is deliberate: a mask rarely suggests mundane
reality. Hence, "frying pot" conceivably means both an ordinary
!
cooking utensil, and the "universal" womb (since Yemanja gave
birth to the universe) wherein, among other things, she created
("cooked up") daughters. The juxtaposition of domestic and
abstract imagery jolt the poem back into the realm of myth and
allegory: on two levels, these lines could be read as a black and
female creation myth, a myth which becomes increasingly abstract,
convuluted, and surreal, in the next lines:
My mother had two faces
and a broken pot
where she hid out a perfect daughter
who was not me
I am the sun and moon forever hungry
for her eyes. (6)
In spite of the abstruseness, these lines further entrench the
poem in myth and legend, as it raises riddle-like questions:
"broken pot" refers to a legend about Yemanja ("Glossary" 121).
But who is the "perfect daughter"? On the other hand, the "I" in
the poem, although imperfect, is still "the sun and moon." That
179
is to say, she is definitely Yemanja's divine daughter, who longs
to see her mother (lines 5-6).
The next sections of the poem become increasingly complex.
The narrator bears "two women" on her back and has no brothers and
cruel sisters. These sections can be interpreted as a voice of
"alienation" (cf. Martin) especially considering the last lines of
the poem:
Mother I need
mother I need
mother I need your blackness now
as the august earth needs rain.
I am
the sun and moon forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one. (6-7)
Actually, the first four lines are an ironic plea as well as an
invocation: Lorde is a part of, yet apart from, her mother, whose
attribute of "blackness" is needed for nurturance, even as a
drought-like ground ("august earth") needs rain. The repetitious
incantation particularly suggests an oriki or praise poem. The
concluding lines similarly reiterate the image of a daughter who,
although cosmic and awesome, still needs the presence of her
divine mother. Or rather, she wants a more total possession.
Writing about 2ami in terms equally applicable to The
Black Unicorn, Chinosole says:
Lorde establishes a matriliny that is Afroamerican -
she was Harlem born; Caribbean - her mothers and fore-
mothers were Grenadian; and West African - her self
created Afrekete is the female counterpart to the Da
homean trickster orisha or divine force called Legba
or Eshu. Most importantly, African cultural tradi
tions are reflected . . . in what I call, a princi
ple of non-polar duality. . . . Lorde celebrates
difference, multiplicity, and duality through an
acceptance of the creative rather than destructive
potential of irreconcilability...[She] celebrates
contradictions in poetry and prose, as in "House of
Yemanja." ("Telling It" 4)
"Non-polar duality" is an apt description of this poem's focus.
However, it is still possible to see that focus as an aspect of
the mask: for an oracle, dualities and polarities would come
naturally. Further, constant invocation of a dual-natured deity
enhances one's power.
"125th Street and Abomey" invokes more power through
possession, even though the persona is physically in Harlem.
Although "Half earth and time splits us apart," Abomey is
spiritually and mentally present in the speaker in the Goddess
Seboulisa. The beginning lines describe this split:
Head bent, walking through snow
I see you Seboulisa
printed inside the back of my head
like marks of the newly wrapped akai
that kept my sleep fruitful in Dahomey (12)
Lorde has brought the goddess Seboulisa home (America) imprinted
inside of her head; Lorde is "possessed." The comparison of
Seboulisa to her braids (akai) implies that the goddess keeps her
present life fruitful, and that Seboulisa's "fas" (words) are
imprinted in her mind. In the following lines, Lorde compares past
libations made in Dahomey with present mental libation or
offering, as she invokes Seboulisa:
take my fear of being alone
like my warrior sisters
who rode in defense of your queendom
disguised and apart
give me the woman strength
of tongue in this cold season. (12)
On one level, this invocation is similar to the prayer of any
orthodox Christian. The poem's intense tone and diction suggest
that the persona is coming out of "possession" - losing her
powers, if not her faith. But on a more important level, her
"prayer" is unorthodox. The speaker wants two interrelated
!
things: (1) to be like her "warrior sisters" and live "apart" from 1
men; and (2) the "strength of tongue," or strength of words and
voice. That strength is to be used like that of her "warrior
sisters." The poem's conclusion suggests that the prayers are
answered; the possession is again total, and the mask, also,
effectively in place:
Seboulisa mother goddess with one breast
eaten away by worms of sorrow and loss
see me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember. (12-13)
The first two lines repeat but vary lines from "Dahomey." "Loss,"
in this case, suggests that Seboulisa's loss is similar to Lorde's
in her estrangement. And, again, she asks the goddess's blessings
("see me now") particularly because she is "severed." However,
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she is still enough in touch with the goddess to retain and regain
power, as in the last two lines: it is a powerful laugh that will
be remembered eternally ("into echo") by "all the world." And
that laughter can only be Lorde's goddess-inspired, mask poetry,
written by a "warrior-poet."
According to Pam Annas, "125th Street . . ." is an example |
of the fourth stage which women poets go through in renaming and
redefining themselves. Here, she says, Lorde's "historical self
and her contemporary self come together in one name" ("A Poetry of
Survival" 12). Throughout The Black Unicorn, Lorde, according to
f
Annas, is engaged in "self-definition through what she is not . . ;
. a necessary renaming through unnaming" (23-24). In fact, what
Lorde does here is the opposite: she names herself as what she is;
she names, creates and becomes that persona, ritualistically.
Although these poems ("125th Street" and "House") foreground
the divine daughter-goddesss, mother image, they also include a
"warrior's stance." A goddess mother would naturally produce
warrior daughters, as in the poem, "The Women of Dan Dance with /
Swords in Their Hands to Mark the / Time when They were Warriors."
The poem's title serves mainly as background and introduction to
the narrator. It is not about the Dan women, as such, but about
Lorde, who invokes and feels spiritually akin to those women. Her
"sword in hand" is obviously her poetry, which she uses to add
another dimension to her indecipherable black female being. She
183
is phoenix-like, "terrible / only when I must die / in order to
rise again" (14). She does not "come like a secret warrior / with
an unsheathed sword in my mouth / hidden behind my tongue." There
is nothing furtive about her. And in fact, being "woman" includes
being a warrior:
I come like a woman
who I am
spreading out through nights
laughter and promise
and dark heat
warming whatever I touch
that is living
consuming
only
what is already dead. (15)
Both the language and the woman are somehow remote and elusive;
her tone is both quietly, rhythmically seductive, yet threatening:
the warrior takes precedence.
The image of warrior is strongest in the poem "A Woman
Speaks." Although the poem never uses the word "warrior," its tone
is warrior-like, minatory, and deadly. This one, again, seems to
subtly belie its title, except that, obviously, "woman" means
warrior here, also:
Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind. (4)
In line one, "moon" and "sun" immediately call to mind Seboulisa
and Yemanja, especially since they enable the woman to be magical
and elemental (lines 3-4). Then too, the lines could be read as a
184
metaphor for writing: by the end of the poem, the speaker's magic
is written, as, simultaneously, the poem "leaves her shape" or
description. Still, the woman is almost incomprehensible. That
is, she says, "if you would know me / look into the entrails of
Uranus," the planet of unexpectedness and revolution. She is also
"ageless" and still looking for her "sisters / witches in
Dahomey." Her image incorporates the supernatural, the awesome,
the powerful, to culminate in a series of warnings, which complete
her "shape":
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white. (4)
In terms of the woman's magic, and the poem's, these
concluding lines are ritualistic and threateningly cryptic. The
first three lines can be read as since I have been female for a
long time I am dangerous. Even her smile is "treacherous." Most
importantly, she is "not white," suggesting that whatever might be
true or applicable to white women does not, in this case, apply to
her. (As in a preceding poem, "your" means "if the shoe fits,
wear it.") If there is a composite image drawn here, it is that
of a black supernatural witch-warrior, something as unknown and as
different, and as powerful, as a black unicorn. And that image,
185
persona, and mask dominates The Black Unicorn, most ironically in
the love poems.
II
Robert Stepto says that in part one, Lorde acquires "a voice
or an idea of a voice that is essentially African in that it is
communal, historiographical, archival, and prophetic" ("The
Phenomenal Woman" 316). To put it another way, Lorde acquires the
voice of a ritual mask. But Stepto accurately observes that in
the rest of the book, "There is a subtle shift in poetic forms
that appears to signal, in turn, a shift in focus from acquisition
of voice to that of art" (317). In a sense, the poems in the |
other sections are less supernatural, more mundane correlatives to !
those in part one. The poems cover a range of topics - from love
affairs to police brutality. Yet, in most of them, there are
allusions to the mask of part one; or rather, the mask still
speaks, albeit in another key, in most of these poems.In other
words, the "art" is the mask, shaping and refocussing the content
of the other poems. The love poems are some of the most
representative and most striking examples of this "art." In the
love poems, Lorde speaks from a mask of black goddess-warrior,
wherein her lover becomes the initiate, novitiate, receptacle, as
she was in part one, for Seboulisa and the Dahomean witches. Her
tone in these poems is persistently authoritative, demanding,
4
i __
186
commanding, and absolute. Her language is cryptic, convuluted
and allusive, as in part one.
Whereas it is questionable to use Lorde's prose to interpret
her poetry, or vice versa, it is useful to compare the two for her
style. Her prose about lovers or the erotic, as compared to the
poetry, is lucid, concrete, and frequently sensual. For example,
she writes:
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used a-
gainst women. It has been made into the confused, the
trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For
this reason, we have often turned away from the explo
ration and consideration of the erotic as a source of
power and information, confusing it with its oppo
site, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct
denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents
the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emph
asizes sensation without feeling."
("Uses of the Erotic" 54)
This passage shows Lorde at her analytical and theoretical best,
teaching and overcoming distortions, as she redefines eroticism
for both women and men. The quotation is clearly written and
direct, even if somewhat formal. Also, Lorde practices what she
preaches, as seen in the following excerpt, considered a
masterpiece of lesbian eroticism:
I held you, lay between your legs, slowly playing
my tongue through your familiar forests, slowly
licking and swallowing as the deep undulations and
tidal motions of your strong body slowly mashed ripe
banana into a beige cream . . . Our bodies met again,
each surface touched with each other's flame, from
the tips of our curled toes to our tongues . . . I
took a ripe avocado and rolled it between my hands
until the skin became a green case for the soft
mashed fruit inside, hard pit at the core. I rose
187
from a kiss in your mouth to nibble a hole in the
fruit skin near the naval stalk, squeezed the pale
yellow-green fruit in thin ritual lines back and
forth over and around your coconut-brown belly.
The oil and sweat from our bodies kept the fruit
liquid, and I massaged it over your thighs and
between your breasts until your brownness shone
like a light through a veil of the palest green
avocado, a mantle of goddess pear that I slowly
licked from your skin. (Zami 249 & 251)
This excerpt is perhaps studiedly and deliberately controlled in
its sensousness, and even somewhat overwritten. Yet, the specific
imagery ("coconut-brown belly") and the slow, meditative tone make
the passage erotically "powerful" and effective. Lorde's love-
erotic poems in The Black Unicorn are something else again,
principally because she is the "mask as lover." If the poems
have anything in common with the excerpts, it is (1) their
powerful, cerebral, analytical nature, and (2) their persistent
imagery of hunger, ingestion, and possession.
Just as the persona in part one was "hungry" for her
Goddess-mother, the lover in these poems is similarly "hungry":
quasi-carnivorous, insatiable, and overwhelming in her perceptions
and demands - which, frequently, are unclear. In fact, it
sometimes appears that the persona wants to consume, possess, or
destroy her lover. In "Woman," for instance, the sensuality is
cerebral and un-erotic because of the poem's tone and diction.
The imagery suggests "possession" on several levels:
I dream of a place between your breasts
to build my house like a haven
where I plant crops
188
in your body
an endless harvest
where the commonest rock
is moonstone and ebony opal
giving milk to all my hungers
and your night comes down upon me
like a nurturing rain. (82)
In lines 1-4, the speaker wants to "own" her lover, as if she is a
house or a fertile field. The lover's fertility provides an
enigmatic "endless harvest" of "moonstone and ebony opal." The j
stones are semi-precious jewels, but what do they represent? Even
so, why would jewels be a part of the harvest? As in part one,
the speaker is cryptic, distanced, and symbolic. In fact, the poem
presents deliberately mixed metaphors throughout: the "commonest" I
rock or jewel will nurture the speaker, apparently (line 8). But i
again, "your night" is ambiguous, as is "nurturing rain." The one
clear thing is the tone - that of a quietly intense devouring
persona who wants to "possess" her lover totally, as she was
possessed by the Orishas.
Hunger, in fact, is a major image in several of these love
poems, synonymous with need and kinship in part one. Hunger as
word and metaphor sustains the masked image from part one, even as
it suggests the intensity of the speaker's love. Still, the
persona manages to be intellectually distanced. "Fog Report" (90)
is a good example of this distancing. The poem begins "In this
misty place where hunger finds us / seeking direction / I am too
close to you to be useful." The lines imply many things, but
189
directly state none. The two women are obviously going through
troubled times, which the poem obfuscates rather than clarifies:
I am often misled
by your familiar comforts
the shape of your teeth is written
into my palm like a second lifeline
when I am fingerprinted
the taste of your thighs
shows up
outlined in the ink. (90)
"Familiar comforts" is an ordinary ambiguity: a lover does
provide these comforts, which differ from person to person. But
then lines 3 and 4 destroy the reader's "comfort." The lines
suggest that the woman bit the speaker's hand (but that is too
easy). However, they suggest the "akai" of Seboulisa, written
inside her head. That is, an arcane, secret knowledge and union.
Lines 5-8 enhance the mystery through "mixed" synaesthesia. The
concrete image of "fingerprinting," producing the "taste of your
thighs" somehow negate each other. The images bounce off each
other, deliberately closing out the poem's meanings except
(possibly) to the speaker's lover. Still, the lines connote
intense passion and involvement, strengthened and glossed in the
poem's ending:
I am tempted
to take you apart
and reconstruct your orifices
your tongue your truths your fleshy altars
into my own forgotten image
so when this fog lifts
I could be sure to find you
tethered like a goat
in my heart's yard. (90)
190
Again, these lines suggest passion via cerebral "deconstruction."
Ironically, the lines also contain violent imagery, as opposed to
erotic. The speaker wants to recreate her lover (lines 3-5) as
herself - and at that, a self which she has "forgotten." Once
more, the lover is "devoured" by the speaker's intense, hungry
passions. Once again, the speaker is to her lover what she was to
Mawulisa. Finally, the homely simile "like a goat" mainly
suggests domestic, trained passivity - an image which enhances the
speaker's longing, demanding tone, but an image which is more :
threateningly unpleasant than erotic.
Chinosole says that "the very rootedness of Lorde within
Black traditions determines the type of lesbian literary
i
imagination we find in her work" ("Telling It" 2). This statement j
might apply to Zami, but it hardly fits the poetry in The Black
Unicorn. If these poems fit a black tradition, it is a black
metaphysical tradition. Little about the poems even suggest the
speaker's race - except, significantly, the mask she carries over
from part one. Then too, several people observe that The Black
Unicorn draws upon a suppressed tradition of lesbian bonding in
Africa. Citing one of Lorde's essays as support for this point,
Vickie Mays observes, "Lesbian relationships are recognized and
legitimized social relationships in certain African societies"
("Making Visible" 97). Even if that is the case, and even if that
191
fact serves to "validate" black lesbianism, it hardly explains the
black lesbian in most of the love poems in The Black Unicorn.
Just as the poems in part one sometimes present a
threatening, warrior-woman image, the love poems present a
"threatening" lover. The lover, like the warrior, is deadly. The
lover, like the warrior, is also masked due to her cryptic diction
and "formal" style. "Dream Songs from the Moon of Beulah Land I—
V" (75-80), for example, chronicles stages in a lover's quarrel,
or lapses in communication. But again, the persona is distanced,
though longing and frustrated, devouring and possessive. Section
one begins "How much love can I pour into you I said / before it
runs out of you / like undigested spinach" (75). Once more, the
woman addressed is a receptacle, a container, as she was a house
before. While "undigested spinach" is a graphic simile for
fullness and overflow, it also suggests diarrheaic frustration.
Section two shifts from concrete frustration to abstract threat:
"Whenever I look for you the wind / howls with danger" (76) as the
speaker's "words become sabers / cutting my boundaries / to
ribbons of merciless light” (76). Here, "sabers" suggests swords
(of Dahomean women warriors), and "merciless light" implies
painful vision. However, the diction conceals more than it
reveals, as in section III, where the narrator recounts a cryptic
dream wherein she and her lover ride in a "big black Mazda" which
eats up "three kinds of gas at the same time" (77).
192
Section IV sustains the metaphor of a drum with a more
obvious double meanings. It starts!
You say I am
sound as a drum
but that's very hard to be
as you cover your ears
with academic parchment
be careful
you might rip the cover
with your sharp nails
and then I will not sound at all. (78)
By this point, "drum" can only suggest the African drum and its
importance in communication. From carrying "two drums" on her
head, the narrator, now, the drum: the means of communication.
Still, in lines 4-5, the narrator suggests that "academic
parchment" stops communication - and that she is vulnerable to its
"sharp nails." The speaker paradoxically concludes, "If I ever
really sounded / 1 would rupture / your eardrums / or your heart"
(79). In other words, if she ever really talked ("sounded"), it
would be unbearable for her lover. This assertion emphasizes the
language of the mask, of "speaking in tongues," of controlled
power held in check.
Interestingly enough, Fahamisha Shariat observes that in The
Black Unicorn, "Lorde's poetic imagery provides convincing support
for the critical theory which posits the existence of black female
language and diction" as seen in, among other things, "the images
of water . . . of blood, of darkness juxtaposed with light"
("Review" 174). But (as with Chinosole's claim about a "black
193
lesbian imagination") this assertion is dubious. The poem "From
the Greenhouse" contains much of this imagery, but the imagery
hardly suggests - without part one - a black, woman speaking. In
this poem, as in the preceding ones, the narrator "masks" her
feelings with cryptic images. "Summer rains like my blood cries,"
the poem begins, suggesting that the speaker is suffering in the
summertime. However, "blood," in this instance, is a metaphor or
symbol for still another lapse in communication:
My blood yells against
your sleeping shoulder
this is a poem of summer
my blood screams at your false safety
rain surges against our window
green sprouts are drowning
in mud and blessings
in our carefully planted greenhouse
I have moved as far as I can
now my blood merges
into your dreaming. (101)
The nature imagery here recalls the imagery in both "Woman" and
"Fog Report" - only now, nature is more itself, less symbolic of
their relationship. But the hard rains (lines 5-7) suggest a
troubled time in their love affair ("green house"). Beyond that,
the narrator reiterates the theme of possession in the last two
lines: even in sleep, the lover is invaded. Still the intense
metaphorical diction and the allusive style say more about the
weather than specifically about their relationship. Moreover,
194
without the defining images and concepts of part one, no one would
know that the speaker is a black woman.
To reiterate, The Black Unicorn somehow reaches a diverse
audience, providing something for everyone: black, white; female
and male; lesbian and heterosexual. This "mass audience" appeal
is partly because the poetry is so obscure. The words of a
goddess-oracle are subject to myriad and personal interpretations.
The person behind the mask is mainly hidden. One final poem is a
major case in point for the voice of Lorde as mask-lover.
"Meet" (33-34) is one of the most complicated, abstruse
love poems in the book. Two pages long, the poem is cadenced,
rhythmical and overpowering, but still cryptic and solipsistic.
Because this poem is so totally different from Lorde's erotic
prose—pieces, because it almost defies summary, and because it is
a perfect example of Lorde as cerebral mask-lover, it is quoted in
full below:
Woman when we meet on the solstice
high over halfway between your world and mine
rimmed with full moon and no more excuses
your red hair burned my fingers as I spread you
tasting your ruff down to sweetness
and I forgot to tell you
I have heard you calling across this land
in my blood before meeting
and I greet you again
on the beaches in mines lying on platforms
in trees full of tail-tail birds flicking
and deep in your caverns of decomposed granite
even over my own laterite hills
after a long journey
licking your sons
while you wrinkle your nose at the stench.
195
Coming to rest
in the open mirrors of your demanded body
I will be black light as you lie against me
I will be heavy as August over your hair
our rivers flow from the same sea
and I promise to leave you again
full of amazement and our illuminations
dealt through the short tongue of color
or the taste of each other's skins as it hung
from our childhood mouths.
When we meet again
will you put your hands upon me
will I ride you over our lands
will we sleep beneath trees in the rain?
You shall get young as I lick your stomach
hot and at rest before we move off again
you will be white fury in my navel
I will be sweeping night
Mawulisa foretells our bodies
as our hands touch and learn
from each others hurt.
Taste my milk in the ditches of Chile and Ouagadougou
in Tema's bright port while the priestess of Larteh
protects us
in the high meat stalls of Palmyra and Abomey-Calavi
now you are my child and my mother
we have always been sisters in pain.
Come in the curve of the lion's bulging stomach
lie for a season out of the judging rain
we have mated we have cubbed
we have high time for work and another meeting
women exchanging blood
in'the innermost rooms of moment
we must taste of each other's fruit
at least once
before we shall both be slain. (33-34)
This poem elicits many possibilities for interpretation
because of its ambiguity. On one level, it is an "erotic" piece.
The eroticism is sustained - barely sometimes - through the
intense language and specific lines in each section (lines 4-5 and
196
12-13 in section one; lines 18 & 24 in section 2; line 50 in the
i
third section). However, even these lines are more intellectual
than sensual. In section one, for instance, the images raise
issues rather than resolving them. The woman is red-headed and
therefore white, for example, but "red" also suggests flame and
heat since the woman "burns*1 the narrator. In lines 12 and 13,
"decomposed granite" and "laterite hills" suggest "moonstone" and
"opal.” Granite is a hard, durable stone; "laterite" is "a reddish
ferruginous soil formed in tropical regions by the decomposition
of the underlying rocks" (Random House College Dictionary 757).
But neither meaning explains why or how the women are compared to
*
stones. j
Each section of the poem abounds with incompatible,
incongruous images and metaphors. The first three sections begin
with sensual imagery, but move quickly beyond that level. Each
section also ends with lines which are "encoded," whose meanings
are perhaps meant to be clear only to the speaker's lover (and |
even she might have to guess).
Section one, for example, ends describing the speaker's
lover as "licking your sons/ while you wrinkle your nose at the
stench." This image is incompatible with the preceding comparison
of stones, and it is a weak allusion to African wild life (echoed
in sections 3 & 4). Section two is perhaps the "easiest" or most
accessible section, but even there, some lines are cryptic, such
197
as "heavy as August over your hair" and "short tongues of color."
The last two lines, neither sensually nor intellectually
appealing, defy interpretation.
Writing about the theme of power in Lorde's poetry, Lynda
Koolish sees the style in "Meet" as exemplifying power, both
within the poem and outside it ("The Poetry of Audre Lorde" 12).
She also sees the poem as being spoken by a "priestess on solstice
night," and sees the dialectics in the poem as "an act of healing,
a place where Black and white women meet" (8). Finally, she says
Lorde "borrows from the legend of Mawulisa as a prophecy for the
possibility of the deepest healing" (9). Of all these claims,
only the first two, about "power" and the priestess' voice, seem
applicable. As a priestess, the narrator "borrows" from Mawulisa
because she is^ Mawulisa, but "healing" hardly seems a major
concern, nor do interracial love affairs. Although Lorde disclaims
an interest in "art for art's sake," this poem does show an
interest in the power of "language for language's sake." A mask,
or person in possession, has to speak and perform, but not
necessarily to be clear. The words are an end in themselves.
Much more could be said about this poem - each line opens up
to discussion, but not necessarily to clarity. For example, one
element of lesbian love affairs in the potential for being
sisters and mothers, or for mutual female nurturance. Yet, that
hardly explains the last two lines of section two: "now you are my
198
child and my mother / we have always been sisters in pain."
Finally, the poem ends on an eerie, desperate (not erotic or
sensual) note, suggesting that the women should make love one last
time before their imminent deaths.
If this "love" poem has any erotic appeal, it is definitely
intellectual or cerebral eroticism. Given how outspoken Lorde can
be, she is deliberately vague and abstract (despite many concrete
images) in "Meet." Given the voice and persona in part one, that
of a Goddess-warrior, it is only natural that a mask-as-lover
would speak in this manner. A powerful mask would hardly show
emotions like a "normal" human being.
i
As Stepto observes, Lorde does use art to shape and focus
her experiences and opinions in the other three sections of The
Black Unicorn. The love poems, especially, are an extreme
demonstration of this artistically shaped and deliberately
controlled and distanced voice. Ironically, in the poems where
many poets are most vulnerable, emotional and open, Lorde is most
inacessible, cerebral, and closed. These qualities, as mentioned,
cause The Black Unicorn to be interpreted in myriad and strange
ways. For example, Mary J. Carruthers sees the book as an example
of the trend among lesbian-feminists to "deal with life at the
level of metaethics - its social, psychic, and aesthetic
underpinnings, which are articulable only in myth; their
metaethics takes its structure from a complex poetic image of
199
lesbian relationship" ("Re-Vision" 294). Carruthers also says
that Lorde's poetry is "apocalyptic" and, alluding to poems in the
other sections, "Moreso than her white fellows [sic], Lorde takes
violence as a central, dominant theme for her poetry" (319).
Neither lesbian "metaethics" nor violence per se dominates The
Black Unicorn. The dominant image and voice is that of an
authoritative, powerful, supernatural black female persona, as
defined in part one of the book.
Lorde's inclusion in No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by
Women (eds. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass,1973) is ironic: she is
frequently "masked" in her poetry. In fact, lines from a poem by I
Barbara Smith are applicable to Lorde. Writing about Angelina
Weld Grimke, a black poet who sometimes "passed" as white she
says,
She merely warns me
in a hidden tongue
that for survival
we must often play invisible,
the Masquerade,
must save our best and
darkest selves for us. ("Theft" 180)
Lorde is hardly invisible in The Black Unicorn, but she does use
"a hidden tongue" for both concealment and empowerment. Lorde
turns the tables on both her enemies and her lovers: invincible
and impervious to anyone's disdain or attack, the "mask" forces
everyone to see and deal with her artistic persona with respect,
if not with awe. Perhaps, then, behind that mask, as she says in
i
I __
200
"125th Street," she is "laughing" her name "into echo" which "all
the world will remember."
Notes
Lorde's other books of poetry are Cables to Rage (Paul
Breman, Heritage Series, London: 1970), New York Head Shop and
Museum (Broadside Press, Detroit: 1974) and Between Ourselves
(Point Reyes,CA: Eidolon Editions, 1976). The first four of these
are out of print.
2
Dudley Randall, Eugene Redmond, and Sherley Anne Williams
among others, note this difference of orientation as a major one
in Afro-American literature.
3 i
The title poem not only calls up the context of the j
European unicorn, it also might allude to Dudley Randall's
derisive poem, "Black Poet, White Critic," which reads:
A critic advises
not to write on controversial subjects
like freedom or murder,
but to treat universal themes
and timeless symbols i
like the white unicorn.
A white unicorn? (emph. mine)
(p.234 in S. Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry,
1973)
4
Most of The Black Unicorn would have been written around
the time of Lorde's first biopsy (roughly, in the fall of 1977),
when she started to think seriously about being one-breasted. The
masectomy occurred in 1979. My sources for this information are
The Cancer Journals, and "The Transformation of Silence into
Language and Action" (MLA papar, 1977. rpt. in Sister Outsider,
40-44).
“*Even though some of the poems were published previously,
they have a similar tone - hence, possibly, their inclusion in
this volume. It is as if Lorde had already used voices in this
vein, and then grew into, or discovered a way to organize and use
them.
202
Chapter Six: Conclusions
We are the women whom nobody, seemingly, cares about, who
are made to feel inadequate, stupid and backward . . . Who
will revere the Black woman? . . . Who will glorify and
proclaim her beautiful image?
- Abbey Lincoln
Despite our insistence that because of our experiences as
Blacks, we are, as critics of Black literature, more
perceptive about and responsive to the writings of other
Blacks, we seldom bring our Black experiences to bear in our
critical writings.
- Sherley Anne Williams
Our point of departure is the knowledge that an asethetic
mode is a value system. We can probably allow ourselves the
additional given that aesthetic responses are to some extent
culture controlled.
- Carolyn Fowler
**************
This study ends as it began - with the works and insights of
three critics to serve as rationale, as both beginning, and
ending. These three epigraphs are directly connected to the
three with which the first chapter started; they share common
goals and insights with this study. Black women will revere black
women (cf. Lincoln). Moreover, black feminist literary critics
must bring all of themselves to the works they critique - not
merely their "blackness," as Williams suggests. Finally, this
study clearly reveals a methodology based in the assumption that
"an aesthetic mode is a value system," as Fowler says.
203
In the first chapter, I raised some initial questions and
posited theories which the four main chapters attempted to answer.
The first question (implicit, rather than explicit) was, what does
it mean to read and interpret black women poets from the
interpretive strategies of a black feminist literary critic? It
means that first, black women poets are seen as an "autonomous"
group of writers, albeit in relationship to their class, ideology,
and any other variables that influence their art. It means,
further, that I have attempted to read these women's poetry on
several levels: not only in terms of their race, or in terms of
their gender, but in a context of both. The theories of Henderson
and Showalter were the starting points of this study but more
importantly, the questions which Mary Helen Washington asked were
its impetus. My methodology has consisted of seeking answers to
her questions, and to related questions. In doing an initial,
"pioneering" study of these four black women poets, some answers
are apparent: in treating these poets as "case studies," I have
tried to approximate Barbara Christian's method, though on a far
more limited and less objective scope, in Black Women Novelists.
As she puts it, "I have attempted to illuminate the novels of
these writers rather than set them up against inappropriate
criteria. That is, I have attempted to let the essential qualities
of their works shine forth so readers can judge for themselves
what is effective and what is not" (xi). Here, I have tried to
204
illuminate the stylej^ of these poets, in terms of their being
black women.
The signals which inform us that a black woman speaks are
varied. Just as there is no monolithic definition of a black
woman, there is no single standard by which a black female poet
can be recognized. With the four poets discussed here, the
"signals" vary from subtle vocal intonation to overt signs in
both syntax and diction. Regarding the black woman's myths and
cultural-communal bases for her art, these poets provide several
answers. For Clifton, the basis is her own female relatives,
friends, and ancestresses. For Williams, one basis for the poetry
is the blues - whether she constructs it as a vehicle for her own
"blues" (story - autobiography), or, as a medium to retell the
story of Bessie Smith. Moreover, with both Clifton and Williams,
their being from working-class backgrounds enables them to see
value in black women who would usually either be treated as
pathological victims or dismissed altogether. Jordan's satirical,
feminist poetry is based in the colloquial diction of "ordinary"
black women. Audre Lorde, of course, bases her voice, at least in
The Black Unicorn, in African mythology and religion. In each
case, however, the women draw equally upon being both female and
black in their poetry. Finally, as to how this manifests itself
in the poetry - that should be obvious. The women write, as
Brooks said all poets should, from their own milieu. This means
205
that Clifton's voice, "soft" sometimes, and particularly in
comparison with Jordan and Lorde, sounds the nuances and tones of
women whom she has known. Williams starts from the base of a
community of women friends with whom she grew up.
From these four case studies, it should also be apparent
that their art embodies a value system based in a unique
perception which black women have of themselves, as well as of the
rest of the world. Jordan and Lorde exemplify this concept most
totally in their poetry. Their stance is, "This is how JE, a black
woman, perceive myself, and everything else." Far from
internalizing the definitions and stereotypes of "other," these 1
women articulate and define a world, in both their lives and their
poetry, which establishes them as the center, the defining
concept. In other words, their art does contain (like anyone
else's) a value system: they value themselves as writers, as black
women, as visionaries, as the case may be. They do not, in their
poetry, give credence to anyone else's values as primary.
Even as Francis E.W. Harper dealt with both being female and
black, and as Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks do, these four
poets perceive the world from the perspective of black women.
There is no either/or bifurcation. Walker's collective-individual
voice re-appears in Clifton's "Miss Rosie" and in Williams's "Any
Woman's Blues." Jordan's satirical black personas, similarly, deal
with a perception of the world which is individual and collective
206
- particularly if the "collective" is the masses of black women.
Lorde, in her Goddess persona, takes the "mule of the world," the
"strong black woman," to an ultimate level. In one way or another,
these four poets share several characteristics mentioned by
Filomina Chioma Steady (in her The Black Woman. Cross-Culturally
j
1981). They share an African heritage; they are aware of - having
experienced - "marginalization"; they advocate "self-reliance as a
I
necessary ideology" and a "less antagonistic 'feminism' [than
their white counterparts]" (8-34). As Barbara Smith writes about
this particular brand of feminsm, "The concept of the simultaneity
of oppression is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding
of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant
i
ideological contributions of Black feminst thought"
("Introduction" xxxii).
While this quotation applies to all four poets, their focus
is not, entirely on oppression so much as on "celebration"
(Clifton & Williams) and enlightenment (Jordan and Lorde). Each
poet seems particularly aware that the words and ideas of black
women have been ignored, slighted, and distorted. Hence, their
poetry and ideology Ls corrective and educational, whether or not
they mean them to be. Steady, for example, thanks (among others)
"the award winning June Jordan" in the preface to her collection.
Another anthology (as well as a chapter in the text) begins with a
quotation from Clifton (La Frances Rose-Rodgers, ed. The Black
207
Woman 1980). That chapter, by Geraldine L. Wilson, repeatedly
refers to Clifton's Generations, her life and her poetry, to
support her points about the perceptions and worldviews of African
women ("The Self-Group Actualization of Black Women" 301-314).
Each of these women, to use another term, is a "womanist,"
as defined by Alice Walker:
WOMANIST 1. from womanish. . . . a black feminst or
feminist of color . . . usually referring to outra
geous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior.
2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/
or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's cul
ture, women's emotional flexibility . . . and women's
strength. Committed to survival and wholeness of en
tire people, male and female"
(In Search of xii)
******************
I share with Claudia Tate the belief that "This book
originates in the belief that no one can promote the black woman
writer's literary well-being better than she can herself" (Black
Women Writers at Work xxvi). Tate means, obviously, not just the
writers, but editors such as herself. Since she, Barbara Smith,
Mary Helen Washington, Mari Evans and others share this
perspective, they either edit the anthologies or write the
criticism themselves. These writers contribute invaluably to this
study. When it was started, there were only Stetson's anthology,
Smith's essay, and Washington's essays and anthologies. In the
past three years, more than twenty books about and by black women
have appeared, as well as one magazine (Sage Atlanta, GA.)
208
dedicated solely to the black woman: not as, necessarily "doubly"
(or triply) oppressed, but to a study, a definition, an
interpretation of herself on her own terms, on her grounds, and in
her perspective. As Hortense Spillers says, "Essentially the
black woman as artist, as intellectual spokesperson for her own
cultural apprenticeship, has not existed before, for anyone. At
the source of her own symbol-making task, this community of
writers confronts, therefore, a tradition of work that is quite
recent, its continuities broken and sporadic" ("A Hateful Passion"
297). And yet, I have tried to enter this tradition, as a critic,
to see a continuity that is not all that "broken," nor all that
sporadic. My concern is - and here, I do not pretend
"objectivity" - that these women are seen as artists, as
"intellectual spokespersons," as poets in their own rights. If
this study has been too "uncritical," it is because of my primary
goal, which was to present how and what the poet does, not
necessarily how well. the question should come up, then these
poets should be judged in a context of their peers, such as Sonia
Sanchez, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Carolyn Rodgers, Gloria
Naylor and Jayne Cortez, among others. That issue, however,
remains for another study, another book. My focus here has been
on the cultural (female and black) basis of the poetry in order to
document the fact that it exists, rather than to critique that
basis. This study, like many which I have cited, attempts to
209
address a void: a void of serious, analytical study of black women
poets, utilizing a cultural, as well as a literary strategy. I
end by beginning, and contributing to what is, hopefully, a
continuous dialogue about the style, content, cultural basis, and
importance of black women writers.
210
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary
Clifton, Lucille. Generations: A Memoir. New York: Random, 1976.
. Good News About the Earth. New York: Random, 1972.
. Good Times. New York: Random, 1969.
. An Ordinary Woman. New York: Random, 1974.
. "A Simple Language." (Personal Statement). Black Women
Writers (1950-1980) A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans.
New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.
. Two Headed Woman. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1980.
Jordan, June. "Feminism is Not a Narrow Preoccupation." Sojourner:
The Women's Forum. 10.8 (1985): 16-17.
. "Foreword." in her Civil Wars (Collected Essays). New York:
Beacon, 1981. ix-xii.
. "Letter to R. Buckminster Fuller (1964)." Civil Wars. 23-28.
. Living Room: New Poems. New York: Thunder's Mouth P , 1985.
. "One Way of Beginning This Book." Civil Wars, xv-xix.
. Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980. Boston: Beacon, 1980.
. "Thinking About My Poetry." 1977. Civil Wars. 122-129.
. Things That I do in the Dark: Selected Poems. 1977. Boston:
Beacon, 1981.
—— . "Where Is the Love?" 1978. Civil Wars. 141-146.
Lorde, Audre. "Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining
Difference." 1980. in her Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. New York: Crossing P , 1984. 114-123.
. The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978.
. Chosen Poems - Old and New. New York: Norton, 1982.
. The Cancer Journals. Argyle,New York: Spinsters, Ink. 1984.
. "An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich." 1981. Sister
Outsider. 81-109.
. "My Words Will be There." (Personal Statement). Black Women
Writers. Ed. Mari Evans. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.
261-268.
. "An Open Letter to Mary Daly." 1979. Sister Outsider, 66-71.
. "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." 1978. Sister Out
sider, 53-59.
. Zami: A New Spelling of my Name. Watertown,Mass: Persephone
P , 1982.
Williams, Sherley Anne. Author's Preface to "Meditations on
History." Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black
Women Writers. Ed. Mary Helen Washington. New York: Anchor-
Doubleday, 1980. 195-199.
. "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry."
Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature,
Art, and Scholarship. Eds. Michael S. Harper and Robert B.
Stepto. Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1979. 123-135.
. "Foreword." Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston,
1937; Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1978. v-xv.
. The Peacock Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1975.
. Some One Sweet Angel Chile. New York: William Morrow, 1982.
. "Tell Martha Not to Moan." 1968. The Black Woman: An Antho-
logy._Ed. Toni Cade. New York: Mentor/NAL, 1970. 42-55.
. "Author's Afterwards." in her Give Birth to Brightness; A
Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature. New York: Dial P ,
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