650 The American Century: Literature since 1945or race. So, in a poem called “Arrow” (1989), she quietly subverts those literary
positions that reduce black people to marginal caricatures and women to convenient
symbols of the elusive, the ineffable. And in her long poem sequence, Thomas and
Beulah (1987), she resurrects the rarely acknowledged contribution of working-class
blacks to American life by telling the story of the courtship, marriage, and subsequent
life of her own grandparents.
The perspective of Wanda Coleman (1946–) is very different, but just as racially
inflected in its own way. So, in turn, is that of Nathaniel Mackey (1947–).
An electrifying reader and performer of her own work, Coleman has said that her
“one desire” is “through writing” to “control, destroy, and create social institutions.”
“I want to wield the power that belongs to the pen,” she has declared. Using nervy
rhythms, a stark idiom, and an elliptical line, she has done just that, in poems that
recall racial violence (“Emmett Till” (1990)), the violence done to women, black
women in particular (“American Sonnet (10)” (1993)), and the constant threat, the
fear that eats away at the soul in the urban ghetto (“Today I Am a Homicide in the
North of the City” (1990)). Mackey has other priorities, although many of them are
also marked by his African-Americanism. “Music includes so much,” he has
suggested, “it’s social, it’s religious, it’s metaphysical, it’s aesthetic, it’s expressive, it’s
creative, it’s destructive.” The music that specifically “just covers so much” for him is
modern jazz. Combined in poems like “Falso Brilliante” (1985) and “Song of the
Andoumboulou” (1994) are the influence, the idiom of jazz pioneers like Charlie
Parker and Thelonious Monk – and the experiments in breath and line of such
projectivist poets as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Jazz is also important to
Yusef Komunyakaa, as a poem like “February in Sydney” (1989) indicates, since it
uses memories of the jazz musician Dexter Gordon as the source, the base line for a
sort of free-form meditation. But, with Komunyakaa there are other, racially tinged
experiences at work in the poetry too: his boyhood in rural Louisiana (“Sunday
Afternoons” (1992)), his years as a soldier and war correspondent in Vietnam
(“Facing It” (1988)), and, sometimes, a strange, surreal mixture of the two (“Banking
Potatoes” (1993)).
With Ntozake Shange (1948–), African-Americanism has led to a studied rejection
of literary convention. Born Paulette Williams, in 1971 she assumed an African
name that announced her new priorities: Ntozake translates as “she who comes with
her own things,” and Shange as “who walks like a lion.” Living up to that name, six
years later she produced a choreopoem, a mesh of poetry, music, and drama, called
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shange has
explained that for colored girls is about “our struggle to become all that is forbidden,
all that is forfeited by our gender, all that we have forgotten.” In it, seven women
wearing the colors of the rainbow plus brown, the color of the earth, perform twenty
poems that trace their development from youth to maturity. The poems focus on the
lack of understanding between men and women, the misrecognition of women
and the pain of unfulfillment, unrequited love. Marked by the idioms and inflections
of the African-American oral tradition, they reject conventional grammar and
spelling, the standard English that Shange sees as reflective of the hierarchiesGGray_c05.indd 650ray_c 05 .indd 650 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM