the pun on “hides” (as of “softness cured”) leads directly to the image of
ghosts known by their large white ¤ngers in the dark. Do those ghost ¤ngers
belong to the predominantly white glove wearers? Mullen doesn’t press the
point: gloves are “tender” and “dainty”; they make the wrists look “delicate.”
The Trimmings poems thus have a complicated derivation. On the one
hand, one could read this particular playful prose poem in conjunction with
the short paragrammatic pieces cited by McCaffery in his essay for “The
Politics of the Referent”—poems by Bruce Andrews, bpNichol, and McCaf-
fery himself. On the other hand, Mullen’s piece is more overtly political
and engaged in the contemporary discourse about gender and race. Indeed,
Mullen internalizes the theoretical paradigm of Language poetics so as to
re¤gure the relationship between the various ethnicities and communities to
which she belongs.
In a 1993 lecture called “Visionary Literacy: Art, Literature and Indige-
nous African Writing Systems,” for example, Mullen uses the deconstruc-
tionist analysis of écriture to call into question the standard explanatory
models of African American vernacular orality:
That black literary traditions privilege orality... has become some-
thing of a commonplace, in part because it’s based upon what seems
to be a reasonable and accurate observation... Presumably, for the
African-American writer there is no alternative to production of this
authentic black voice but silence. This speech-based and racially in-
®ected aesthetic that produces a black poetic diction requires that the
writer acknowledge and reproduce in the text a signi¤cant difference
between the spoken and written language of African Americans and
that of other Americans.^23As pointed out by Aldon Nielsen, who discusses this lecture in his Black
Chant, Mullen’s proposed study of African signage, as the background for
understanding the relationship of oral to written, “has much to tell us about
the falsity of the assumed opposition between singing and signing in both
Africa and America” (36). And he cites Mullen’s statement:
The larger question I am asking is this: How has the Western view of
writing as a rational technology historically been received and trans-
formed by African Americans whose primary means of cultural trans-
mission are oral and visual, rather than written, and for whom graphic
systems are associated not with instrumental human communication
but with techniques of spiritual power and spirit possession... In or-168 Chapter 8