collective characteristics, activities, thoughts, and
ideas; she is linking all these signifiers to the
notion of a ‘‘people,’’ and thereby indirectly ask-
ing how they can be taken to cumulatively add up
to and define a certain understanding of a people.
I call this an indirect question because of the way
in which it is posed in the poem. Along with
various individuals and activities, Walker includes
interrogative locutions that have no determinate
referents: ‘‘to learn to know the reasons why and
the answers to and the people who and the places
whereandthedayswhen...’’Byrenderingthese
questions into the syntactical elements out of
which they are constructed in language, the mean-
ings of the questions, the objects they ask about,
are left to be decided. Their syntax, here, serves to
index a wider system of referentiality, and thus of
meaning in general, which is itself subjected to the
poem’s questioning. It is as if the speaker’s unfin-
ished questions were evoking ‘‘the perception of a
field, a beginning or an opening which requires
an endless production and reproduction.’’ The
‘‘sense’’ of the questions, if it were revealed, would
presumably evoke the ‘‘sense’’—the meaning, sensi-
bilities, and thoughts—of the people who ask them;
but without specifying the relation between the
questions and those people, Walker seems to be
asking one to consider the very idea of a ‘‘people’’
as implying the problematic of the constitution of
its meaning. How, then, does the meaning of ‘‘her’’
people relate to this series of appositions and open-
ended questions? Conversely, how does the struc-
ture of apposition inform this meaning? What
assures that these lists originate in, or refer to, a
singular entity which she names a ‘‘people’’? Finally,
what meaningful entity can contain these various
things, linking them together and underlying their
apposite appearance in the poem, without, how-
ever, announcing itself as such, i.e., by doing no
more than letting them ‘‘speak for’’ it?
I want to propose that,assuming these ques-
tions shape, to some degree, the formal structure
of the poems ofFor My People(which of course
does not exclude the possibility of other questions
being raised from other perspectives), answers to
them can be found when one reads the poems
sequentially as Walker’s attempt to think through
the problem of historicalrepresentation. The sec-
ond poem in the volume, ‘‘Dark Blood,’’ signals
such an attempt. It begins, ‘‘There were bizarre
beginnings in old lands for the making of me.’’
From the start, the poem announces itself as a
kind of historical inquiry. The ‘‘bizarre begin-
nings’’ which have ‘‘made’’ its speaker consist, in
part, of ‘‘sugar sands and islands of fern and pearl,
palm jungles and stretches of a never-ending sea.’’
Two stanzas later, the speaker proclaims that
‘‘Someday I shall go to the tropical lands of my
birth,’’ a journey which will enable her to ‘‘stand
on mountain tops and gaze on fertile homes
below.’’ By traveling to these faraway lands, she
suggests, it is possible to gain perspective on her
historico-geographical origins. Such a perspective,
in turn, entails ameaningfulgrasp or conceptual-
ization of her bizarre beginnings. This is an imag-
inary journey, one that the speaker expresses more
asawishthanasanaccomplishedfact,andforits
articulation in the poem it relies, like ‘‘For My
People,’’ on a list of places and things. However,
if these lists were more or less static catalogues
in ‘‘For My People,’’ here they become dynamic
forms of the experience of traveling toward,
through, and away from what is enumerated.
They become located, spatially and temporally, in
conjunction with the speaker’s experience of them.
‘‘Sense’’ thus seems to emerge out of the spatial and
temporal movement implied by the speaker’s his-
torical inquiry itself. But this is hardly a unified
sense, or without its deeper contradictions, as the
poem’s ending reveals:
And when I return to Mobile I shall go by the
way of Panama and Bocas Del Toro to the
littered streets and the one-room shacks of
my old poverty, and blazing suns of other
lands
may struggle then to reconcile the pride and
pain in me.
It is one thing to journey to the lands of one’s
origin, but quite another to come back to who
and where one is, here and now; for the latter
implies that one knows oneself in a profoundly
new way—and perhaps for the first time—as the
cumulative sum of those things that were revealed
through the historical inquiry. On her journey
back to her present circumstances, the speaker
discovers that the ‘‘old poverty’’ so characteristic
of the New World shaped who she is no less than
the Edenic ‘‘wooing nights of tropical lands and
the cool discretion of flowering plains.’’ As a
result, the idyllic perspective that was gained
on her ‘‘bizarre beginnings’’ is shot through with
the (perhaps more disconcerting) knowledge of its
historical unfoldings in the diaspora. To grasp the
wholeof this history of her ‘‘dark blood’’ now
means, for the speaker, a ‘‘struggle to reconcile
the pride and pain in me.’’Lineage