Following the death of her husband, Clifton
endured breast cancer in 1994 and kidney failure
in 1997. She received a kidney transplant from
her daughter Alexia. Clifton lost her daughter
Frederica to a brain tumor in 2000 and her son
Channing to heart failure in 2004.
Throughout her life, Clifton has continued
to teach creative writing across the country at
small and large universities alike. Although she
retired in 2005 from St. Mary’s College of
Maryland, where she held the Hilda C. Landers
Chair in the Liberal Arts, as of 2007 she still
returned to teach for at least part of each sub-
sequent year. She counts among her friends
some of the most important writers of the twen-
tieth century, including Toni Morrison, Gwen-
dolyn Brooks, and Ishmael Reed. Her name is
familiar to children, students, adult readers,
and scholars alike.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–5
In lines 1 through 3, Clifton asserts that her hips
are large and that they must have adequate room
for movement. From the start, the sounds and
rhythms employed by Clifton mimic the swaying
of hips. In line 4, Clifton says that her hips
cannot squeeze into small spaces. Perhaps the
expansiveness of her hips transcends the narrow-
ness of the culture—as if white American culture
in particular, with its obsessive concerns with
women’s weight, is too constraining for the mag-
nificent hips Clifton pays homage to. Clifton
places a comma in the middle of line 5, signaling
a turn to a new thought. In the second half of line
5, Clifton attaches the notion of freedom to her
hips.
Lines 6–10
The notion begun in the second part of line 5
continues through line 10. She touches on the
topic of slavery in this section, asserting that her
hips are not slaves. Her hips have the freedom to
be where they will and to do whatever she would
like them to do. Her hips, then, become symbolic
of emancipation, a word that resonates with
both racial and gender inequalities of the past.
Emancipation, on the one hand, describes the
freeing of slaves during the American Civil
War; the Emancipation Proclamation is an
important and significant national document.
In addition, the term emancipation can also
refer to voting rights. African American men
were given the right to vote in 1870 with the
ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the
Constitution. Women, both black and white, on
the other hand, did not become enfranchised
until much later with the passage of the Nine-
teenth Amendment in 1920.Lines 11–15
Line 12 is nearly identical to line 11, with only one
word different between them. In addition, the two
differing words begin with the same initial sound.
The similarity of the lines draws attention to the
differing words while at the same time creating
the effect of an incantation. That is, the words of
these lines, when read aloud, sound like words of
magic, designed to enchant. Indeed, as the poem
continues, Clifton ascribes supernatural qualities
to her hips. She also speaks of her hips as if they
have existence independent from her. She says
that in the past, her hips have enchanted a male
and completely confused him. The final five lines
of ‘‘homage to my hips’’ move the poem from one
in which the speaker’s concern is with claiming
space for her hips (and by extension, her whole
body) to one in which the hips are powerful tools
of supernatural strength.MEDIA
ADAPTATIONS The Academy of American Poets maintains
an audio clip of Clifton reading ‘‘homage to
my hips’’ on their website at http://www.poets.
org/poet.php/prmPID/79.
A video recording of Clifton reading ‘‘hom-
age to my hips’’ and other poems was made
on March 17, 1988. The Library of Congress
website has posted this recording as a web-
cast at http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/
feature_wdesc.php?rec=3656.homage to my hips