In ‘‘homage to my hips’’ Clifton is also asso-
ciating herself with the ‘‘Black Is Beautiful’’
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the period
when this poem was written. This movement
urged African Americans to reject western Euro-
pean notions of beauty and to instead embrace
Afrocentric features as their standard of beauty.
As the poet Alicia Ostriker notes in theAmerican
Poetry Review, ‘‘Clifton began writing during the
explosive Black Arts movement of the late 1960’s
and early 1970’s,’’ and she ‘‘records her womanly
conversion from bleaching cream and ‘whiteful
ways’ to the love of blackness.’’
Liberation from Expectation
Ajuan Maria Mance, writing in a chapter
fromRecovering the Black Female Body: Self-
Representations by African American Women,
argues, ‘‘In ‘homage to my hips,’ Clifton contin-
ues her pursuit of a new and emancipatory vision
of the black female corpus.’’ The wordemancipate
means to free from slavery or other restraint;
an emancipationist is someone who favors or
advocates emancipation from some legal, social,
or other restraint. Another term for an emancipa-
tionist is a liberationist.In‘‘homagetomyhips,’’
Clifton foremost plays the role of a women’s lib-
erationist. She remarks on the pettiness and nar-
rowness imposed by patriarchal and societal
expectations of women. She demands space—
space to move her large hips in a dance to her
own expansive soul. She also asserts that her hips
have more strength than a man’s. Revealing a
second role, Clifton’s assertion that her hips are
free, never having been contained by slavery,
reminds the reader that Clifton is not just a
woman but a woman of color, a woman whose
own great-great-grandmother was captured in
Africa and brought to North America. She cele-
brates her freedom in making a negating reference
to an institution that turned proud people into
chattel by depriving them of the most fundamental
of all human rights, the ownership of their own
bodies. Her statement that her hips have freedom
of movement and freedomof intention embodies
the abstraction of liberty itself. Nothing will
impede the forward progress of these powerful
hips, and by extension, the progress of a powerful
people.
Transformation from the Mundane to the
Supernatural
By the end of ‘‘homage to my hips,’’ Clifton’s
hips have assumed more than just the power of a
free, individual woman of color. They have
grown to large and supernatural proportions,
capable of overpowering and confusing a man.
Clifton refers directly to her hips being capable
of casting magical enchantments over a man.
The reference to magic suggests that Clifton
may be referring to juju, the magic of an object
or fetish believed by West Africans to hold
supernatural power. Clifton’s hips, with their
freedom and their strength, have not only natu-
ral human power but also the juju power of the
supernatural and of Clifton’s female ancestors.
In this brief poem, then, Clifton invokes the
spirits of the women who went before her,
women who were under the cruel reign of slavery
as well as those who were free in Africa, to
endow her hips with supernatural power.Style
Alliteration and Repetition
The poem ‘‘homage to my hips’’ consists of only
seventy-eight words organized into fifteen lines.
As with many of Clifton’s poems, ‘‘homage to
my hips’’ does not have capital letters, although
it is punctuated. The poem does not have regular
rhyme or meter, but strong sound and rhythmic
qualities are created by the use of repetition,
both of whole words and of sounds. The repeti-
tion of initial sounds is called alliteration, and
Clifton uses this device throughout the poem.
The repetition of sounds and words serves to
emphasize Clifton’s themes. In addition, through
the repeated sounds and words, the poem itself
takes on the rhythm of an incantation or magic
spell. Thus, both the meanings of the selected
words and the sounds of the words work dynam-
ically to convey the sense that the speaker is a
woman of power and possibility.Synecdoche
Synecdoche is a literary figure of speech in which
one part signifies the whole. For example, when
a sailing captain calls out, ‘‘All hands on deck!’’
he or she does not literally mean that everyone
on board should place their hands on the boat
deck. Rather, the captain is using the term
‘‘hand’’ to represent the whole sailor. For a syn-
ecdoche to work well, it should use an important
part of the whole, and it should be a part that is
directly connected to the topic. Thus, in the
above example, ‘‘hands’’ is a good choice as ahomage to my hips