648 The American Century: Literature since 1945sexual and reproductive functions. And sometimes, as in some gangsta rap, the
sexism is nowhere near being latent. “i wish I knew how it would feel / to be free,”
says Nikki Giovanni in “Woman Poem” (1983), and then goes on to link her historical
imprisonment as a black with her cultural imprisonment as a woman. “its a sex
object if you’re pretty / and no love / or love and no sex if you’re fat,” she observes;
“get back fat black woman be a mother / grandmother strong thing but not a
woman.” This sense of the redoubled oppression of black women, on the grounds of
gender as well as race, has led Sonia Sanchez to celebrate her attachment to others
like herself. “I cried,” Sanchez declares in “Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love” (1984),
“For myself ... For all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out
anticipating civilization and finding ruins.” It has encouraged Mari Evans, in turn, to
celebrate the simple fact of her own black womanhood. “I am a black woman,” she
announces in the poem with that title (1970), “tall as a cypress / strong / beyond all
definition”; “look on me and be / screwed.” For June Jordan (1936–), the edge to her
experience as woman is more devastating and traumatic. A victim of rape, she has
seen in the violence she has suffered a connection with other forms of violence,
more general and historical, perpetrated in Africa and America. “It all violates self-
determination:” all forms of racial oppression rupture personhood, personal and
political space. And in “Poem About My Rights” (1989) she explores and insists
upon the ineluctable link between her own past and, say, “South Africa / penetrating
into Namibia penetrating into / Angola.” “I am the history of rape,” she confides, “ /
I am the history of the rejection of who I am / I am the history of the terrorized
incarceration of / my self.” The connection between herself and history does not
stop there, however, with the simple, sad acknowledgment of the evil done to her as
a black woman and the evil done to black people in many parts of the world. “I am
not wrong. Wrong is not my name,” she insists, “My name is my own my own.” She
will fight back, so setting an example to others similarly violated. “From now on,”
she tells all her oppressors, past and present, “my resistance / my simple and daily
and nightly self-determination / may very well cost you your life.”
The violence which seeps into Jordan’s work is, unsurprisingly, there in the work
of many other African-American poets. It is part of the suppressed history of the
race that Lucille Clifton invokes in her poem “at the cemetery, walnut grove
plantation, south carolina, 1989” (1991). It makes Audre Lorde insist in “Power”
(1978) that, pace W. B. Yeats, the difference between poetry and rhetoric is not the
difference between the argument with oneself and others but “being / ready to kill /
yourself / instead of your children.” That violence is also the determining feature,
perhaps, in the work of two other remarkable African-American poets of this period,
Etheridge Knight (1931–1991) and Michael Harper (1938–). Both Knight and
Harper, like so many other black writers, allow the rhythms of African-American
musical traditions to pulse through their work. So, in “A Poem for Myself (Or Blues
for a Mississippi Black Boy)” (1980), Knight exploits blues forms to tell a story of
black wandering from Mississippi to Detroit, Chicago, New York, then back to
Mississippi. And in “Ilu, the Talking Drum” (1980), he takes the black American life
experience in a full circle from Africa to the South then back to an Africa of the spiritGGray_c05.indd 648ray_c 05 .indd 648 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM