Zalka Peetruza and Other Poems
Raymond Garfield Dandridge(1928)
A collection of poems by RAYMOND GARFIELD
DANDRIDGE. The volume includes new works as
well as poems that had been published previously
in his 1928 collection, THEPOET ANDOTHER
POEMS. Produced by the McDonald Press of
Cincinnati, the volume references the poem
“Zalka Peetruza” that was one of five Dandridge
poems had been included six years earlier in
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON’s anthology, THE
BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY (1922).
This poem, whose title was followed by the paren-
thetical note that Zalka Peetruza was a woman
“Christened Lucy Jane,” chronicled the transfor-
mation of an ordinary woman into an exotic other.
“She danced, near nude, to tom-tom beat, / With
swaying arms and flying feet,” reports the absorbed
and observant speaker. Yet, despite the “swirling
spangles, gauze, and lace,” it is the face of Lucy
Jane, aka Zalka Peetruza, that does not partici-
pate in the performance.
Dandridge’s poem suggests the alienation of
the woman performer whose “eyes [are] obsessed
with vacant stare” and whose “heart stood still”
throughout the dance. The distance that Lucy
Jane maintains suggests that her appearance is
staged on a number of levels and that it has dis-
cernible traumatic implications. The dance by
Zalka Peetruza is cultivated for the sake of audi-
ence gratification rather than personal satisfaction,
and in this way it speaks to the unfeeling and de-
humanizing commodification of particular bodies
and experiences for “art’s” sake.576