If history is such a mixed bag, Walker sug-
gests that this is due to two parallel, at times
contradictory ways of approaching it: on one
hand, an idealist-theoretical tendency that wishes
to ‘‘gaze on fertile homes’’ through its totalizing
recovery of ancient African origins, and on the
other, a materialist-diasporic tendency that fore-
grounds displacement, dispossession, fragmenta-
tion, and conditions of poverty. While the third
poem in the volume, ‘‘We Have Been Believers,’’
may signal a critique of the former of these ten-
dencies—‘‘We have been believers believing in the
black gods of an old land,’’ but ‘‘Now the needy
no longer weep and pray; the long-suffering arise,
and our fists bleed against the bars with a strange
insistency’’—the fourth and fifth poems, ‘‘South-
ern Song’’ and ‘‘Sorrow Home,’’ argue that his-
tory must be grasped first and foremost on the
level of its materiality; specifically, the materiality
of the body and its identification with the mate-
rial environment.
‘‘Southern Song’’ and ‘‘Sorrow Home’’ posit
an identification between body and place that is
premised on the threat of alienation. These poems
use the figure of the body to emphasize the need
to reclaim, to repossess one’s historyasthe very
condition of one’s material embodiment. The first
of these begins, ‘‘I want my body bathed again by
southern suns, my soul reclaimed again from
southern land.’’ This form of identification is
also figured as a kind of sleep or rest: ‘‘I want
my rest unbroken in the fields of southern earth.’’
Thus, to disturb the rest amounts to interrupting
the coherence of the identification: ‘‘I want no
mobs to wrench me from my southern rest.’’ The
speaker here imagines a non-alienated identifica-
tion as a kind of possession that links together
place, poem, the body, and the speaker’s self:
I want my careless song to strike no minor
key; no fiend to stand between my body’s
southern song—the fusion of the South, my
body’s song and me.
‘‘Sorrow Home’’ maintains this identification
with the South (which, meanwhile, has become a
proper name) while reestablishing it within the
idealization of ‘‘bizarre beginnings’’ that was pro-
posed in ‘‘Dark Blood.’’ The speaker now asserts
that ‘‘My roots are deep in southern life... I was
sired and weaned in a tropic world,’’ in contra-
distinction to the ‘‘walled in’’ life of the northern
cities. Yet here again the threat of alienation
seems not only imminent but inherent to this
way of conceiving the speaker’s identity with a
historico-geographical region. In other words,
identity-as-possession (Self¼South = History)
seems torequirethat the possibility of disposses-
sion/displacement be ever looming around or at
its margins:
O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating
in my bone and blood! How long will the
Klan of
hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep
me from my own?
Walker now offers a version of this history
of claiming what is one’s ‘‘own,’’ tracing the
movement from despair, through alienation, to
the triumph of reclamation. The poem ‘‘Delta’’ is
divided into three parts that roughly correspond
to this trajectory. The first part, while reasserting
the corporeal identification with place—‘‘I am a
child of the valley. / Mud and muck and misery
of lowlands / are on thin tracks of my feet’’—
takes this condition as not exactly the cause, but
as one of many symptoms of the misery of the
Delta’s inhabitants. The second part describes
this misery in terms of the alienation of the Del-
ta’s people from the products of their labor,
understood as their alienation from their ‘‘own’’
bodies (earth/place/self):
We tend the crop and gather the harvest but
not for ourselves do we labor,
not for ourselves do we sweat and starve and
spend
under these mountains we dare not claim,
here on this earth we dare not claim,
here by this river we dare not claim.
Walker goes on to stress that this kind of
alienation is akin to a state of sleep, revising her
earlier use of this figure in ‘‘Southern Song’’
where it stood for a positive love for and posses-
sion of that which is one’s own. In ‘‘Delta,’’ sleep
has become a state of unknowing, of suffering
and dispossession. To gain knowledge, and thus
to possess what is one’s own (i.e., history),
requires that sleep be interrupted and trans-
formed into a state of wakefulness:
for out of a deep slumber we are ’roused
to our brother who is ill
and our sister who is ravished
and our mother who is starving.
Out of a deep slumber truth rides upon us
and we wonder why we are helpless
and we wonder why we are dumb.
Out of a deep slumber truth rides upon us
and makes us restless and wakefulLineage