Clifton, an accomplished poet, died at 73 this week, and the feminist community has been among those to honor her life and work. Feministe wrote that Clifton successfully articulated "what it means to be a black woman in America, to have the legacy of slavery lapping at her ankles, and what it meant to see her elders and icons have to bear the daily slog of being othered in a racist land." Feminist Law Professors noted that "Clifton frequently wrote about women's experiences. Some of her well-known poems addressed experiences with menstruation, aging and infertility."
Stacia L. Brown described Clifton as a poet who "instruct[s] us that there are endless approaches to black womanhood, countless ways to become influential or strong or wise within our culture. There is no linear track. There is no 'proper way' of doing things. There is no truly irredeemable scandal, no truly insular success. We can quietly rebel against centuries-old archetypes. We can be, quite simply, ourselves–even after everyone we know has developed a staid concept of what that might mean."
As the Poetry Foundation says, "One always feels the looming humanness around Lucille Clifton’s poems—it is a moral quality that some poets have and some don’t." Clifton was indeed successful at conveying "humanness," and its accompanying sensuality, physicality, and femininity. Here is "Homage to My Hips":
these hips are big hips.-TLF
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top
0 comments:
Post a Comment