Aliki Caloyeras

Oral Presentation: Cheryl Clarke, “After Mecca:” Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2005).

Cheryl Clarke:
~ Undergraduate at Howard University 1965-1969
~ Practicing poet, essayist, and teacher in 1970s and 1980s
~ Returned to graduate school in 1991 for PhD

~ Writes “After Mecca” as a cultural insider, as a part of the community she is studying and analyzing
~ “After Mecca” fills a void in African American scholarship (especially of the Black Arts Movement), which has tended to neglect the work of black women and gay and lesbian poets

Thesis: In the “brief but generative period” from 1968 to 1978, “black women exercised much artistic and writing agency,” and although black women poets have not traditionally been credited with a central position in the Black Arts Movement, they responded to it and influenced its development through their participation.

Discursive Period: 1968-1978
~ After tumultuous and violent period of the1960s which saw the assassinations and murders of Medgar Evers; Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley (4 little girls killed in the Birmingham Baptist church bombing); James Chaney, Michaels Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (Civil Rights foot soldiers); Jimmy Lee Jackson (protester); Viola Liuzzo; Malcolm X; MLK; as well as Watts Riots (1965).
~ Rise in publication of works by black authors: 1945-1975 about 1000 books published by black poets (almost twice as many as in all preceding years); Of these, about 695 were published after 1968, with about 200 by black women.

Black Arts Poetry: “The new poetry spoke to black Americans’ righteous anger at white Americans, yes! And much of it spoke to new anxieties, interior energies and soul quests enabled by the new consciousness. . .” (20).
~ Re-education/ “Negro to Black” conversion: what does it mean to be black?
~ Fear and anxiety: what does it mean to be authentic?
~ Assumption of subject position: does subject mean (heterosexual) man?

Mecca (apartment building in Chicago & center of Muslim world) as Trope:
~ turning away from the (white) West
~ struggle to imagine a world where blacks are not relegated to the margins
~ deliverance from oppression
~ site of many deaths
~ requires mourning

Black Women Poets: Clarke analyzes individual poems throughout the book by various poets including Jayne Cortez, Carolyn Rodgers, Elouise Loftin, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. Also compares poetry to fiction of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

Key Themes and Tactics:
~ Connection between black music and black poetry, which works to destabilize the ‘lyric I’
~ Humor and parody
~ Black vernacular speech
~ Black women’s sexuality and feminist liberation (often heterosexual)
~ Critique and correction of male counterparts for being too closed and exclusive.
~ Call for more inclusive practices moving away from gender and (hetero)sexuality toward androgynous “Blackhood”

Key Figures:

Gwendolyn Brooks’ “In the Mecca”:

~ 1960s poetry theorizes state of ‘the race’ and ‘the revolution’ and clears the way for writers to transform the literary canon in the 1970s.
~ Loss of lyric space
o R&B as space where lyric is reinvented, where “unrequited love stands for the pain of racial exclusion and destruction” as with Aretha Franklin’s “The Thrill is Gone” (24). Tradition of transforming lyric space.
o “In the Mecca” as postmodern epic elegy. The narrative of the poem finds a mother on a quest to find her daughter, who has disappeared. She encounters various figures in the community who are given voice in the poem, but their voices are seldom reliable. Subjectivity shifts drastically in poem; thus, no singular lyric ‘I’
o Poem parodies multiple traditions and modes both European and African American. Parody both pays homage to and critiques its source.
o Themes of corrupted sexuality in poem–both hetero- and homo-
o Loss of lyric space enacts erasure of black community and loss of daughter. Death of daughter signifies loss of female power in the space of Black Arts Movement.
o The reader becomes a witness and is pulled into act of mourning with mother figure.
~ Poem (and community) requires collective mourning. Mourning allows for regeneration.

Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls:
~ Claimed allegiance to West Coast feminist-lesbian community
~ Although influenced by Black Arts Movement rejects heterosexism of the movement.
o Both black and white feminist-lesbian writers were influenced by Black Arts poetics, use of vernacular, connection to popular music, performance and militancy.
~ Anti-commercial (anti-Broadway) but pro-community (all-inclusive female community)–challenged male-centered Black Theater.
~ Reclamation of “colored” and “girls”
~ Performative: Symbolic making of “choreopoem” builds a new community committed to imagination; psychic liberation; sexual liberation; sacred/secular music (jazz); the eradication of violence against women (rape); and celebration of women’s endurance

Audre Lorde:
~ “Theory of simultaneity of oppression”: Lorde rejects the sexism and homophobia of black nationalism and classism an racism of mainstream white feminism
~ Revisionist motherhood: separate sex from procreation
~ “Loss of political faith and recuperation of black matrilineal and diasporic literacy” (131)
~ “Unicorn” as lesbian sign (traced back to West African mythology)
~ Lamentation and recuperation (hope for progressive future)