PART TWO
Literature and Its Issues
Chapter 8
Families (p. 307)
RECONCILING WITH FATHERS: POEMS (p. 309)
LUCILLE CLIFTON
forgiving my father (p. 309)
Lucille Clifton’s extended analogy between paying one’s bills and seeking emotional
resolution between father and daughter begins with the language of blunt earnestness.
The speaker has been thinking hard. She has come to a conclusion. After many years
of delay, it’s time for a resolution. Although both her parents are dead, Clifton’s speak-
er focuses on the continuing emotional tug of unresolved pain and disappointment.
Both the speaker and her mother tried to get emotional nurture from the father, but,
as she notes, he was never capable of such commitment. He was too needy himself to
give to others, a trait that apparently ran in his family. In the analogy, the father never
had emotional reserves to give but instead was an “empty pocket” to the women who
hoped for more. In the last stanza of the poem, the speaker suggests that she is trying
to be rid of the exhausting blame game. She realizes that her father can give her noth-
ing. In a kind of neutral reconciliation with herself, she will have nothing more to do
with his memory. Neither parent can supply emotional restitution or ultimately satisfy
her. Her epiphany that her desires are futile leads to as much “forgiving” as she is ca-
pable of giving her father.
ROBERT HAYDEN
Those Winter Sundays (p. 310)
If we assume that the speaker of Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” is
the author himself (or a 1920s contemporary), we find ourselves in a Sunday morn-
ing atmosphere that may seem alien to students’ recent childhood experiences. Stu-
dents accustomed to central heating may not at first recognize the deprivation and
effort implied in making “banked fires blaze” in a wood- or coal-burning stove, fur-
nace, or fireplace to make the day’s activities possible in a drafty house in Buffalo,
New York. Hayden makes it clear from the first line that it is a daily sacrifice that the
father makes: “Sundays too my father got up early,” the speaker says (emphasis add-
ed). There is a priestly, almost godlike quality to the everyday “offices” that the adult
speaker, looking back, can view with awe, though the child of the past cannot. The
word offices here has connotations of religious service, and we are meant to see not
only the implications of the title but also other ways in which the father’s labors are
sacramental. The speaker does not invite us to be overly idealistic or sentimental,
however; we are given both the freshly polished shoes and the “chronic angers of that
house,” both the physical pain of daily labor and the archetypal wonder of creating
fire.
The realization that the father is keeping his family alive (“breaking” the cold)—
through his Sunday fire making but more important through his work throughout the
week—is echoed in the last lines of the poem. Repetition of the phrase “what did I
know” makes the last sentence more a lament than a question. An answer would
consider the difference in perspective that comes with adulthood: an acceptance of
ambivalence, perhaps, or an awareness that experiences may be interpreted without
necessarily assigning blame or assuming guilt. The ambiguities and gaps in the text
leave readers room to interpret the poem in the light of their own family dynamics; the
working-class nature of the poem’s setting provides a context that might add depth to
THEODORE ROETHKE
My Papa’s Waltz (p. 312)
The images in “My Papa’s Waltz” contrast with one another in ways that defy a sim-
plistic reading. Students who would sentimentalize the relationship must deal with the
undercurrent of danger implied by the connotations of the words whiskey, battered,
beat, and even death. The household is brought into chaos, and the mother clearly
disapproves. Yet those who jump to conclusions of child abuse—a frequent reaction
among students—must account for a verb like romped and for the child’s holding on
to his father rather than struggling to get away. In fact, it is the child who holds on
“like death”—an ironic simile—and the father whose hands show signs of injury and
wear, perhaps a reversal of what might be expected of an abuser. Still, those who argue
that the father is an abuser could say that it is the knuckle that is battered. Are these
the scars of a man who works hard, or has he been injured by striking something—or
someone—with his fist? No, the poem is characterized by playfulness, the sentimen-
talist could respond. The title refers to the father lovingly as “My Papa,” and the regu-
lar rhythm and rhyme have a dancelike quality. Father and son participate together in
the dance, while the mother—not, we may note, mama—stands aside, unwilling to
“countenance” such behavior. The formal word used to describe her face invites the
connotations of stern disapproval while neatly providing the rhyme. The sense of male
solidarity in the rough and dangerous play that excludes the woman may be a subtext
worthy of discussion.
LI-YOUNG LEE
My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud (p. 313)
Even a cursory reading of his poetry and his philosophy reveals Li-Young Lee to be a
profoundly spiritual poet. He sees poetry and religion as intertwined, as a deep sort of
yoga in which the whole mind and being of the poet are absorbed and reflected. Per-
haps Li-Young’s most frequently anthologized piece is “Persimmons,” a poem, like
this one, in which his father appears as a character. In the final stanza, the elderly
man, now blind, sits on the cellar steps in the family home as his son looks for a lost
item. When the son finds several paintings, the old man touches with his hands the
surface of one scroll he has made of persimmons “so full,” says the poem’s speaker,
“they want to drop from the cloth.” The father goes on to say, “Some things never
leave a person: / scent of the hair of one you love, / the texture of persimmons, / in
your palm, the ripe weight.” In another poem—“The Gift”—the poet lovingly de-
scribes his father’s voice as “a well / of dark water, a prayer” that he hears as the man
gently removes a splinter from the child’s palm. While our understanding of the cur-
rent poem is enhanced by knowing that the elder Mr. Li was a devout Christian who
was imprisoned because of his faith, the scenes in “Persimmons” showing the artist
and in “The Gift” revealing the father can provide added dimensions as we read “My
Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud.”
The first line of the poem simply repeats the title, but the enjambment after this
phrase forces the reader to pause imperceptibly before getting the slightly paradoxical
information in the rest of the sentence that he is reading “to himself”—a phrase often
used to mean a person is reading silently. Nor is the speaker sure of what the father is
reading, whether Psalms or news. Juxtaposed, the two seem equivalent, but they are far
from that—the Psalms being sacred, ancient, and perhaps eternal, given that the father
is in heaven; the news being worldly, current, impermanent, contingent upon
tomorrow’s ephemeral events for its context. The title itself, and the echoing first line,
are themselves paradoxical and ironic, echoing the prayer that casts God as our father
who art in heaven, followed by the surprising image of “reading out loud” with an
embodied human voice. Then we follow the speaker’s reasoning as he tries to
The influence described in stanza 2 adds a sterner dimension to the picture of the
father–son relationship. Were this the only poem by Li-Young Lee that a reader had
encountered, the impression might be that this father offers a rather cold sort of love,
despite the vigilance toward children in the opening line. To most readers the images
here will sound negative. By ending the first line with the word grave, the poet invites
connotations that connect both to death and to seriousness in life. The efforts of the
father to indoctrinate his son seem to have had the opposite effect. Yet the speaker does
not seem bitter, simply realistic about the influence. In the third stanza, the
autobiographical elements seem clear. At a certain point in the poet’s childhood, his
father escaped from the oppressive government of Indonesia and then moved from
place to place in Asia before coming to America. The image of listening for God but
also for information about current affairs before taking action (a radio) echoes the
listening reader in the opening lines, reading either “Psalms or the news”: both spiritual
and political realms must be considered in decision making. The picture is of an
idealistic but pragmatic father. In this untidy balancing between worlds where one
finds guidance less in logical precision than in intuition caught “under a lintel,” the
two men are alike. The stern perseverance of the father in stanza 2 was burdensome
and counterproductive, but the son discovers perhaps that even this trait has come as
the result of being a person “powerless, / to whom knowledge came while he sat among
/ suitcases, boxes, old newspapers, string.” In the final stanza, the speaker realizes that
the guardian is less godlike than human. Even in heaven he “waits” to see what the
next moment will bring. The poem ends with a question, signifying perhaps that life is
always contingent.
GRANDPARENTS AND LEGACIES: POEMS
NIKKI GIOVANNI
Legacies (p. 316)
From her first recognition as a poetic and political voice of the black arts movement of
the 1960s and 1970s to her current involvement with young people as a professor at
Virginia Tech, Nikki Giovanni has celebrated and articulated her African American
heritage. Rather than following the literary and cultural traditions of white America,
Giovanni uses the rhythms and vocabulary of her family and neighborhood in her
message and in the way she delivers it. Like many black people of her generation, she
seeks to recover and preserve a distinctive, powerful family and cultural history and to
express it to her contemporaries and their children and grandchildren. Her grand-
mother, Louvenia Watson of Knoxville, Tennessee, is for the poet a tangible link with
this heritage, and Nikki Giovanni—now of grandmother age herself—serves as such a
link to younger people. The poem expresses a strong sense of this continuity, going all
the way back to West African customs and ways of being in the world. We therefore
need to see beyond the everyday images of the poem to the longer chain of human
experience they may symbolize.
In a similar way, the dialogue of the poem has surface meaning, but the
granddaughter, at least from the poet’s distance, hears instead something unspoken in
the dialogue. Although she seems to reject it, the child holds the legacy too dear to
spoil it with everyday use, is afraid—superstitiously or otherwise—to touch the gift that
her grandmother wants to pass on to her. Folklore can be a way of doing something,
such as making rolls. The child seems to be thinking of a more spiritual, mystical link.
When the grandmother wipes her hands, she seems to give up on the idea that children
will ever be able to grasp the legacy their elders want to give, but we know that the poet
has recognized the motives of both generations. What is passed along cannot be
articulated by either.
Pride is an important concept in the poem and in the ideology of the poet; being
proud of one’s heritage is her implicit message. The compressed, idiomatic language
and conversational rhythms, although not formally structured, are nevertheless poetic
LINDA HOGAN
Heritage (p. 317)
As a Chickasaw, Linda Hogan has a heritage that is a mixed bag, and in this poem she
hints at the multiracial history that complicates it. Originally from the Southeast, the
Chickasaws were considered one of the “civilized tribes” and were known in the nine–
teenth century as slaveholders whose cruelty almost matched that of their white
neighbors. At the same time, they sometimes welcomed runaway slaves, and both
blacks and whites were known to marry into the Chickasaw nation, with children giv-
en full recognition. None of this prevented the U.S. government from seizing Chicka-
saw lands, however, or forcing the relocation that took the Chickasaw nation, includ-
ing Hogan’s ancestors, to Oklahoma. Later, when oil was discovered on new Chicka-
saw lands, white speculators often married Native American women to gain title to
mineral rights, further victimizing their families. Hogan traces her blond coloring to
such a marriage, explaining why she describes “white breasts that weigh down / my
body” and why she calls her “whiteness a shame.” Images of deathly white contrast
with images of black and brown throughout the poem, with both oil and tobacco—
important substances in Chickasaw history—recurring as ambiguous stains. The po-
em’s last stanza recalls a history of dispossession, a heritage of ambiguity and confusion
of self, a compass that points in two directions at once.
Homelessness seems to be a negative concept at first, but the last stanza raises
questions. The grandmother says that “it is wise to eat the flesh of deer / so you will be
swift and travel over many miles.” This hints at a tradition that predates the “civilized”
farming life of the nineteenth century and that sees the return to wandering as an
ironic return to Chickasaw roots. Hogan uses her elder relatives to find both a personal
heritage and a link to the larger history of Native America, a history that is largely one
of loss. The black saliva spilling onto her from her grandmother’s snuff is a startling
image, but it becomes “sweet black liquid like the food / she chewed up and spit into
my father’s mouth / when he was an infant.” Anthropologists have speculated that the
origin of kissing in human society may stem from mothers and grandmothers chewing
up food for recently weaned children, and the concept may be touching if we can get
past our knowledge of hygiene. Tobacco in Native American tradition is “medicine”
to cleanse the body and “medicine” in a magical and religious sense. The image of
being covered by night can be comforting. Still, much bitterness and justifiable anger
Linda Hogan’s brief reference to her grandfather seems less positive, and the
longer descriptions of her grandmother lead the reader to see the older woman rather
than the man as a more powerful influence. Even with the assumption that Hogan’s
grandfather may not have spoken because others in the family had lost their tribal
language, we are still left with Hogan’s use of the word fear in connection with her
grandfather and his silence. It is through his actions that she learns “to kill a snake /
when you’re begging for rain,” the word begging carrying its own negative
connotations. Therefore, readers may see Hogan’s grandfather as negative. However, if
we think in terms of culture, it may be that the speaker—and certainly most readers—
fail to see qualities that might reverse our original evaluations. Perhaps what seems
like superstition and alienation in Hogan’s grandfather reflects Native American
GARY SOTO
Behind Grandma’s House (p. 319)
The images of his childhood in Fresno, California, permeate both the poetry and the
prose of Gary Soto. Known as a children’s writer as well as a poet, he relates stories
about streets surrounded by junkyards and tire factories and about being a Hispanic
boy playing baseball and attending Catholic school. The Mexican American families
of Soto’s childhood world are poor but hardworking role models who survive without
compromising their values. Because his father died in a factory accident when Soto
was five years old, the influence of the extended family of uncles and grandparents—
already prominent in traditional families—becomes essential to his upbringing and
important in his writing.
Students may not recognize the poem’s images from the 1960s. There’s
Brylcreem, with its “Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb” connotations, recalling a
television show that featured advertisements for this “greasy kid stuff” hair cream
needed for the Elvis-like ducktail hairstyles of the bad boys in the barrio. The speaker
Most readers, male and female, have acted out similar childhood fantasies. We
remember both the naiveté and the desperate longing to be grown-up and powerful
that lay behind our bravado. Most college students enjoy discussing their grandparents
as well and often have just recently gained the distance needed to admit that the older
people have both strengths and flaws. In childhood, grandchildren’s attitudes range
from awe—even fear—to the conviction that grandparents are children like
themselves, perhaps coconspirators. Gary Soto’s ten-year-old protagonist has a
grandmother who inspires awe because she is obviously in control of the situation. But
there’s a sense of equality here, too. After all, she throws the sort of punch we’d expect
from another boy. She knocks him and us abruptly into the reality of her
commonsense world. The verisimilitude of Soto’s concrete detail places us in a
particular time and place, and this sense of reality is ironic in the context of his
playacting machismo, the minutiae cutting him even more down to size. The
profanity lends authenticity but also contributes to the plot of his small narrative. His
words, and the noise and vandalism that accompany them, cause the grandmother’s
action. Although he does not provide an explicit moral, the speaker is able to select
events that tell this story, and the poem’s existence implies a lesson learned, perhaps
that pride goeth before a fall, literally.
Some American subcultures, including Hispanic ones, have long traditions
involving extended family roles, whereas others privilege the independence and
privacy found in nuclear families. However, even in mainstream American culture,
John Paul II made a papal visit in 1999, for example, his most loyal and vocal
cheerleaders were young adults. What are the ramifications of children rebelling
against the more liberal ideals of their parents’ generation to make common cause
with conservative grandparents?
In Gary Soto’s poem, we see the single exchange between the boy and his
grandmother, and whether we see her action as admirable or as abusive depends as
much on an understanding of irony as on cultural perspective. We can guess that he
admires her greatly. Nikki Giovanni’s narrator also admires her grandmother, even
though she seems disrespectful. We know this because she tells us. Linda Hogan is
honest but accepts her heritage. Whereas inexperienced writers tend to sentimentalize
or demonize, these poets give glimpses of complex individuals, and readers can see
any of the grandchildren as respectful. None are idealized, though Nikki Giovanni
moves in this direction by describing spiritual links. Although women can relate as
well as men to the main idea of Gary Soto’s “Behind Grandma’s House,” the child’s
male gender is a crucial fact. The poem deconstructs myths of manhood through the
action of a strong woman. If a grandfather struck a girl child pretending to be a beauty
queen, we would have a very different story.
In the poem in this cluster by Linda Hogan, grandparents seem more to be
creatures of the past than the grandmother in Gary Soto’s poem. Hogan’s mother,
father, and uncle—as well as her grandparents—are ancestors who pass on a
heritage even though they all are alive in the speaker’s recent memory and may
indeed still survive. In Soto’s concise narrative the grandmother is very much alive
and well. It is in her gutsy, commonsense knowledge of appropriate behavior and of
what will get through to boys too full of themselves that the poem itself becomes
present reality rather than a nostalgic memory of the 1950s. As long as boys see
growing up as an aggressive demonstration of violent behavior, whether in deed or
ALBERTO RÍOS
Mi Abuelo (p. 321)
At the personal Web site of Alberto Ríos, information on the poem “Mi Abuelo” can
be found in a section devoted to helping students with research. This is a testimony,
perhaps, to Ríos’s philosophy of education and his dedication to dialogue and to what
he has termed the “language of listening.” Accompanied by a picture of his grandfa-
ther, Margarito Calderón Ríos, a broad-faced man with a bushy mustache who fought
in the Mexican Revolution, Ríos has posted his reply to a student who asked for help
with a presentation on the poem. This reply illuminates some of the poem’s imagery
and provides a bit of the poem’s background. We find that “Mi Abuelo” is a compan-
ion poem to a sestina about Ríos’s grandmother, “Nani.” Nani was an important figure
in his early life. Ríos’s grandfather died before he was born, but the poet felt connect-
ed to both grandparents and found ways to communicate with both of them.
Like Richard Rodriguez, who describes a similar experience in “Aria” (p.
1295), Ríos recalls being punished for speaking Spanish at school, even on the
playground. Speaking Spanish was a bad thing to do, and he lost his ability to speak
his first language until relearning it (though he says it actually had not gone away) in
high school and college. Because his Nani could not speak English, Ríos explains that
he learned a language that used gestures and eyes as well as a language based on her
“finding meaning” in both verbal and nonverbal dialogues.
Ríos is able to listen not only to the languages of food and kissing but also to the
whispers of his dead abuelo. As Ríos explained in an interview, in his father’s Mexican
cultural heritage the border between the living and the dead is not as fixed as it is in
his mother’s English traditions. Growing up celebrating the Día de los Muertos (Day
of the Dead), Thanksgiving, and Memorial Day, he came to feel that the grandfather
who had died before he was born was “part of every family gathering” and an
important figure in his life. So he listens for his abuelo to speak to him from the grave
and interprets his language for us.
Perhaps because as a historical personage high in the army of the Mexican
Revolution he is a powerful figure in family folklore, or perhaps simply because he is
dead, the grandfather evokes ambivalent feelings in his grandson. Ríos knows how the
man looks in a photograph on his grandmother’s wall, which he says is sometimes the
only scrap of reality he has about him. At this point, his abuelo would be literally a
flat, two-dimensional character. But as he listens, the writer fleshes out the corpse and
imagines him speaking mysterious things. His abuelo seems to be able to predict the
future. But if he is wrong, this is a false prophecy: can the great man be wrong? More
frightening than deliberate lies might be his seeming omniscience even though he
lacks power and knowledge. If the ancestor figure is “at best . . . a liar,” then perhaps
he is at worst weak, mistaken, and self-deceived.
Another alternative to being a liar, of course, is to be a teller of truths. Some
readers may feel that this is the worst-case scenario the speaker fears—that the
vocalizations he hears from the grave are true, that his abuelo communicates
something about reality. When the corpse says my hair is a sieve over and over again,
the narrator is angry and shouts to the dead grandfather that he is not a sufficient
ancestor, implying that he is not a whole man. The phrase may disturb him because it
seems meaningless yet is repeated. Does the dead man mean that everything sifts
The implications of this image, however—taken with the lines in which his
abuelo speaks of hills as “slowest waves” and the speaker sees him as a “ripple-topped
stream in its best suit, in the ground”—is that the man in the grave has become an
integral part of the natural world. According to Ríos, this sense of being a part of the
environment is embedded into the Spanish language, whereas in English we must
often use the pronoun I, creating a sense of separateness from and responsibility for
acting on the environment. So while the grandfather seems odd and crazy, his words
may carry this sense of oneness with the earth.
The grandson discourses with his dead grandfather about the woman they both
love—“his wife,” who is the poet’s Nani. He also relives the old man’s childhood
memories and his struggles to find home remedies rather than trust doctors: these
imagined memories are based on stories passed down in the family. Those of us who
did not know our grandparents share this frustrating imaginative task of sorting out the
stories of their lives and our consequent heritage from bits and pieces. When the poet
Margarito Calderón Ríos is an imposing presence, even in death. On the one hand,
this can be a positive notion. On the other hand, an important element of critical
thinking involves bringing the unquestioned assumptions of family lore to light for
examination. We can encourage student readers to become more aware of the
influences of family and culture on their thinking and to communicate with their
ancestors and bring them into perspective. When the speaker of the poem says that his
grandfather’s “fever has cooled now,” we may take this in an ironically literal way: a
corpse is cold and can no longer experience passion. The statement may be taken to
mean, however, that the grandfather’s panicky repetition of the phrase “my hair is a
sieve” can now be calmed as the poet acknowledges its truth—that everything sifts for all
of us—and as the language of listening frees the ghost to rest in peace. The last lines may
indicate that the poet wants to continue his dialogue with the dead man because he says,
“I look down the pipe, sometimes.” On the other hand, when he looks down the pipe in
the final lines, he leaves us a visual image rather than the auditory images encountered
earlier in the poem. Perhaps now that his grandfather is “an ordinary man” to him, he
can communicate with his abuelo through vision—using something like the language of
gesture and eyes he shared with his grandmother.
For Ríos, the dead grandfather is godlike in his power over the minds of the living.
The corresponding figures in other poems in this cluster seem more mortal. Linda
Hogan’s grandfather, sitting in fearsome (or fearful) silence, seems to be propitiating a
god as he goes about “begging for rain” and strikes the reader as particularly impotent
when compared to Ríos’s omnipotent corpse. Gary Soto’s grandmother comes closest
JUDITH ORTIZ COFER
Claims (p. 323)
The title of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s poem may have multiple meanings. The speaker’s
grandmother has reached the time of life when she is finally able to claim her own
territory, and she does so: She alone has a claim on her bed and her body. Like Virgin-
ia Woolf’s assertion that a woman requires a “room of one’s own” to become a writer,
the grandmother’s edict is that she need no longer share her space. Like Woolf in an-
other way, the old woman seems to have killed any angel that might have at some
point occupied her house: She claims the right to speak her mind. Yet the grand-
mother is haunted by claims upon her life. She recalls children who died stillborn or
were miscarried. Perhaps those undeveloped babies who “drowned in her black wa-
ters” still claim her happiness, for they occupy the center of the poem. When we hear
Grandmother’s voice in the italicized lines 12 through 14, it is unclear to us whether
her memory of her dead babies has stolen her days or whether she refers to the living
daughters to whom she speaks. Likely, she views them all as thieves who made claims
on her.
In addition, because the grandmother “made a pact / with man and nature,” those
entities exerted their claims in the past. She agreed to “bear / the weight of sex” and to
accept childbirth and loss as consequences of this covenant. One is reminded of the
curses in Genesis spoken by God as he drives Adam and Eve out of the Garden of
Eden for disobedience. Adam is cursed by having to sweat over his labor, trying to get
the soil of the earth to yield. Eve will endure another sort of labor, her childbearing
becoming painful, and she will give birth in sorrow. The first simile used to describe
the grandmother in this poem, “a Bedouin tent,” has a Middle Eastern flavor that
perhaps invites biblical connections, although none seems evident. One can imagine,
however, the grandmother now spreading out her claim to cover all the area between
the tent poles, a matriarch at last. The final simile of the poem has her “like the sea . .
. claiming back her territory.” This image is striking and ironic because when the sea
claims the land, the land is engulfed and disappears. The claimed land dissolves and
mixes into the vastness of the ocean, leaving nothing to claim. Perhaps it goes to the
shipwrecked ones who drowned within her. The comparison of her dead babies to
naufragos foreshadows the simile that ends the poem. The “black waters” metaphor
for her womb has a poisonous ring to it, however. It implies that Grandmother
Through details that show the grandmother’s ambiguous, even negative, emotions
about motherhood, Cofer resists sentimentalizing the relationship, and the speaker’s
attitude conveys brutal honesty without condemnation. The other poems in this cluster
center on relationships between grandparents and children and the heritage they share
(or the child’s regret about their loss), but despite her litany to each daughter that
children “steal your days” (her “legacy” to them), Cofer’s “Claims” is about the
grandmother herself rather than the speaker of the poem. We feel the grandmother’s
losses and her bitterness and rejection of her children; she speaks aloud the thoughts
that many mothers hide. Because Cofer’s grandmother ends her statement about the
misery of motherhood with the word “Amen,” we can assume that she is religious.
Considering which grandmother might make the same decision about sex as Cofer’s
GAYS AND LESBIANS IN FAMILIES: POEMS (p. 316)
ESSEX HEMPHILL
Commitments (p. 326)
During the last years of his life, before he died of the complications of AIDS, Essex
Hemphill was not reticent about his homosexuality. Above all, perhaps, he was a poet
who wanted to be seen and heard. Although “Commitments” speaks explicitly of si-
lences and of the family relationships that depend on masking his true identity, the
longing to be seen and heard sets its tone. He refuses to remove himself from his place
in the family, even though he knows that someday some family members will want to
literally cut him out of the picture. The opening lines hint at his coming death, and
we hear the echo of a cliché about the eternal quality of the soul in his assertion “I
will always be there.” It sounds like a reassurance, but it is also a declaration of his
intention. It says, “I’m here.” And it is not his dead body but his “silence” that will be
“exhumed”—dug up from the grave—perhaps when people know him without his
mask of practical invisibility, perhaps when he is dead. He names relationships and
gives pictures of the typical details of a backyard picnic in which the foods identify a
family with roots in the American South.
But to echo the silence of his earlier stanza, line 16 adds a spatial equivalent of
silence; his “arms are empty,” childless. And the hopes of his aunts to see his wedding
are empty, too. If he could marry the person of his dreams, these aunts might not
attend the wedding, and if they did, they would not throw rice, the symbol of fertility
in marriage. After giving us a vision through the camera lens at holiday celebrations,
he repeats his image of empty arms, juxtaposing it with an elaboration on emptiness:
“so empty they would break / around a lover” (lines 26–27). The image is enigmatic,
the word break making us think of voices breaking in sadness, of vulnerability so
Although questions implicitly give students the impression that they can come up
with an answer to explain the conflicting statements in “Commitments,” assure them
that sometimes a poem may be about the conflicting feelings and tensions in a situation.
Perhaps we will want to create a different definition of invisible, one that takes the
possible allusion to Ellison into account or that considers a misreading of who one really
is as a part of invisibility. A part of the person he is has been buried with his silence and
perhaps will come to light. But things dug out of graves cause fear and disgust, and he is
realistic enough to know that his relatives will not welcome the visible breaking of his
silence.
In the second stanza, the poet is describing an image in a photograph, not an
action, and no verb is needed. The image is so American and so normal we expect
to smell the apple pie. Hemphill contrasts this normality with his inability to be
completely part of it. His mention of a lover in the middle of this family scene
reminds us that his would be a lover, not a husband or a wife. There seems to be a
real desire for a place in the family and a concomitant longing for children of his
own. Heterosexuals sometimes have problems imagining homosexuals as real people
AUDRE LORDE
Who Said It Was Simple (p. 327)
The tree metaphor Lorde uses in her opening stanza is rich. The anger she feels is old,
deep, invisible, multifarious, knotted—like tree roots. Root-bound plants are trapped,
often unable to grow, even when transplanted. The damage is too profound. The po-
em apparently is set at a lunch counter during the early 1970s, before a protest march
against sexism or possibly for gay rights, although nothing in the poem specifically
indicates what the protest march is about. Lorde’s white “sisters” in protest are served
by the partially black counterman who ignores the black men (are they gay men, and
is this a gay rights march?) sitting at the counter—as if the lessons of nondiscrimina-
tion of the civil rights movement never took place. Lorde recognizes the contradic-
tions and ironies of the scene—both the counterman and the white women remain
enslaved by their mind-forged manacles of (at least) racism and sexism, despite the
historic echoes of integrating lunch counters during the civil rights movement. For
Lorde, the mirror (where she sees her black skin) and the bed (where women are the
sexual slaves of men in a patriarchal culture) are symbols of her continuing cultural
marginalization as black, female, and lesbian. Of course she is being ironic in her fi-
nal stanza, where she recognizes that the goals of what was then called “women’s lib-
eration” may founder on the classist, racist, and possibly homophobic contradictions
embedded in it.
MINNIE BRUCE PRATT
Two Small-Sized Girls (p. 328)
Like Essex Hemphill, the poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt finds herself in conflict
with the values of the culture into which she was born. Hers is the dilemma of a child
of the rural American South who loses much by breaking away from traditional mores.
Pratt lost her parents, her extended family, and her children as well. Her book Crime
against Nature, from which this poem is taken, deals with the consequences of the
legal term echoed in its title. It was because she was a lesbian that custody of her sons
was granted to their father when her marriage was dissolved, and the threat of possible
conviction for “crimes against nature” was used as a club to keep her from fighting the
court’s ruling. Pratt had already been involved in feminist activism when in graduate
school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had helped to establish
women’s collectives in the nearby towns of Durham and Fayetteville. She identifies
herself as part of a group of “anti-racist, anti-imperialist Southern lesbians.”
Students will differ in their beliefs about “crimes against nature” in terms of
sexual behavior. Inevitably, students will speak of ancient laws—even current laws in
some states—prohibiting sodomy and making illegal certain heterosexual practices
within marriage. In 1999, Pratt’s home state, Alabama, was debating the legalization of
sex toys and aids for medical purposes, with many politicians arguing that because
they might be used outside of heterosexual marriage, such devices should remain
banned. We might want to extend the question outside the sexual arena. How might a
person unfamiliar with the term and its history in America attempt to define “crimes
against nature”? As war, perhaps? Or as environmental destruction? Pratt’s nature
imagery in the poem evokes a hot summer on an Alabama farm, but it also shows the
kudzu devouring everything and the wildfire that they set blossoming like some
brilliant growth. The garden imposes order on nature, just as the girls turn corncobs
into the images of human beings. We can encourage students to explore the symbolic
connotations of sensory details that seem at first to be here only for verisimilitude. An
issue might be raised about the nature of the kudzu vine, for example, an all-
enveloping vine that is not native to the South.
The first numbered section of the poem shows the cousins as little girls on their
grandmother’s farm. In the second, we see them as adults linked to the earlier scene
by certain images—Grandma’s bedspread, “rough straw baskets” like the corncobs of
their youth, kudzu—and we discover that both have endured custody battles. Pratt
compares her “crime against nature,” a sexual transgression, to her cousin’s desire for a
garden, somehow symbolic of her freedom of action. This, too, has been deemed a
the world. A definition of cousins may be made without referring to parents at all; they
are people who share a grandparent. The girls are like their mothers at first, shaping
their babies from the natural materials at hand. In the second section, we see a shared
heritage in their grandmother’s crocheted bedspread. But in the final section we see
their true heritage, the grandmother who doesn’t condemn their fire but instead
washes them up after it. Women do this for each other in Pratt’s world. Age-mates, the
daughters of sisters, provide support; grandmothers give unconditional comfort. Their
pain as they think about losing children indicates that family ties are important. But
RICHARD BLANCO
Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother (p. 330)
In “Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother,” part of Richard Blanco’s 2012
collection Looking for the Gulf Motel, Blanco offers a first-person narrative of a
grandmother scolding her grandson about his seemingly effeminate behaviors. From
urinating with the seat down to eating popsicles, the behaviors in question are seen as
constructing the grandson’s gay identity. Indeed, the young boy is continually under
surveillance, as implied by the repeated admonition “I’ve seen you. . . .” Male and
female gender roles are clearly circumscribed here, and readers will likely pick up on
the differences in how others in the family perform gender. The mother, for example,
hosts Tupperware parties and likes to kiss her son, whereas the father visits the barber
shop. There is little ambiguity between their roles. The grandson is explicitly encour-
aged to avoid the kinds of behaviors his mother exhibits, and the poem goes so far as to
suggest that the mother might be encouraging him in ways the grandmother distrusts.
EXORCISING THE DEAD:
CRITICAL COMMENTARIES ON A POEM (p. 334)
SYLVIA PLATH
Daddy (p. 335)
Often the voice in a poem is quite different from the poet’s own, and students need to
go beyond the tendency of novice readers to see all poetry as an emotional outpouring
of the poet’s soul. The poems of Sylvia Plath, however, invite a biographical approach.
As a confessional poet, writing as part of a 1950s and early 1960s attempt to bring the
life of the poet into the text, Plath incorporated images of her personal psychological
struggles into her poetry. For this reason, her poetry might first be approached in the
context of the post–World War II society in which she came of age, when the
Holocaust and other abuses carried out by fascist movements were within recent
memory. Before the cultural changes of the late 1960s, including the resurgence of
the women’s movement, the expectations placed on most daughters were rigidly
prescribed. Fathers tended to be authoritarian, and husbands to control the lives of
their wives and children. Thus contextualizing the poem may help current readers
understand the tone and imagery of “Daddy” and allow them to respond thoughtfully
to the alternative views of critics.