"A Long Missing Part of Itself": Bringing Lucille Clifton's Generations into American Literature

Abstract

Poet Lucille Clifton recently said that her early writings form part of a movement that to American literature a long missing part of itself (Rowell 67). Her 1976 memoir, Generations, traces her genealogy back to African matriarch first brought to and shows obstacles Clifton personally must overcome to bring this story into American literature. Clifton says of importance of incorporating her family's story into a larger tradition, All of our stories become Story. If mine is left out, something's missing. So I hope mine can be read as part of Story, of what it means to be human in this place at this time. I am a black human being, and that is part of Story (Rowell 58). obstacles Clifton overcomes in process of gaining her voice as a poet and contributing to The Story stem largely from what Regina Blackburn calls the double jeopardy of being both black and female in America (148). Those obstacles are what Eva Lennox Birch calls hitherto male preserve (127) of autobiography and mourning stories which Karla F. C. Holloway says form a (32) in African American culture. My purpose is to show how Clifton works within and against those obstacles to confront ways in which they would silence her and to find in them potential to bring her story into American literature. In confronting challenge of male autobiography, Clifton prefaces each chapter of her memoir with a quote from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, which embodies self-expressive impulse of traditional male autobiography with its focus on achievements and autonomous self-identity of author. As for Clifton's choice to use quotes from Whitman to indicate tradition of male autobiography, she could very well be responding to Albert Stone, who argues that the whole oratorio [of American autobiography] is ... composed of separate Songs of Myself (26). Whitman becomes a site for responding not only to tradition of male autobiography, but to whole of American literature, since, as Ed Folsom argues, At some point in lives of most twentieth-century American poets ... some encounter with Whitman takes place.... at some point, most American poets after Whitman have directly taken on--to argue with him, agree with him, revise, question, reject or accept him (21-22). In Generations, Clifton's response to Whitman's Song of Myself speaks with a double voice as she embraces Whitmanian spirit of inclusion and celebration, but replaces autonomous individuality informing so much of Song of Myself with a collective, generational sense of self based around an expanding African American family. narrative of Generations centers around death and burial of Clifton's father, which situates Clifton's story within what Holloway calls an African American cultural narrative of mourning stories, a narrative which she says differs from mainstream American writing in that the familiar literary theme of a character's for is revised in African American narrative to a body's search for a safe harbor (37). While mainstream American writing, especially autobiography, is concerned with of living self, African American literature often deals with specters of dead, beginning with slavery and extending to lynching and police brutality. These stories about dead pose an obstacle to traditional quest for identity at center of any memoir because of their overpowering presence in collective African American experience. But Clifton finds potential in this obstacle by harnessing power which comes from collective memory of deceased generations. As Holloway says, the bodies we would leave behind will challenge our own being unless we incorporate their stories into ours and, in so doing, claim their right to a memorial (38). Memory of dead, instead of silencing autobiographical impulse, becomes a way to memorialize generations. …