“come into the / black / and live”: Poetry and the Dream of Black Liberation

Abstract

CLA JOURNAL 157 “come into the / black / and live”: Poetry and the Dream of Black Liberation Shauna M. Morgan the news everything changes the old songs click like light bulbs going off the faces of men dying scar the air the moon becomes the mountain who would have thought who would believe dead things could stumble back and kill us1 ~Lucille Clifton “The poetry sustains,” said Lucille Clifton in conversation with Sonia Sanchez at The New School in New York City during the first of the now well-known Cave Canem reading series (1070). During the reading, which occurred shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clifton, within a matter of ten minutes or so, read several poems that demonstrated the scope and range of her writing and engagement with era-shifting and history-making moments, whether they be personal or public. She began with a poem written about her sister, moved through poems that bore witness to racist violence against Black and indigenous people, and connected that reality to a continental Black struggle. Her short reading closed with new poems, as she noted, written after the tragedies of that moment. One opened a space that acknowledged that the collective trauma the nation felt was something not unfamiliar to Black folks in the United States. Worth quoting fully here, the poem “Friday nine fourteen” presents as analogous to the U.S. American crimes against Black and brown folks and the “villainy” of that moment in 2001: 1 From Clifton’s Good News about the Earth: New Poems, Random House, 1972. 158 CLA JOURNAL Some of us know we have never felt safe all of us Americans weeping as some have wept before Is it treason to remember? What have we done to deserve such villainy? Nothing we reassure ourselves Nothing. The nuance here is not to be missed, however, as she further indicts the United States and questions its culpability. The line breaks in this short poem signal that there are multiple audiences and multiple speakers within the collective “we” of the poem. Indeed, as she begins, “Some of us know / we have never felt safe / all of us / Americans weeping as some / have wept before” (1045). A student of Sterling A. Brown and Owen Dodson, Clifton, in the vast body of her work, which is at once artful and instructive, has a poem for every day and every moment. In Toni Morrison’s foreword to The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2000, she noted that Clifton was most often praised for her “moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness [and] eloquent elegies for the vulnerable and the prematurely dead” (xxviii). However, she cautions us not to miss the “astute, profound intellect”and“the range and complexity of the emotions she forces us to confront” (xxx-xxxi). Particularly in this moment, we must return to Clifton, reaching for not only the inspiring and loving words within, but seeking the insight that she offers through an imagination that calls us to participate in our own visioning of a future. Writing in a literary tradition that long declared the need for political art, Clifton remembers the experiences of people in the Diaspora and roots our liberation in the spirit of African identity as she declares “the news” of the time, offers the answers to our cries, and situates them within the realm of history and a past rooted in a Black radical tradition. Writing then, Clifton was even preparing Shauna M. Morgan CLA JOURNAL 159 “come into the / black / and live”: Poetry as a Sanctum for Black Liberation for the now, and she has left us a body of work to help us reflect and guide us to the life of freedom we have always desired—a life we must continue to imagine. It is this moment of creating, too, which sustains. Not only is the content of Clifton’s poetry sustaining but also the context to which it speaks and the revisioning and imagining that moment engenders. In her poem “after Kent State,” which opens the collection Good News about the Earth, we are warned about the unbridled possibility of white violence. The poem reads,“only to keep / his...