Sent From Afric Shore

Abstract

Questions of tradition have formed a major theme of African American literature and its literary criticism since at least the eighteenth century. Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects (1773), published twelve years after a Boston merchant purchased her as a child from the cargo of a slave ship, includes an encomium to Maecenas, patron of Virgil and Horace. In it Wheatley notes that Terence ‘was an African by birth’, but frets that he may be her only black model: For many black writers, the primary creative anxiety has not been of influence, but of unknown ancestry. In an article for Ms. magazine in 1974, Alice Walker asked where to look for ‘artistic great-grandmothers’ in the history of slaves, lamenting the creativity suppressed while ‘for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write’. She noted Virginia Woolf's call for a ‘Room of One's Own’, but asked what then ‘to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?’ 2 Where Woolf resorted to imagining a forerunner, Judith Shakespeare, Walker noticed the quiet domestic channels into which the dammed self-expression of her mother's generation had been diverted: quilts, gardens, song.