Toward a Black Femme Fugitive Poetics

Abstract

Toward a Black Femme Fugitive Poetics Joy Priest Little scholarly attention has been given to schools or movements of Black femme poets and poetics, aside from the naming of poetic cohorts and collectives that include male‐identified poets, and in spite of the recent frequent occurrence of Black women poets holding the office of the United States Poet Laureate (Gwendolyn Brooks, 1985‐86; Rita Dove, 1993‐95; Natasha Trethewey, ‐2014; and, most recently, Tracy K. Smith, or serving as two out of the total five Inauguration Poets in U.S. history (Maya Angelou for Bill Clinton in 1993 and Elizabeth Alexander for Barack Obama in 2009). An investigation into the assemblage of the Black femme figure and fugitivity, where they can be found in contemporary poetry, might trace a critical lineage of Black femme poets practicing a fugitivity from the logics of white supremacist, hetero‐patriarchal society, or what Fred Moten calls the “durational field” of slavery and its aftermaths (2017: xii), and, more particularly, performing a refusal of the family construct that such a society constitutes through the language of its canonical and legal documents. The goal is to trace a genealogy, which is a feminist methodology, and to use that genealogy to identify, in the work of others, specific survival strategies of the Black femme figure therein, which are illuminated via her unique standpoint and practice of fugitivity. Important to this investigation is a question frequently presented to poets: Does poetry do anything? Which can be understood as: Does poetry effect change? Is it activism? Is it active? Is it an action? Poststructural feminists and queer theorists have argued that gender and bodies are socially and discursively constructed, that “social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture and all manner of symbolic social sign” (2017: 481). When one considers the ways in which language constitutes our bodies and subjectivities, and when it becomes clear how important a role language plays in our society's ideological schema, then an intervention into language, a defamiliarization of language, an interrogation of language, or an invention of new language (all of which poets do) can be radical acts that do. Language is the medium through which a culture's ideologies, narratives, and subjectivities are created, perpetuated, and maintained. In the following, I outline a crucial role that poetry played in the decentering of white feminist concerns during the second wave of hegemonic feminism. Poetry as a Tool for Feminist Theory Feminist and queer theorists have discussed the role of poetry as a tool to intervene in hegemonic feminism and epistemic violence. In the late 1960s, women from the margins of the feminist movement, namely women of color, used poetry as a way to name and circulate their particular oppressions and subject positions apart from the more prevalent narrative and visible concerns put forth by white feminists. T. V. Reed, a scholar of feminist social movements, suggests that poetry was an organic outgrowth of the women's movement during the 1970s when consciousness‐raising groups called on women in the movement to come together in group sessions and share their experiences in order to open up those experiences for “structural analyses” (91). Because certain of women's experiences hadn't been taken up in the larger scholarship, there was no theory available about the race‐ or ethnic‐specific oppressions they were experiencing in their lives, and often those oppressive structures occurred across spectrums of difference. More marginalized women—Black, Native, Chicana, queer—were hard‐pressed to get their issues on the docket of the feminist hegemony, and, as a result, poetry became an important strategy to disseminate their voices and concerns. In her 1977 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” the feminist poet Audre Lorde reflects on this moment. She famously writes, “This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt” (Lorde : 36). Lorde argues that poetry can be a tool to articulate our unique subject positions, identify oppressive structures, and conceive of our own specific demands for change. For her, poetry was not a luxury, it was a revolutionary...