9 - “Perhaps Buddha is a woman”: women’s poetry in the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

An essay “On Being Young - a Woman - and Colored” (1925), written by Marita Bonner, offers a profound glimpse into the ethos of women's writing of the Harlem Renaissance. At the end of this essay Bonner muses, “Perhaps Buddha is a woman,” as she decides that the image of Buddha may best describe what it meant in 1925 to be “young - a woman - and colored.” The image of the brown Buddha presents the young “colored” woman as contained but somehow moving in spite of the appearance of stasis. Bonner writes, “Like Buddha - who, brown like I am - sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before the white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands. Motionless on the outside. But inside?” (112). This image captures the complexity of Harlem Renaissance women's poetry. “On Being Young - a Woman - and Colored” was published the same year, 1925, as the pivotal, male-oriented anthology The New Negro. As opposed to Locke's archetype of the “New Negro,” Marita Bonner makes Buddha her prime archetype for the young “colored” women emerging in 1925. The very image of the “colored” female Buddha evokes a peaceful hybrid fusion of the old and the new as opposed to Locke's vehement differentiation between the “Old Negro” and the “New Negro.” The female Buddha is imagined as the best way to counter the stereotypes that deny black women's aesthetic sensibilities and femininity. Bonner wonders why a black woman must be viewed as a “feminine Caliban craving to pass for Ariel” (111). This notion of the black woman passing for Ariel, presumably an image of refined white womanhood, illuminates the nexus of gender, class, and race constraints negotiated by women poets of the Harlem Renaissance.