8 - African American Women Poets

Summary

The first well-known African American literary figure, Phillis Wheatley, was of course a woman poet, her volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England appearing in 1773. Therefore, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., notes, “All subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilineal line of descent, and that each, consciously or unconsciously, has extended and revised a canon whose foundation was the poetry of a black woman.” Even with this auspicious precedent, African American women have struggled to write themselves into a white male literary canon, as well as, until recently, a predominantly black male one. As many of the essays in this volume point out, historically men have served as the most visible and oft-cited rhetoricians of literary movements, even when women have made equally significant artistic contributions. Redressing this tendency in regard to twentieth-century African American poetry, this essay moves from the New Negro Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and into the contemporary era, showcasing the work that African American women poets have performed on behalf of race and gender equality and, perhaps most importantly, the relationship between them.

As is frequently noted, women experience another layer of consciousness beyond what W.E.B. Du Bois famously describes in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the “double-consciousness” of African American life: the “sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others” (694). Efforts at self-fashioning one's identity are similarly complicated by long-standing stereotypes of black women as licentious and hypersexualized (the jezebel); asexual and slavishly devoted to whites (the mammy); and abrasive and domineering (the sapphire), among other degrading conceptions circulating in popular culture. Women poets use the printed page to vigorously challenge these stereotypes, explore the wide range of African American women's experiences, and protest gender inequity, both interracially and intraracially. As the nineteenth-century poet Frances E.W. Harper averred in “A Double Standard” (1895), “what is wrong in woman's life / In man's cannot be right” (55–56), a point echoed by many of her twentieth-century successors.

Moreover, while Wheatley may be hailed as the progenitor of African American written poetry, vernacular culture is an equally significant foundation for poets of both genders.