Anissa Cantin
April 29, 2004
Expressions of Life Beyond the Knee
Introduction:
During my studies in Minority Literature I found it particularly interesting to read and reflect upon the poems of women authors. Of course there was the same gender connection but I also started to notice that these women were expressing their trials in life in their writings. It is very interesting to explore the idea of women as a minority and to hear their struggles in their works. In history women may have officially been limited to passing on family tales and tradition orally, but now with this form of written word, the stories will go on for generations and reach well beyond the immediate family at her knee.
In this journal, I will assemble selections from female poets of varying races, decades and backgrounds. These poems will be reviewed and compared with the actual life story of each author. It is my intention to show that female poets do indeed use their art of words to tell their expression of life.
Women of Mexican Heritage
Half-Breed by Cherri Moraga
Cherrie Moraga was born in Los Angeles in 1952. She was born to a “Chicana” mother and Anglo father. Her father deserted the family while she was still very young. This caused her mother to become the sole supporter of their family. Her mother was considered undereducated for this country and thus had to settle for manual labor type employment. This would not do for her children and she made every effort to see her children be more successful in America and thus encouraged Moraga to use her fair-skinned appearance to pass for white and to take advantage of "white privilege" (a term that refers to the privileges of being white and therefore having more advantages in life).
This approach by her mother caused Moraga to feel more and more disconnected from her Chicana heritage and ultimately from her mother as well. It wasn’t until years into her life that the connections began to form for Moraga. With the acceptance of her homosexuality she began to feel some of the struggle her mother endured. In an interview with Moraga published by the web page Voices From The Gaps, she states, "When I finally lifted the lid to my lesbianism, a profound connection with my mother reawakened in me. It wasn't until I acknowledged and confronted my own lesbianism in the flesh, that my heartfelt identification with and empathy for my mother's oppression--due to being poor, uneducated, and Chicana--was realized."
In her poem entitled Half-Breed, Moraga reflects on the sacrifice made by her mother. The disgrace she felt in the kind of jobs that supported their family is shown in her reference to the cleaning the toilet bowls of strangers. She alludes to the struggle she perceives that is caused by her race in her symbols of her mother’s “brown head floating in a pool of crystalline whiteness.”
the difference between you and me
is as I bent
over strangers’ toilet bowls,
the face that glared back at me
in those sedentary waters
was not my own, but my mother’s
brown head floating in a pool
of crystalline whiteness
she taught me how to clean
to get down on my hands and knees
and scrub, not beg
she taught me how to clean,
not live in this body
my reflection has always been
once removed. Moraga
Peel My Love Like an Onion by Ana Castillo
Castillo considers herself to be Catholic in faith. She does however have some issues with some of the traditional beliefs taught in her church. It is believed that the Catholic Church does not condone sex unless it is for procreation only. Castillo believes that this idea causes women to be denied their sexuality and thus not being in touch with their emotions in that area as well as in the areas of psychologically, physically, and spiritually. She believes these women need to reconnect with themselves and seeks to do this for herself and her readers in her poetry. To this end, some of her writings can become slightly erotic but amazingly humorous as well.
In her poem Peel My Love Like An Onion, Castillo uses a symbol that would be known to most every woman from her Mexican American heritage. By using an onion, a simple staple of most cooks, she can help readers relate to their sexuality. She compares the seemingly unending layers of the vegetable to that of a woman desire. It is a deep emotion that has many levels but seems deep enough to go on forever.
Equally intriguing is her reference to the vapors and smells of an onion. She alludes to the tears one encounters when peeling an onion and the tears that a lover feels when her mate departs while she is left behind wanting to hold him in her embrace.
Peel my love like an onion,
one transparent layer follows the next,
an infinity of desire.
I breathe your skin
and a vapor of memory arises,
tears my orifices raw
with the many smells of you.
When you leave, Tezcatlipoca,
it is I who have evaporated you perhaps.
Horned creature to whom
I have given wings, come back. Rest again, in my
thin arms, limb with limb
like gnarled branches entwined in a sleep
of a thousand years.
Castillo
Women of African Heritage
On Being Brought From Africa To America by Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley
has been called America's first black poet.
In any case, drawing from her life, she was able to write the poems that
made her one of the most popular of her times.
She was kidnapped from Africa in 1753 and was sold into slavery at the
very young age of seven. She was
bought by a tailor named John Wheatley from Boston as a attendant for his wife.
It was not long until she had won the hearts of the family and was soon
accepted as a member of the family, and was raised with the Wheatley's other two
children. Within sixteen months of
her arrival in Boston, she had learned to read and write English. At the age of
twelve she was reading the Greek and Latin classics, and passages from the Bible
and at the age of thirteen she wrote her first poem.
It is hard to
believe that Wheatley had a true idea on the plight of slave.
She may have been a witness to their lives but she was taken from her
home at a very young age and was raised as one of the children of her masters.
It is hard to believe she had the same experience as other members of her
race. The Wheatley’s provided her
with knowledge. She was taught the
ways of the white people including their religion and because of these
teachings, she became a very devote Christian.
Her feelings about her advancement in life can be found in her poem On
Being Brought From Africa To America. In
this poem, she seems to be almost appreciating her captors and masters for
helping to “train” her.
'Twas mercy
brought me from my pagan land,
Taught my beknighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their color is a diabolic dye."
Remember Christians; Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
Learning to Read by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper) was born in 1825 in the free state of Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother died before she was three years old; there was no father to speak of, so she lived with her uncle. He was a teacher at the Academy for Negro Youth and Harper would eventually attend that school. Her uncle was also very active in politics and this is believed to be the root of Harper’s interest in this area too. Ultimately, overcoming a great deal of protests, Harper would become a teacher.
Most interesting in her life is the fact that she lived in a house that served as a station in the Underground Railroad and was privy to its workings. As one might expect, this experience had a profound effect on Harper. Her speeches, poetry and life in general would now never be the same. She became a very outspoken activist against slavery and oppression in general. As can been seen in her poem Learning to Read, Harper felt that education was the key to freedom. She valued her own education and did not take her freedom for granite. She was able to use her encounters with the newly freed slaves to craft very this very meaningful poem. In it, she assumes the narrative of a slave who secretly learns to read later in life and thus gets the freedom she so desires.
Very soon the Yankee teachers
Came down and set up school;
But oh! how the Rebs did hate it,-
It was agin’ their rule.
Our masters always tried to hide
Book learning from our eyes;
Knowledge didn’t agree with slavery-
‘Twould make us all too wise.
But some of us would try to steal
A little from the book,
And put the words together,
And learn by hook or crook…
So I got a pair of glasses,
And straight to work I went,
And never stopped till I could read
The hymns and Testament.
Then I got a little cabin-
A place to call my own-
And I felt as independent
As a queen upon her thrown.
Women of Asian Heritage
The poetry of Izumi Shikibu
Shikibu led a most interesting life. She was the daughter of a Japanese governor and in 995 she married another governor. They had a daughter two years into their marriage. In a very unheard of event, Shikibu had an affair with Prince Tametaka a “lesser” son of the Emperor. Unfortunately, this relationship was not discrete and her husband found out and divorced her. As if this was not enough, Tametaka died from the plague leaving Izumi alone.
She did not remain alone for long however, she soon received visits from Tametaka’s brother, Prince Atsumichi. This of course destroyed the marriage of the Prince but he and Izumi would continue their affair until he too dies. Perhaps to distract her from the loneliness or merely as a means of support, at this point Izumi again became in service to the courts. Some believe this was also a chance for her to explain her indiscretions in life as well.
In the end, she would not stay lonely long. In 1010 she remarried and left the courts. The last known record of her was in 1033 and she continued writing her poetry until that time.
Of course all of her poems were originally written in Japanese but many have translated her words. All of her poetry was short, three to five lines, and very nature oriented. It is very obvious this was a woman of great passion and romance. She is very in touch with her emotions.
In two of her shorter poems, she expresses her passion for one of the men in her life. She is definitely a passionate woman, not a common thought for a Japanese lady of that era.
The face
I see so clearly
doesn’t say a word.
***
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.
You Were Born from by Nellie Wong
Nellie Wong was the first American born daughter to a Chinese immigrant family. She lived through World War II and the horror of being one of the many Japanese Americans who were evacuated into concentration camps. Her family borrowed money and pursued their view of the American dream by opening a restaurant in the Chinatown district of Oakland, California. She did get an education and worked as a secretary. At the age of 36, she began writing her poetry. In her art, she speaks out against the oppression of all people, in particular; workers, women, minorities of all races and classes, and immigrants, all of areas she suffered under personally or watched her parents endure.
It is obvious that Wong thought her heritage was to blame for her difficulties in America. She was constantly stereotyped or ridiculed due to her skit color. It wasn’t until her mid 30’s that she could actually find her voice. A younger collegiate group who encourage her to speak out surrounded her. She found her voice in poems such as You Were Born.
In this poem she refers to the battles many races face due to the color of their skin. She speaks specifically about the African American’s being pushed to the back of the bus on public transportation. She goes so far as to describe skin color as a disability alluding again to the fact that she felt her skin color was the cause of her trials in life. Interesting enough, she also wrote a poem called When I Was Growing Up in which she tells of wishing she were white when she was a child. I feel that Wong did realize that she had let the remarks of color sensitive people cloud her mind. She basically held herself back for years just because she felt confined in her own skin due to the remarks she had heard all her life from others.
(Born)
You came out of disability
out of skin and teeth
and bones and rage
at inequities
of race, gender, class
(Growing)
I know now that I longed to be white.
How? you ask.
Let me tell you the ways.
when I was growing up, people told me
I was dark and I believed my own darkness
in the mirror, in my soul, my own narrow vision.
Women of Native American Heritage
When The World As We Knew It Ended by Joy Harjo
Harjo grew up in the world of the Mvskoke Indians. She was artistic from a very young age drawing with chalk on the slate boards that covered the walls of their garage and with crayons on the walls inside her bedroom closet door. She always kept her art private as a child. It was personal for her then.
Fortunately, it was accepted that Mvskoke women were artists. It was common for them to express themselves in art in all forms. Harjo’s female family members were no exception. Her aunt and grandmother were both painters. This in some way gave Harjo the courage to begin to express her self outwardly too.
Growing up on a reservation, Harjo encountered many hardships but she never lost her love for her world. She always hung to the tradition of women caring for family, or their typical role as homemaker and the one to care for the children. She put these things first in her own life as well as in her poetry. Her first priority was to raise a family. Later she would focus on her education and would discover the art of poetry while in college. Her poems reflect her feelings of tradition, her mourning over the loss of tradition and her priorities of family.
In one of her poems, When The World As We Knew It Ended, Harjo beautifully depicts the end of traditional life for her people. In particular, she refers to life when Native Americans were occupying Alcatraz Island as a sort of reservation. Ultimately, these occupants would be removed by force. She tells how the women were cleaning and caring for the children all the while watching this end come. Without loosing a step, however, after the end the women began again and strived to re-establish their way of life. I particularly loved how the very end of the poem related creating a poem to childbirth.
We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.
…
And then it was over, this world we had grown to love
for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses
and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities
while dreaming.
But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies
who needed mild and comforting, and someone
pickup up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble
and began to sind about the light flutter
the kick beneath the skin of the earth
we felt there, beneath us
a warm animal
a song being born betwwent eh legs of her,
a poem.
what gramma said about how she came here by nila northsun
Northsun was born in 1951 and grew up as an active member of the urban American Indian community. She participated in many of the traditions of her culture such as powwows. She was teenager at the time of Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island and the ground roots movement into American Indian activism. Throughout her education and poetry writing, which began in the 1970’s, she remains true to her Indian heritage. It is obvious that she values her roots and wants them to remain a predominate factor in her life. The most striking thing about norhtsun’s poetry and personality in general is the absence of capital letters. It is almost like she portrays herself as a small part of the bigger picture, a small link in a larger chain.
Interesting enough, northsun currently lives on the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Reservation in Fallon, Nevada. She continues to pass on her family and cultural traditions in her role as the director of a teen crisis shelter.
Her desire to pass on her family history and tradition is reflected in her poem what gramma said about how she came here. In this poem she puts history to paper by recording a story relayed to her by oral tradition from her grandmother. By putting this story to paper, she has assured its preservation for future generations thus holding on to a part of the Native American life that seems to slowly slip away. I like how the first line of the poem makes me think of a little girl begging her grandmother to tell her a story and finally the grandmother gives in.
i guess i’ll tell you how we came here
when i was a young girl my
familylives induck valley
my older sister was supposed to get
married to this young man
but they waited
then he saw me &
liked me better
but she was older &
was supposed to marry first
one day he rode up to the house
i was outside hanging clothes
he scooped me up on the horse
& ran away with me
that is how we got married
we had to move away
we came here to fallon
we were the first ones here
it became the paiute-shoshoni reservation
that is how we came here
Women of the Predominate Culture
Dead Love by Mary Mathews Adams
I was not able to find a great deal of information on Mary Mathews Adams but even with the sparse amount of resources, the idea of her life influencing her poetry if very evident. It is known that Adams was an education woman. She went to school at the Packer Institute. She married Alfred S. Barnes, a publisher, who passed away several years into their marriage. She then married Charles Kendall Adams, president of the University of Wisconsin. He too preceded her in death. She obviously loved both of her husbands very much and the loss of them was traumatic to her. She expressed her grief in her poem Dead Love. However, this poem leaves me to wonder if she loved another, maybe one who she could not tell other about. She seems to allude to a secret love in this poem. Of course the mystery surrounding women is a source of inspiration for many a poet.
Two loves had I. Now both are dead,
And both are marked by tombstones white.
The one stands in the churchyard near,
The other hid from mortal sight.
The name on one all men may read,
And learn who lies beneath the stone;
The other name is written where
No eyes can read it by my own.
On one I plant a living flower,
And cherish it with loving hands;
I shun the single withered leaf
That tells me where the other stands.
To that white tombstone on the hill
In summer days I often go;
From this white stone that nearer lies
I turn me with unuttered woe.
O God, I pray, if love must die.
And make no more of life a part,
Let witness be where all can see,
And not within a living heart.
I, Being Born a Woman Distressed by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Born in 1892, Edna St. Vincent Millay was definitely a woman before her time. Raised in a single-family home, she was taught to have an appreciation for literature and music from an early age. Her poetry won her many awards and even a scholarship to Vassar. She was said to have lived a “Bohemian” lifestyle in the famous New York Greenwich Village. She was consumed with writing with the intent to be published. She was also involved in the theater.
Mostly unaccepted in her day, Millay was openly bisexual. Even after she married Eugen Boissevain, they maintained an “open-sexual” relationship. They were said to have acted as two bachelors. Obviously she was not comfortable in this conformity in marriage. It wasn’t that she didn’t have feelings for her husband but she would have much more preferred to live an unencumbered lifestyle. In her poem I, Being Born a Woman Distressed, she seems to find her voice and shares her lack of satisfaction in monogamy.
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
Conclusion:
I will admit, probably to the relief of most men, that women are complicated beings. For sure some are homemakers, caregivers and submissive beings. But they often assume these roles by choice. They are also activists, teachers, artists and historians. No matter the role they choose for their lives, or even the roles that are forced upon them by society, they assume them with great passion and conviction.
It is hard to say that the days are gone when all women fit into a mold of being the June Cleavers of the world. It would seem that there never was a real mold, only one that was put forth by those blind to reality. For in reality, women have explored with their sexuality, they have practiced promiscuity, they have loved with great passion, they have fought for rights of their race, they have fought against a society that wanted to keep their kind oppressed and they have struggled to record it all. The idea of telling their stories only to the family at their knee is a farce. Instead, they put these expressions of life into the art of poetry preserving it for all generations to come.
Works Cited
Unsettling America. Ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillian and Jennifer Gillian. PenguinBooks.
New York. 1994.
The Compact Beford Introduction To Literature Sixth Edition. Ed. Michael Meyer.
Bedford / St. Marin’s. Boston, New York. 2003.
Harjo, Joy. How We Became Human. WW Norton & Company. New York. 2002.
Castillo, Ana. I Ask the Imossible. Anchor Books. Random House, Inc. New York.
March 2001.
Poetry Exhibits, The Academy of American Poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1997 – 2004.
<http://www.poets.org/poets.poets.cfm?45442B7C000C070308>
The Poetry of nila norhtSun, <http://grad.cgu.edu/~fitzgers/webpage/poetry2.htm>
Joy Harjo, <http://joyharjo.org/>
Society for the Study of American Women Writers, 19th Century Women’s Poetry, Mary
Mathews Adams. <http://www.Lehigh.edu/~dek7/SSAWW/writ19CenAdam.htm>
Voices From the Gaps, Women Writers of Color,
<http://voices.cla.umn.edu/newsite/authors>
Other Women’s Voices, Izumi Shikibu, <http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/izumi.html>
Phillis Wheatley – The Early America Review,
<http://earlyamerica.com/review/winter96/wheatley.html>