Wandering around the blogosphere as I usually do, I came across a challenge on the calyx press blog. Of course, at 43, I don’t qualify as a “young feminist” (if I ever did), but I still got to thinking about my intentions to review Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.
For a young woman without an anchor, about to become culturally divorced from herself, the anthology was one of a series of buoys she clung to and devoured as if I were a member of the Donner group, not Salma’s daughter. Composed of both poetry and prose, the book represents the discussions Black women had with other Black women, and with society in general, about what it means to be a Black woman. The scope of the conversation is wide. Includes the Combahee River Collective Declaration that includes articulations such as
This focus on our own oppression is embedded in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the deepest and potentially most radical politics springs directly from our own identity, rather than working to end someone else’s oppression. In the case of black women, this is a particularly disgusting, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have come before us that no one is more worthy of liberation than we ourselves. We reject pedestals, royalty and walking ten steps behind. To be recognized as human, plainly human, is enough.
I am not entirely clear about the concept of identity politics. However, it seems to me that the essence of self-determination is to advance your own cause. In the case of black women, the cause must be the black woman. Home Girls is one of the places along my literary reading path where I realized that it was acceptable, even revolutionary, to come out of the deep end, open my mouth, and fully express myself.
Home Girls is also where I first encountered the work of poet Kate Rushin. Her poem, the Black Back-ups,
is dedicated to Merry Clayton, Cissy Houston, Vonetta Washington, Dawn, Carrietta McClellen, Rosie Farmer, Marsha Jenkins, and Carolyn Williams. This is for all the black women who sang backup for Elvis Presley, John Denver, James Taylor, Lou Reed, etc, etc, etc.
…This is for Hattie McDaniels, Butterfly McQueen, Ethel Waters
Sapphire
saphrony
Ruby Begonia
Aunt Jemma
Aunt Jemima in the pancake box
Aunt Jemima in the pancake box?
Aunt Jemima in the pancake box?
tiajemimaonthepancakebox?
Ainchamamaonthepancakebox?
Isn’t mom cool in the pancake box?mom mom
Get out of that damn box
and come home with meAnd my mom jumps out of that box
She swoops down in her nurse cape
what to wear on sunday
And at Wednesday night prayer meeting
And she wipes my forehead
And she fans my face
And she makes me a cup of tea
And it does nothing for my true pain
Except she’s my mom
mom mommy mommy mommy mommy
Mam-mee Mam-mee
I would walk a million miles
for one of your smilesThis is for black backups.
This is for my mom and your mom
my grandmother and your grandmother
This is for the thousand thousand Black Back-upsAnd the colored girls say*
After reading this poem, I couldn’t listen to Lou Reed’s Walk on the Side as just a song. Instead, she now expressed a relationship in which the talent and artistic ability of black women are used to enrich other artists, both musically and financially. It’s Big Mama Thornton and Elvis represented across the cultural landscape. Or it would be, except Big Mama’s daughter loves her mother and wrote a poem about it; a poem that changes the dynamic landscape of understanding.
* © 1983 Donna Kate Rushin