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Celebrating African American Women Poets

© Dorothy Harris

In the last article I discuss Audre Lorde's Essay entitled "Poetry is Not a Luxury." I discuss Lorde's theory about the ways in which poetry for women, and particularly for women of color, is a mechanism which gives voice to women who may not otherwise find opportunity give birth to their thoughts and to conquer their fears. Lorde asserts that poetry becomes essential for the survival of the poet, and explains that without the voice that poetry gives to women, they would be silenced, their voice destroyed, their ideas never incubated, their dreams unfulfilled.

As we celebrate National poetry month, it is imperative to celebrate not only the aesthetic value of the poet's work, but to also examine and celebrate the tool that poetry is for empowerment, for personal and social change, and for self-expression. We must also give significant attention to the role that poetry has played in the lives of African American women throughout our history in America and before.

Phillis Wheatley is the first recorded African American female to have published a volume of poetry in the United States. Because of the quality and the content of her writing, and because she was a young black girl writing at a time when blacks were intentionally kept illiterate, her authenticity as a writer was questioned. Even after she proved before the board of evaluators that she was, indeed, capable of authoring her work, her work itself was minimized by the white male critics. Thomas Jefferson even writes that Blacks can not possibly have any intelligence, and that Phillis Wheatley is no poet. Certainly this was also a time when these same authority figures also stated that all women were incapable of creative expression. Wheatley, black and female, would certainly be discounted as a poet. Because her work is reflective of her time and of her conditioning in America as an enslaved black woman in America in 1770's, many critics minimized the value of her work (It's a bit tough for some readers to read that Wheatley give thanks to God for being brought to America from Africa, rescued from the heathen land to learn of the redeemer). However, because of her ability to create, to give birth to her thoughts, because of her willingness to write use the language of her oppressors to represent, to some degree, the oppressed, because of her willingness to prove herself a poet, we have Phillis Wheatley as a model of an African American poet whose voice was heard, even against the odds.

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