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Journal Assignment: Audre Lorde and Phillis Wheatley admire and employ dramatically different diction. Rewrite either one stanza of Lorde's poem "Power" using Wheatley's diction or rewrite Wheatley's poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" using Lorde's diction. Comment on how your rewrite changes the poem.
Reading Questions and Background:
1. Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) is often acknowledged to be America's first important African American poet. Wheatley was kidnapped as young child and brought to American where she was sold in the South Market in Boston to Susanna Wheatley. She was raised in a devout Christian household and was tutored by various family members, with whom she began to master English, Latin, and the Bible. Whealey's poetry was popular in her own lifetime and she was well known as a "Negro" poet. How does Wheatley use diction (word choice) to construct a persona for herself? How would you characterize that persona? (As long as we are on the subject of diction, it's worth noting that although the term "Negro" is usually considered offensive today, it was perfectly acceptable in the 18th Century and was actually a positive term during the Harlem Renaissance, when Langston Hughes wrote. You will notice that Frantz Fanon--a Caribbean political theorist--uses it unabashedly in 1952 when writing Black Skins, White Masks.)
2. One of the fundamental mistakes people often make when reading poetry is to assume that the poet and the narrator are one and the same. As Herbert Rosengarten and Amanda Goldrick-Jones point out in their essay on "Reading Poetry," poetry is always dramatic (897). Sometimes this drama is explicit: for example when we hear a dialogue taking place (e.g. in Robert Browning Poem's "My Last Duchess") or the narrator simply cannot be the poet (e.g. in Emily Dickinson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died"--Dickinson can't be the narrator since the narrator announces quite clearly that she is dead). However, in other poems, the drama is less apparent. It may seem that we are merely overhearing the inner turmoil or musings of someone very much like the poet--in fact someone whose life story is remarkably similar to the poet's. This is often the case in contemporary "confessional" poetry, but is also an issue in Wheatley's poetry. This sort of haziness between poet and narrator can be confusing; however, it is worth remembering that even in autobiographical poetry--like in autobiographies in general--the self being presented is never identical to that of the author (nor could it be). Autobiographers must choose details from their lives and leave others out. In essence they are "Performing" the self which they would like to have known and erasing evidence that does not suit the needs of their art. (You might think back to Augustine's confessions here: he very clearly had an agenda--to tell of his conversion and hence to convert us. Even though his text was rather long, he necessarily had to leave out many details. These were presumably details which either did not help or perhaps even hindered his message.) What sort of person does the narrator of Wheatley's poems seem to be? How does she convince you to respect this person?
3. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was born in Martinique into a lower middle class family of mixed race ancestry and received a conventional colonial education. As an adult, Fanon moved to France in order to fight in the Resistance and to train as a psychiatrist; While there, as one biographer puts it, "his assimilationist illusions were shattered by the gaze of metropolitan racism." (California Newsreel). His first book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) originally titled "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks," arose out of this experience. This book has been seminal for the fields of post-colonial and ethnic studies. To what extent does Fanon's psychological reading of language shed light on Wheatley's choice of diction? You may want also to consider the drawbacks to his approach.
Bibliography/Resources:
Robinson, William, "Phillis Wheatley," The Heath Anthology of American Lit. Vol. 1. ed. Paul Lauter. Lexington, MA: DC Heath & Co., 1994: 1048-50
Rosengarten, Herbert and Amanda Goldrick-Jones, "Reading Poetry," The Broadside Anthology of Poetry. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1993: 891-910.
California Newsreel, "Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (review)" (http://www.newsreel.org/
films/frantzfa.htm)