IDENTITY AND WOMEN POETS OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC: MUSICALITY, HISTORY, AND HOME KAREN ELIZABETH CONCANNON SUBMITTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS SCHOOL OF ENGLISH SEPTEMBER 2014 i The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Karen E. Concannon to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. © 2014 The University of Leeds and K. E. Concannon ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the wisdom and assistance of Dr Andrew Warnes and Dr John Whale. They saw a potential in me from the start, and it has been with their patience, guidance, and eye-opening suggestions that this project has come to fruition. I thank Dr John McLeod and Dr Sharon Monteith for their close reading and constructive insights into the direction of my research. I am more than appreciative of Jackie Kay, whose generosity of time and spirit transcends the page to interpersonal connection. With this work, I honour Dr Harold Fein, who has always been a champion of my education. I am indebted to Laura Faile, whose loving friendship and joy in the literary arts have been for me a lifelong cornerstone. To Robert, Paula, and David Ohler, in each of my endeavours, I carry the love of our family with me like a ladder, bringing all things into reach. Above all, I dedicate this to James F. Concannon, III, whose infallible support and unwavering love have helped me be the person I am. Without him, this, like so many things, would never have been possible. iii ABSTRACT This thesis takes as its subject the points of connections and comparison that exist between five African American and Black British women poets, whose writings range from 1942 to the present day. It concentrates on the interconnection and reconstruction of their spatio-temporal geographies and their utilisation of musical traditions and historical narratives and ideas of location-dependent selfhood to articulate identity. Whilst previous scholarship tends to focus on the confines of a nation-state modality, with specifically American or British interpretations of African heritage, the methodology here is centred on the importance of a transatlantic poetic discourse to identify how literary and cultural exchanges transcend these borders. The first chapter examines the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, whose ability to combine traditional forms and African American vernacular, especially in what I identify as her ‘blues sonnets’, contextualises the voice of the marginalised in segregated Chicago within post-War US culture. The following chapter then shows that Brooks’s near-contemporary, Margaret Walker, often also follows the formal conventions of the English poetic tradition yet does so to represent the ordeal of Jim Crow segregation, while also harnessing what I will show is a mythopoeic ‘I’, which allows her to inhabit traumatic histories of slavery and its long US aftermath. The public, political grounding established by these poets is adopted by Nikki Giovanni, whose categorical voice before and after the Black Arts Movement constructs an historically minded identification for African Americans, with respect to the relationship between a prejudiced society and recognition of African origins, particularly through the musical and oral traditions that predicated the trajectory of African American cultural productions. In the fourth chapter, I then show that the work of Grace Nichols develops this invocation of an African ‘source’ and that her lyrical aesthetic, likewise, makes use of her journeys across the Atlantic and of a perpetual reconstruction of her Afro-Caribbean and Black British identities; she articulates these through her under-examined tributes to American literary influences. This sense of an Atlantic triangulation then provides the thesis with the locus through which it approaches Jackie Kay’s oeuvre. In the final chapter, I show that Kay regularly examines her complex Scottish-Nigerian heritage through the animating lens of African American blues. As such, this thesis assembles together a new and transnational group of poets, examining the intersections of their work and illuminating the shared motifs of home, origins, transformative self-identity, musicality, historical consciousness, and racial and sexual politics. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: GWENDOLYN BROOKS: TENSION AND POETIC IDENTITY 34 Black Arts Movement and the Problems of Form and Audience 34 Precursors and Motivations in Form 39 Development of a Formal Poetics 42 Brooks and the Sonnet 51 African American Vernacular: The Blues Sonnet 60 Women-Centred Poetry: Prefiguring Contemporary Feminism 71 CHAPTER 2: MARGARET WALKER: COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND A SOUTHERN VOICE 86 Sonnets of For My People 90 Elegy: Intersection Between Public and Private 110 Poems Inspired By Beatitudes 115 Anti-Beatitudes? 122 Future as Interpreted Through the Past 126 CHAPTER 3: NIKKI GIOVANNI: HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND METAMORPHOSIS 135 Deviation from the Black Arts Movement: Giovanni’s Protean Aesthetic 138 Historical Consciousness Grounds Creative Articulation 143 Vernacular Tradition, Spirituals, and Blues Songs 156 Change as the Nature of Creativity: Paradoxes Overcome 165 Sexuality and Gender: Transcending and Expanding Historical Norms 173 Political and Domestic: Reliance on Close History 180 CHAPTER 4: GRACE NICHOLS: JOURNEYING AND AMERICAN INFLUENCES 187 Atlantic Crossing: Significance of American Precedents 187 Return to Africa: Journeying with Whitman, Hughes, and Walker 190 The River as Origin: An Historically American Trope 204 Return to Maternal ‘Source’: Brooks, Walker, Hughes, and Ellison 207 American Echoes of Transforming Self and Home 217 CHAPTER 5: JACKIE KAY: TRANSFORMATIONS AND COMPLEX DUALISMS 234 Empathy and Identity: The Lasting Impact of the Queen of Blues 237 A Link to Africa: A Heritage Inherited 251 Blurring of Boundaries: Rivers, Transitions, and Transformations 266 An Enduring Identity of Doubleness and Fusion 274 CONCLUSIONS 281 BIBLIOGRAPHY 287 APPENDIX: INTERVIEW WITH JACKIE KAY 300 1 INTRODUCTION ‘Cover me with the leaves of your blackness Mother shed tears... ...for I’m severed by ocean and longing’ --Grace Nichols In this thesis, I examine the intersections between the work of five black women poets, both African American and Black British, who span the post-War years to the present: Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Nichols, and Jackie Kay. I will show that each of these figures employs her poetry to interrogate— and at times construct—her own identity, through a specifically racialized and gender- sensitive perspective. The establishment of these points of connection, in turn, will suggest that more needs to be done than consider them as participants in their particular national traditions. Whereas critical consensus even now assimilates their poetry to nation-bound visions of literary history, their work itself never stops at the national boundary.1 Instead, I suggest, they are linked together in a literary community by common elements of transatlantic experience, including historical consciousness, an engagement with musical tradition, and a dependence on location-driven identity. There has been a surge within the last two decades for academics to adopt a 1 See, for example, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2013), The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (New York, NY: Norton, 2004), or Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry, edited by Kwame Dawes (Leeds, UK: Peeple Tree Press, 2010). Each of these texts defines their writers by the construction of the nation-state with limited ability to transcend these borders. Rowell says, ‘as each of them writes self against the backdrop of community, whose history and current circumstances are a persistent, though muted, presence...they write themselves, they write their communities, entities with particularized and collective histories that frame their lives as individuals and as members of a group, with interests that are aesthetic as well as social, economic, and political...privilege, the result of ancestral struggle and sacrifice and death’ (pp. xxxv, xli). Rowell’s introductory thoughts about African American poets might also equally apply to Black British poets, whose literary resources overlap across the Atlantic. Likewise, Dawes admits to the difficulty of defining the term Black British but suggests that the poets themselves are best left to their own definitions and self-identifications of the delimiting term (p. 19). Within these anthologies, where, collectively, each of these poets can be found, there is a categorisation that tends to preclude a transatlantic relationship between them, a gap which forms the basis for this thesis. 2 transnational approach to literary criticism. This methodology has been particularly spearheaded by the journal American Quarterly, whose publications have turned more and more towards a denunciation of scholarship bound by the confines of the nation- state in favour of the significance