And I could tell you about things we been through, some awful ones, some wonderful, but I know that the things that make us are more than that, our lives are more than the days in them, our lives are our line and we go on.

—Lucille Clifton, Generations

That Lucille Clifton is one of the most engaging, gifted, and significant of contemporary poets is a critical evaluation more and more commonly held. Witness her inclusion in numerous anthologies, her nomination for the Pulitzer Prize, and her praises sung more frequently now than ever. Likewise, it is generally recognized that her poems offer an edifying personal wisdom, born of experience and deep thought, distilled by a keen and penetrating intelligence. The insights offered by her poems have attracted considerable critical appreciation. Haki Madhubuti has written of her:

In everything she creates, this Lucille Clifton, a writer of no ordinary substance, a singer of faultless ease and able story-telling, there is a message. No slogans or billboards, but words that are used refreshingly to build us, make us better, stronger, and whole.¹

While her vision is thus appreciated, and its effects noticed, there has been little critical work that attempts to account for the how of Clifton's work, to explain her tremendous ability to use poetic discourse as an instrument for teaching. Perhaps this aspect of her poetry is over-looked as a critical focus because of persistent Anglo-American critical bias against the rhetorical in poetic discourse. Influenced by the expressivist tradition of romanticism, and beguiled by the formalist critical schools that react against romanticism, contemporary critics still tend to perceive poetry as primarily the expression of feeling and the making of meaning. This is often true even among those African-American and feminist critics who perceive literature as equipment for living. Such contemporary perceptions of poetry, and particularly lyric poetry, contrast with traditional African, European, and Asian conceptions of poetry that see it also as the product of rhetorical intention toward an audience, including the intention of teaching.

In this analysis of one of Clifton's poems, I intend to demonstrate how we might expand our understanding and appreciation of her work by adding to our customary recognition of lyric as expressive of feeling and meaning also an understanding of lyric as rhetorical discourse, functioning to teach and thereby to alter the consciousness of its audience. My concern here in not only with what the poem means, but also, and especially, with what it does, and how, and to whom. The analysis that follows perceives a poem as a field of engagement that mediates a relationship between poet and audience. This relationship functions not between actual persons of blood and bone, but rather between discursive persons, ethical constructions implied in the text as speaker and as audience.

Here, now, a poem from Clifton's An Ordinary Woman:

light
on my mother's tongue
breaks through her soft
extravagant hip
into life.
Lucille
she calls the light,
which was the name
of the grandmother
who waited by the crossroads
in Virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.
light breaks from her life
to her lives …
mine already is
an Afrikan name.(2)

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Clifton's poem is its structure, which functions to deny reader expectations, making the sequence of subject matter and of focus starkly surprising, especially the final lines. The relationship between the poem's four sentences is subtle, and even within one of the sentences, the second, the relationship of its clauses makes the ending a surprise completion of its beginning.

The poem begins with an image of birth that combines metonymic suggestions of joy and benediction associated with the word “light,” with a bodily and sensual metonymy for the poet's mother, giving the reader, through the phrase “her soft / extravagant hip” a sense of womanly form and of sensual, motherly warmth.

Clifton does not give this poem a conventional, separate title, so the word “light” derives emphasis not only from its being the first word of the poem and its occupying a line unto itself but also from its functioning for the reader as a de facto title; and like most titles it suggests a theme or focus. In the context of Clifton's oeurve the word “light” resonates with a rich variety of connotations.³ At times it is celestial and miraculous, or the presence of God, or a measure of consciousness,⁴ or, in the poem below, a complex combination of knowledge, self-knowledge, and compelling truth:

the light that came to lucille clifton
came in a shift of knowing
when even her fondest sureties
faded away. it was the summer
she understood that she had not understood
and was not mistress even
of her own off eye. then
the man escaped throwing away his tie and
the children grew legs and started walking and
she could see the peril of an
unexamined life.
she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”(5)

In the section of Two-headed Woman titled “the light that came to lucille clifton,” several poems employ “light” as a metaphor for a spiritual presence of ancestors:

                    i
lucille clifton
hereby testify
that in that room
there was a light
and in that light
there was a voice
and in that voice
there was a sigh
and in that sigh
there was a world.(6)
incandescence
formless form
and the soft
shuffle of sound
who are these strangers
peopleing this light?
lucille
we are
the Light(7)
                                                  mother
someone calling itself Light
has opened my inside.
i am flooded with brilliance
mother,
someone of it is answering to
your name(8)

A reader familiar with Clifton's work might intuitively experience the complex metaphoric resonance of the term, perceiving it as one node in a network of intertextual relationships. But I am most interested here in this individual poem and how Clifton creates the reader's experience through it, and this experience need not be diminished by lack of knowing Clifton's other work. In fact, her uses of the trope are so varied that one cannot presume from poem to poem exactly how she intends to use it. One only knows that it portends something significant, profound, and probably at least marvelous if not outright mystical. In “light,” Clifton emphasizes the significance and richness of the term, if not its approximate denotation, with clarity sufficient for even the first-time reader of her poetry to apprehend. In any case, because the initial reference to “light” in this poem is so abstract, the reader more likely focuses on the more visually concrete reference to the mother's hip.

This reference to hips also is significant, for Clifton often rhapsodizes about her body, celebrating not only her own beauty but also by extension the special beauty of all black women. As she pays homage to herself, her body and her ethos come to personify “blackness blessed,”⁹ Hips become a synecdoche, even a theme or motif, in Clifton, to suggest her own womanliness, the power of feminine form, and especially to celebrate the aesthetics of black women's bodies, as, for instance, in “homage to my hips”:

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!(10)

In “light,” the reference to the mother's hips in positive and loving terms has cultural resonance for black women and men who, resisting contemporary Euroamerican obsession with boniness, girlishness, and female frailty, admire and celebrate the African-American woman's body in all the special amplitude of her beauty.

The expectations of warmth, and even sentiment, raised by the language of the first sentence, with the symbolic resonance of the reference to “mother,” “light,” and “softness,” continue in the first clause of the second sentence: “Lucille / she calls the light.”

Clifton emphasizes the name “Lucille” by way of hyper-baton, a purposive deviation from conventional word order that calls attention to a word by surprising a reader's accustomed syntactical expectations. She reinforces this emphasis through poetic structure by giving the name a line of its own. The use of hyperbaton here also allows Clifton to suggest the mother's voice, since the name or, more precisely, the act of naming, with all the significance which that implies in African-American and African cultures, belongs as an act to the mother, as her prerogative, her responsibility, her inspiration.¹¹ If the lack of quotation marks enclosing the name seems to militate against this, then the placing of the name on a line unto itself counteracts the lack of attributive punctuation. Because the name here is recognized as the name of the poet, its presence and its emphasis work—for this moment in the sequence of reading this lyric—to concentrate the attention of the reader. Even if the reader cannot yet understand the central significance of the name, the structure of the lines and of the sentence compels nonetheless a focus on the name that will help empower the conclusion of the poem.

The hyperbaton also functions to de-emphasize the mother as grammatical subject of this sentence, for “she” is actually the subject of the first, and independent clause, of this sentence. The difference in emphasis and focus becomes clear if we rearrange this clause into a more conventional grammatical sequence: “She calls the light Lucille.” Clifton's use of hyperbaton allows her effectively to make the name “Lucille” the subject of the sentence—not, of course, grammatically, but rather in the phenomenological experience of the reader.

In the experience of first reading this poem, the reader likely would expect some elaboration of the first sentence and the first clause of the second sentence to maintain a tone consistent with the suggestions of warmth and sentiment. But Clifton has made certain that the reader is completely unprepared for the next two clauses:

which was the name
of the grandmother
who waited by the crossroads
in Virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.

The hyperbaton by which Clifton emphasizes the name “Lucille” also makes for a momentary sense of disjunction and uncertainty as to what the word “which” references, for the structure of the first clause might suggest a closer linkage to the antecedent “light.” In any case, the reference specifically to the name becomes clear quickly, and just as quickly Clifton introduces the reader to the grandmother.¹² At this point, there is still nothing in the poem to suggest that Clifton intends more than a loving remembrance of her mother and grandmother. Clifton's use of figurative language and her playing with grammatical structure give the poem to this point a noticeably “poetic” quality, appearing to be a reflective and graceful expression of some of the poet's feelings about Mother and Grandmother.

The lines

who waited by the crossroads
in Virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.

function, in an perfectly unexpected way, to modify “grandmother.” With these lines Clifton commemorates the character of her grandmother, and the reader is to understand that character as the grandmother's preeminent legacy. The diction of these lines offers a stark contrast to the languid, dreamily descriptive language of the first seven lines. Flatly descriptive, this language is less Latinate than the preceding lines. And the description conjures specific pictures of a physical setting and a sequence of events connected to motivation, forethought, and determination. These lines have a concrete clarity in reference to the material world that is not present in the first seven lines. In the opening lines, metaphoric language evokes feeling; in these lines concrete description gives us a vision. The first suggests the classic, timeless moment of the lyric, the second the time-bound and sequential structure of narrative. The narrative quality of these lines is signalled by Clifton's use of the past tense, in contrast to her use of the present tense to describe the past in the lines preceding the narrative, and also in the lines following the narrative.

The structure of these narrative lines also functions to generate suspense. The grammatical and tonal structures disorient the reader by denying expectation, making the reader anxious for some resolution of the tension evoked by the uncertainty of reference and by the apparent switch in subject matter. The tension and the suspense are intensified by Clifton's arousing curiosity as to why the grandmother “waited at the crossroads,” and what happened next after she “shot the whiteman off his horse.” The line “killing the killer of her sons” relieves the tension of suspense, answering questions of motivation, of narrative sequence, and of consequence. Clifton then switches back to the present tense: “light breaks from her life / to her lives.”

As we encounter here the third use of the word “light,” it might be helpful to review Clifton's use of this word and its metaphorical richness in this poem. The first instance, “light / on my mother's tongue,” does not seem to have a specific referent. The reader responds to it favorably because of the positive connotations of the word “light,” and because it is linked with “my mother,” doubling the positive terms, dialogically intensifying their suggestive powers. The word “light” here may suggest a word lovingly spoken; or coupled with “tongue,” it may recall the spiritual tradition of speaking in tongues under divine inspiration. But to insist upon these or other such interpretations would be an attempt to codify speculation and hermeneutical free association. It is enough, I think, to observe that the reader likely derives from this first instance of Clifton's using the word “light,” in its context, a suggestion of mother love, womanliness, warmth, and something else slightly mysterious or mystical, befitting the happy miracle of birth.

The second instance, “Lucille / she calls the light,” more clearly refers to the newborn, who we infer to be the poet. More specifically, the word here is a metaphor for the feelings and hopes and happinesses associated with and invested in the newborn. The first use of the word, with its originary movement from “mother's tongue” to “her soft / extravagant hip” [a metonymic phrase that allows the suggestion of womanliness while avoiding potentially more intrusive and crude gynecological metonymic references] establishes the context that saves this second use of “light” from the mundane, as in the commonplace “the light of my life.” It also discourages the reader from being inclined to discover specific visual referents, leaving the more material description for the following narrative lines.

The third use of “light”—“light breaks from her life / to her lives …”—strongly suggests an ongoing and dynamic heritage, continually renewed inspiration, and available strength ready in the here and now for Grandmother's children and the children of her children, and beyond, everlastingly. The use of the word “breaks” here, echoing the earlier use, suggests here also the process of birth, but in this context it implies less the newness of beginning symbolized by and actuated by birth and rather more constancy of renewal of life and its most promising possibilities. The ellipsis at the end of this sentence reinforces the sense of the ongoing process of Grandmother's still-living and life-giving legacy. The final lines—“mine already is / an Afrikan name”—function as a declaration, a proclamation, even. Speaking in the declarative, Clifton does not so much describe her name as “Afrikan”; she rather boldly asserts it to be so, and her heritage gives her the authority to make such an assertion.

The advantages of the rhetorical approach to this poem become apparent when we attempt to account for the function of this epigrammatic assertion. I have been discussing the poem in a manner available to any critic employing some variety of hermeneutical criticism, focusing on the language, the structure, and the meaning of the poem. What has been distinctively rhetorical about my approach has been my assumption throughout of rhetorical intentions on the part of Clifton, and not merely intentions to make meaning but specifically intentions toward her audience. I would like now to make these assumptions explicit questions whose aim will be to discover the rhetorical dimension of Clifton's lyric. In this endeavor, I shall begin by asking of the declaration or epigram that ends the poem not What does it mean? but rather What does it do? Even more explicitly, I will ask How does it evidence Clifton's rhetorical intentions toward her audience? and How does it function to help achieve her intentions?

The word “already” in the epigram suggests the existence of at least some doubt about the “Africanity” of the name “Lucille.” It may well even suggest a response to some presumptuous challenge that she change her name to something “African” as the designation is commonly (and Clifton would likely add superficially) understood. The issue of cultural and social identity implied here gives us a clue as to Clifton's intended audience. Clearly, she speaks to persons who are at least familiar with conflicting perspectives of cultural self-identity among African Americans.

There is a central, on-going ethical issue here that Clifton intends to address, if not fully resolve, in this lyric. The question among African Americans of cultural ethos underlies the historical cycle of self-definition and redefinition that can be traced, simplistically, by following the trail of names from “African” to “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “African American,” with “Afro-American” being a constant guest at the parties but only infrequently asked to dance. More than a simple issue of nomenclature, the foundational ethical questions of social identity are “To whom do we belong?” and “Who belongs with us?” and “What makes us special and not merely ‘different’?”

In an earnest effort to change themselves and the world for the better, African Americans often disregard their most immediate tradition and effectively discard their heritage. Even people who consider themselves Afrocentric tend to ignore the immediate treasure of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, finding a more romantic sense of identity and validation in ancient Africa. This impulse evidences itself in the acts of renaming so common among African-American activists and intellectuals. Anecdotal evidence suggests strongly that persons who rename themselves so as to commemorate relatives whom they admire or specifically African-American heroes are far out-numbered by persons who rename themselves after ancient and contemporary heroes from Mother Africa. How many people rename themselves or name their children after Fannie Lou Hamer, Nat Turner, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, or Duke Ellington, to name just a few people of courage and genius?

People who are inclined to characterize African-American given names and surnames as “slave names” in effect perpetuate the contempt visited upon enslaved Africans by white masters. They deny the worth of their heritage and the generations of ancestor/nurturers. They assume, sadly and ignorantly, that some long-forgotten white slave master is more important in defining African-American individual selves than their parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins. By refusing to carry or to honor the names of their family traditions, such persons surrender to the casual rapist and the Christian murderer priority over the womb that bore, the breast that fed, and the back that carried so many burdens for so very long.

The reader implied in “light” probably includes those who may need correction of their undervaluing their family and cultural heritage as well as those who share Clifton's values, for whom the poem functions as a reaffirmation, and the poet as community spokeswoman. At the very least, we can infer with some confidence that the audience implied in the poem has at least some knowledge of the tension between knee-jerk nationalism and genuine respect for the immediate African-American heritage, and some knowledge of the practice of African Americans renaming themselves, with the overwhelming number of names seeming to leap over African American heritage in an effort to embrace and to secure legitimacy of culture and social identity directly from an idealized and romanticized Africa. Her audience also knows the significance of the spelling of “Afrikan” with a “k” instead of the conventional “c” to begin the final syllable.

Clifton takes it as her duty to her people still-living-in-spirit to remind her people living-in-the-flesh now that Grandmother's quilts covered them lovingly with beauty and kept them warm long before most of them knew what kente cloth was. Clifton counters the notion that African-American given names are “slaves” names, a notion born of self-contempt, which her tone of defiance and pride clearly disapproves. By claiming it proudly and proclaiming it triumphantly, Clifton honors the heritage which she shares with her intended reader. Her poem thus aspires to the condition of epideictic song, singing the praises of all those who carried their names with such dignity and who made a place and a way for her and for so many others.

Seen in this context, the epigram that concludes this lyric functions as a correction. Both the sudden, unexpectedness of the capping sentence as well as the description of “Lucille” as an “Afrikan” name compels the reader to redefine. Describing “Lucille” as “Afrikan” is disorienting, exposing the inadequacy of the reader's conventional habits of understanding. The reader, even if resistant to the idea (before reading the poem) that a name like Lucille can be admirably “Afrikan,” is caught by the urge to connect the concept of “Afrikan” with the heroic and militant characteristics displayed by Grandmother Lucille. The epigram thus functions to provoke an effort for a new level of understanding, for if the reader denies the Africanity of the name, he or she must also relinquish a sense of connection with the women who bear the name.

Rhetorical stance is an attitudinal relationship created in a discourse. Often described in literary criticism as “tone,” the principal difference between the terms is that “stance” conveys the dynamic character of the relationships in a discourse, between speaker and audience, speaker and text, and, reciprocally, between audience and speaker, and audience and text. In this lyric rhetorical stances are relevant especially toward the ethical presence of the speaker, toward the action of Grandmother Lucille, and toward the “whiteman” she kills. Delineating these stances can illuminate some of Clifton's rhetorical strategies toward her intended audience.

A critical approach informed by a rhetorical perspective allows us to see the “Lucille Clifton” projected in the poem as a discursive person, an ethos. The ethos differs from the “persona” in this regard: the persona is a mask, an assumed character, while the ethos is a functional projection of selected elements of the speaker. In the case of Clifton in “light,” the ethos functions to provide an exemplar, a model of attitude and value for her audience to identify with and to emulate.

Plainly, the killing of the “whiteman” is presented as a positive, admirable act. This presentation suggests that Clifton anticipates in her audience the predisposition to see such an act not as “murder” or “inhumanity” or “tragedy” but rather as “justice.” Grandmother Lucille performs an act of execution, justly deserved. Notice the spelling of “whiteman,” a racial rather than a personal naming, an epithet which implies that such persons “[have] no names worth knowing.”¹³ This epithet also suggests the racist motive of the murderer; and by denying him an individual identification, it allows this particular murderer to typify an entire class of murderers and terrorists that has long brought death, suddenly and savagely, to African-American families. Further, her denial of a name for the whiteman effectively reverses the customary hierarchy of power and prerogative that denies black people dignity. Even if Clifton knows the name of the whiteman that great-grandmother Lucille executed, by leaving him unnamed, she denies him the dignity of naming and caring about names that have been denied to her people. The intended audience thus takes some satisfaction in the act of retribution, itself exceptional as a response to all-too-common outrages. And this satisfaction is reinforced by the line “killing the killer of sons,” with its alliteration and rhythm. There is likewise some admiration inspired by the grandmother's intelligent patience and by her being such a good shot.

The act of teaching assumes at least two things: that the lesson to be taught is worth learning and that the persons to be taught need teaching. Teaching is a rhetorical enterprise; its inventional processes are shaped by intentions toward a particular audience. As discussed recently by critics such as Walter Ong, Wolfgang Iser, and others, discourse implies the audience to which it is addressed.¹⁴ The audience is compelled, for the sake of successfully participating in the rhetorical and aesthetic experience of a discourse, to conform to the role implied as its part in the dialogic process of reading or listening.

In this lyric Clifton teaches by leading her reader to the discovery of a significant self-perception, by offering herself as an ethical exemplar, and by creating an imaginative experience for her audience to participate in. Her teaching by indirection calls for the reader to participate in the making of meaning and the discovery of the appropriate stance. As Madhubuti notes, Clifton “is a writer of complexity, and she makes her readers work and think.”¹⁵ The sense of revelation and discovery is all the stronger for the reader having had to share in the making of it. This dialogic strategy places her poem within the tradition of African-American communicative strategies such as signifyin', call and response, and teaching by parable, metaphor, and example.

Lucille Clifton, with her subtle virtuosity—as rhetorical as it is poetic, as functional as it is beautiful—fulfills one of the most faithfully pursued aspirations in the tradition of African-American poetics: She discovers and reveals beauty and dignity in the individual and the collective African-American self, and she teaches others to do likewise.

Notes

1. Haki Madhubuti, “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry,” in Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation (1950-1980), ed. Mari Evans (Garden City: Anchor, 1984) 150. See also Joyce Johnson, “The Theme of Celebration in Lucille Clifton's Poetry,” Pacific Coast Philology 18 (1983): 70-76, and Audrey T. McClusky, “Tell the Good News: A View of the Good Works of Lucille Clifton,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation 139-49.

2. Clifton, An Ordinary Woman (New York: Random, 1974) 73.

3. Perhaps some of Clifton's attraction to the figure can be found in the etymological relationship of “Lucille” to “light” through the Latin root lux. The relationship of etymological root to name-play is apparent also in her poems on Lucifer.

4. Clifton, “holy night,” in Two-headed Woman (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980) 38; “in this garden,” in Two-headed Woman 23; “conversation with my grandson, waiting to be conceived,” in Two-headed Woman 32; “for the mad,” in Two-headed Woman 43.

5. Clifton, “the light that came to lucille clifton,” in Two-headed Woman 47.

6. From Clifton, “testament,” in Two-headed Woman 51.

7. Clifton, “incandescence,” in Two-headed Woman 52.

8. From Clifton, “mother, i am mad,” in Two-headed Woman 53.

9. From Clifton, “the thirty eighth year,” in An Ordinary Woman (New York, Random, 1974) 95.

10. Clifton, Two-headed Woman 6. This poem is from a section titled “homage to mine,” and is immediately preceded by the poem “homage to my hair,” which includes the lines

                                                      my God
    i'm talking about my nappy hair!
    she is a challenge to your hand
    Black man,
    she is as tasty on your tongue as good greens.

11. The historical act apparently belonged to Clifton's father.

12. This “Lucille” is actually her great-grandmother. Clifton chooses not to make this detail clear, and her choice reflects the African-American cultural tradition of extended, multi-generational families in which any number of matriarchal figures may become “Mama” or “Granny” or ‘Muhdear.”

13. Clifton, next: new poems, American Poets Continuum Series (Brockport, NY and St. Paul, MN: BOA Editions; Distributed by Bookslinger, 1987) 27.

14. Walter Ong, “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974).

15. Madhubuti 151.