Erica L. Still
BODY LANGUAGE

Lucille Clifton's hips are big hips, and that's worth celebrating. Which is exactly what she does. She pays homage to them, honoring them publicly for their magnitude and achievement: "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!" With Whitman's enthusiasm, and without his verbosity, Clifton sings of herself. Her lines snap with excitement as she puts her finger on the one thing she is most sure of --- herself. One imagines that Clifton does not wear, or any longer own, overlarge, billowy, potato-sack clothes --- these hips have no need to be hidden. Her clothes must be as tailored as her poem. Declarative, nipped and tucked into place, these short lines of one and two syllable words refuse to hide within elaborate images. Which is not to say that they are without metaphor or imagery, but to grasp the clarity with which they speak. These hips are big, "they need space to / move around in," and Clifton gives it to them. In the tradition of African American women's poetry, this is not Phillis Wheatley's eager anticipation of a heavenly escape from physicality, but Zora Neale Hurston's celebration of woman's body. This is the power of the Incarnation, of word made flesh --- the body that can tell the truth.

It's not as serious as it sounds. For above all, these hips know how to bring pleasure --- surely the spell-cast man is smiling, and so are we. The pleasure is unquestioned (it is sincere), and yet the humor is serious, for it exists exactly at the point of our recognition of the power struggle which the poem implies. This staking out of space that the poem accomplishes is bold precisely because women's hips are not supposed to require too much space. And that "these [African American] hips have never been enslaved" further points to the racial hierarchy and history that Clifton refuses to remain within. So we smile at Clifton's obvious excitement about these magic hips at the same time that we recognize the seriousness with which she disrupts gender and racial norms. We smile because she is doing such serious business with such irreverent, peculiar tools.

Memory also serves this disruptive purpose: "they ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories / and i keep on remembering / mine." Serious humor here also. And again the primacy of the self, the self with its own memories. This poem's title, "why some people be mad at me sometimes," is instructive. Clifton's non-standard English makes rooms for itself just like her hips do --- you can't help but notice it, and smile in recognition. At the same time, (in addition to what Guy Davenport calls the memory of another linguistic system) is the awareness of systems of power and authority. Clifton's memories need as much space as her hips do; neither hips nor memory fits neatly into previously ordered social constructions.

But not fitting neatly is not the same as being outside of those systems altogether, and Clifton knows that even she sometimes concedes. Indeed, she has already faced that inclination:

cruelty. don't talk to me about cruelty
or what i am capable of.

when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country

and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.

it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.

i didn't ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.

now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.

Here the body is acknowledged as a testament of both good and bad. The magic hips are equally involved in the celebrations and the destruction. Furthermore, the serious humor acquires a new edge here, for the holocaust of roaches points to another holocaust about which one cannot joke.

It is not the killing of roaches that amuses us; it is Clifton's acceptance of that ability as evidence of her more vicious potential that gives us pause, to do as Clifton did, both to smile and to shudder. Also, we are beginning to recognize her unusual choice of tools --- hips and memory to disrupt social patterns, roaches' deaths to reveal violent tendencies --- and we are pleasantly amused at her unconventionality and attracted by her ability to see herself in the world without seeing herself as the world. More important, she sees the truth in herself without seeing herself as the Truth, and we are drawn to the serious humor that offers such a vantage point. Clifton uses herself to make us see so much more; in her hands, ordinary lives and bodies gain multiple layers of meaning.

That intensity of meaning, but without such humor, remains when Clifton turns to injustice or violence perpetrated against other people. Offering their stories she is quite solemn, as in "sorrow song" :

for the eyes of the children,
the last to melt,
the last to vaporize,
for the lingering
eyes of the children, staring,
the eyes of the children of
buchenwald,
of viet nam and johannesburg,
for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
ordinary men.

No pleasure here, not even an ironic smile. All that remains is the truth as experienced by the body --- the eyes amazed at extraordinary evil. Even at the moment of its disintegration the body lends clarity, remains a place from which to see. And every body lends that insight, Clifton insists. Asian bodies, black bodies, Indian bodies, and white ones, too, every single one has something to say. Killing them does not silence them. Vaporized, they remain in the air all around, speaking to us with our every breath.

Yet, for all that (because of all that?) the body's ability to know is not always appreciated. Sometimes its revelations are too much to look at, and what it teaches is too hard to know. In "wild blessings" Clifton acknowledges the way bodies communicate with each other, and the high price of that gift:

licked in the palm of my hand
by an uninvited woman. so i have held
in that hand the hand of a man who
emptied into his daughter, the hand
of a girl who threw herself
from a tenement window, the trembling
junkie hand of a priest, of a boy who
shattered across viet nam
someone resembling his mother,
and more. and more.
do not ask me to thank the tongue
that circled my fingers
or pride myself on the attentions
of the holy lost.
i am grateful for many blessings
but the gift of understanding,
the wild one, maybe not.

It is hard to recognize the cruelty in one's self, or to see oneself in the "holy lost."

Incarnated knowing is a difficult knowing, and Clifton is not always grateful for it. Even so, she embraces it, gives account of it, wrestles with it, and ultimately uses it as the ground from which she speaks. Thus she becomes the theologian Davenport claims is the poet. "Poetry is," he writes, "the voice of the spirit, where religion resides, so we keep coming back around to the poet as a kind of theologian, not one with first principles and dogma but one searching for the source of spirit." Yet Clifton is more than the searching poet, for she has located a source of the spirit. She explains, "the light that came to lucille clifton / came in a shift of knowing," and despite her attempts to resist that light, "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.'" Clifton's spirit comes from the Light that comes to her, from the ancestors whose "shimmering voices" she hears singing "in populated air," from the vapors of lost children, and it manifests itself in the very body she inhabits.

The body is a source of truth, and for Clifton poetry is an extension of that body. Poetry then becomes another way of articulating the furiously knocking truth, and that is a vocation Clifton takes seriously.

the making of poems
the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job.

Clifton is engaged in the (theological) work of giving true names, and every necessary failure (and they all are) returns her to the Incarnation of word into flesh, to the possibility that the body will speak truth. The uninvited woman who licks Clifton's palm forces upon her the gift of understanding. Clifton's poetry, in turn, becomes the invited lick forcing us to understand as well. Clifton gives birth to her poetry. Her physical being, with its resident Light, is the source from which it rises and gains authenticity. What Clifton says is true, though not in the sense of final Truth. Her truth is forthcoming, spare, economical, limited --- it does not drape itself in too-large language, it does not protest too much, it does not presume to speak of that which it does not know. It laughs at itself and takes other people's truth seriously. Alternately funny and sorrowful, Clifton wastes no time, minces no words, and takes huge risks. She writes knowing that she says something worth hearing. Unadorned but often elegant, uncomplicated but well-crafted, Clifton's lines point to the obvious things we miss, to what we've never seen in what's always been there. Sudden shifts and sharp ironies make her poems turn, just at the last minute, exquisitely. Truth-telling is Lucille Clifton's style, and like the testimonies she must have heard growing up in church, she relies on the truth of her own existence to make sense of the world. And then, in the space of her poems, she invites us to share that truth with her:

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.