Rationale
Students come to a course with certain expectations. In the case of this new African American Literature class, students had been anticipating material that was uniquely African American: innovative, passionate, jazzy, exciting, uplifting, bluesy, political, street-smart and, above all, real. After looking at the works of Terry and Wheatley, one student snapped her book shut and asked, "What's black about this?" I did not have an adequate answer for her, and immediately began to do some research. The opening phase of the unit places great emphasis on "audience," which, in many ways, justifies the strategies early African American poets used. However, a consideration of audience does not explain why African American poets continued to use traditional European forms such as the sonnet long after they had reached their desired audience. What both my student and I needed to know was that even as early as Terry and Wheatley, the double-voiced device of the African trickster was already at work. These poets were conveying messages that, to one audience, appeared to mean one thing, while another audience understood an entirely different message, embedded in the same words. This technique is called "signifying." Michael G. Cooke, author of Afro-American Literature in the 20 th Century: The Achievement of Intimacy, explains that "an adaptive skill in misleading was an important basis of survival for blacks" (Cooke, 1984). He adds that signifying "has done better than the blues at guarding its secret freight of purpose and value." Cooke sees signifying as originating in an unequal power relationship: ". . .the signifier is the one who as best he can makes up for a lack of social power with an exercise of intellectual or critical power."
Partway through the course students take a close look at two essays: George Schuyler's "The Negro-Art Hokum" (Schuyler, 1926) and Langston Hughes' "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (Hughes, 1926). The discussion that follows focuses on whether or not there is such a thing as African American art. Students who are familiar with and comfortable with jazz, blues, and hip-hop are less comfortable with sonnets, eclogues, and classically structured poetry written by African Americans. In many ways, the formalist dilemma that began with Terry and Wheatley continues to this day.
African American formalism has been explored in Henry Louis Gates' book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), and Keith D. Leonard's book Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (2006). Jon Woodson explores both formal and vernacular African American poetry in Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s (2011). In addition, contemporary theorists including June Jordan, Michael Cooke, and Toni Morrison, offer highly accessible perspectives that a teacher can offer to high school students.
Gates' work is rooted in the tradition of tricksters in African mythology, Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey. Both characters are concerned with language and interpretation; Esu "serves as a figure for the nature and function of interpretation and double-voiced utterance," while the Signifying Monkey, a distinctly Afro-American figure, "serves as the trope in which are encoded several other peculiarly black rhetorical tropes" (Gates, 1988). Put in simple terms, "signifying" [or "signifyin'" or "signifyin(g)"] is a phenomenon that operates on many levels, including intertextuality, formal revision, and linguistic subversion. On the one hand, a message is encoded in poetry (or prose) that meets conventional criteria for both form and content. At the same time, a second message is woven into the work that is obvious only to the audience for whom it is intended, an audience normally not included in the body for whom the "conventional criteria" constitute meaning. This subversive use of language arises when a disenfranchised group finds its own voice temporarily suppressed or erased. Refusing silence, the trickster will master the language of the oppressor and then use it to fight against oppression.
The Signifyin' Monkey has made his way into a wide range of African American poems and songs that range from bawdy to playful. The character of the monkey misleads others by his words, causing arguments among the animals until he is uncovered. True to form, the monkey gets away with it, but his neighbors are now aware of his lies and tell him to "stay up in that tree" (Gates, 1988). Time and again the Signifyin' Monkey throws himself on the mercy of his victims, but, as Michael Cooke notes, "He submits only to subvert" (1984). On one level, the Signifyin' Monkey is an episodic children's tale featuring countless adventures and misadventures. On a deeper level, the Signifyin' Monkey is exercising power over the other animals in the jungle, most of whom are far stronger than he. He perseveres and he persists (Cooke, 1984). He is a keen observer of the others, an instigator who uses language to create disorder as well as to talk his way out of punishment. His "lies" are often subverted truths; this would explain why the other animals allow him to remain. In a way, they need the Signifyin' Monkey, whose use of language mediates (and perhaps exacerbates) the disparity between the way things are said to be and the way they really are.
Gates discusses Phillis Wheatley's interrogation at the hands of eighteen of Boston's "finest" scholars which proved to them that she had a mastery of Latin and Greek and English prosody sufficient to have produced, by her own hand, a sheaf of poetry. At that time, writing was "the visible sign of reason itself" (Gates, 1988). Soon after the publication of her poems, Wheatley was manumitted, as her work proved that she was capable of reason and therefore should not be enslaved. Even so, despite being vetted by a white panel, Wheatley's poetry contains protest that is embedded sotto voce, able to be heard by those who share or who can empathize with her plight. Thus, even Wheatley was a "double-voiced" writer.
At that time, not only could most African Americans not write, but statutes were soon enacted that made reading and writing for African Americans against the law. Teaching slaves to read and write was against the law as well. Many feared, and rightly so, that slaves who could read would get "ideas." Another fear was that literacy (the sign of reason) could "disqualify" the entire enslaved work force, rendering the plantation model philosophically and financially impossible. These laws made written language a coveted, elusive, illegal pursuit that promised power to whoever could acquire it. Ironically, the slave would eventually find his voice using the very syllables and verbal tools his oppressor used to enslave him. This irony has played out repeatedly over many generations of post-colonial discourse. The earliest African American writers were "signifyin'" simply by writing at all. Their presence in the literary world created a space for more to follow. It is here that the work of Gates and Leonard intersect.
Keith D. Leonard explores the "liminal cultural space" created by African American formalist writers in Fettered Genius. He challenges the flawed dialectic of African American literary theorist Houston Baker, who insists that formal poetry is the cultural province of white people into which black writers can only insert black content, that is, a white envelope containing a sort-of-black message. At best, the result is "mastered 'masks' with which black people cover their true selves in order to protect themselves and to manipulate white people" (Baker, qtd. in Leonard, 2006). The arena of dueling racial ideologies fosters the idea that ethnic differences are absolute and static, and denies the possibility of development on either side. The level of frustration this binary system causes is felt by poets and audiences on both sides, and allows little room for shared human experiences. Leonard repeats Gates' question asking how African Americans can "posit a full and sufficient self in a language in which blackness is a sign of absence?" (Gates, 1988).
To address this question, Leonard re-situates it in terms of cultural differences vs. shared humanity. He states that
The triumph of the African American formalist poetic tradition is the fact that African American poets from slavery to Civil Rights did indeed resolve the oppositions of this binary logic of race politics in their best poems by combining the aesthetic power and social validity of traditional formalist artistry with the complexities of African American experience, culture, and heritage to produce a full and sufficient African American artistic and cultural self. (2006)
In other words, the African American poet creates a middle ground by the very act of using traditional artistry to protest against the attitudes that form the foundations of that tradition.
According to Leonard, formalist mastery is itself an act of subversion that demonstrates self-defining resistance. Pitting black vernacular, blues and jazz against white formalism and modernism creates a different set of "fetters" for the African American artist. Rather than creating a space for expression, this attitude places the artist in a confrontational mode. While this is a legitimate, even common stance for an African American writer, it is not always the perspective he or she may desire to take. Leonard details the difficulty early critics had with Gwendolyn Brooks' traditional poetry. Jean Toomer, who experimented with both traditional and innovative forms in his work, Cane, was misunderstood by nearly everyone. Langston Hughes said that
Both [white and black readers] would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial. (Hughes, 1926)
In Chapter Two of Anthems, Sonnets and Chants, Jon Woodson focuses on the sonnet itself, what Beth Palatnik calls "a privilege-soaked, white-identified form" (qtd. in Woodson, 2011). Woodson notes that sonnets written during the 1930s were particularly effective vehicles for anti-lynching discourse. In 1935, one-third of the poems published in the magazine Opportunity were sonnets (Woodson, 2011). African American newspapers such as The Pittsburgh Courier regularly published poems, many of which were sonnets. Rather than being considered a privileged form, it was a common form used by poets black and white, distinguished and minor. Again, while this may have been a way to garner a wider literate audience, that ploy does not explain why African American poets chose the sonnet again and again for some of their most important work. According to Woodson, ". . .radical poets invested the cultural capital of the sonnet in a political agenda" (2011). What, then, is this "cultural capital"? The history of the sonnet shows its effectiveness in the political arena as well as in its service to love. Sonnets by Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon protesting World War I were widely circulated during the Harlem Renaissance. The sonnet was just waiting to be taken up by African American poets who could cash in on its cultural capital and coin some phrases for the ages as well.
An overview of the use of the sonnet by noted African American poets shows that they recognized in it the potential for free and powerful expression. Claude McKay, author of the well-known sonnet "If We Must Die," employs many of the traditional elements of the sonnet, but mixes the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet with the structure of an Italian sonnet. The poem also harks back to Henry V's inspirational speech in Shakespeare's play of the same name (Francini, 2003). Both the literary form and the allusive resonance of the poem are used to link the struggles of African Americans to the struggles of Henry V's army, while critiquing the culture that Henry V, among others, helped to create. It is a love-hate dialectic frequently found in African American sonnets. Francini says that "the colonized subject, having lost forever his or her original identity, interprets and reconstruct (sic) the colonizer's language and cultural patterns according to his or her marginalized perspective," resulting in a "new eloquence" (2003).
While some African American poets introduced gospel themes into their poems, others, like Jean Toomer, used folk rhythm and imagery without going completely into black vernacular. In his multiple-genre creation Cane, Toomer includes a sonnet, "November Cotton Flower." It starts with "Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old," lines that have rustic imagery, and a definite folk-ballad quality (Toomer, 2011). The poem continues with a description of a winter landscape, but the sestet, particularly the concluding couplet, suddenly steps out of folk idiom and into an echo of Shakespeare's Sonnet #73, "That time of year. . . ." Both McKay and Toomer are not afraid to appropriate the sonnet form and its literary heritage and use them together to give power and resonance to their poetry. Their success with these devices demonstrates the cultural bond that validates the certainty of "shared humanity."
Several well-known African American poets have chosen to create sonnet cycles, a device that 1) extends the lyrical moment, 2) allows for cross-referential imagery, and 3) provides a way to express multiple points of view and/or speakers' voices, placed in a framework that gives them a cohesive wholeness (Francini, 2003). African American soldiers living during the American Civil War provide the voices for Natasha Trethewey's sonnet sequence, "Native Guard," contained in her collections of poems by the same name, published in 2006. This work earned her the Pulitzer prize for Poetry. The cycle consists of ten sonnets covering the years between 1862 and 1865. The last line of each sonnet is repeated, usually altered slightly, in the first line of the next sonnet. The tenth sonnet's final line ends with "Truth be told," the phrase which opens the first line of the first sonnet. This tight, almost military structure nearly erases the divisions between sonnets; it presents the years of the war in a circular pattern, implying many days and months of repetitive experience. One sonnet compares being a soldier to being a slave: "For the slave, having a master sharpens/ the bend into work, the way the sergeant/ moves us now to perfect battalion drill, /dress parade. . . " (Trethewey, 2006). Another poem explores the irony of being a black soldier in charge of guarding "white men as prisoners — rebel soldiers,/ would-be masters. . . ." Repeated themes include the importance of memory, writing and telling the truth, hunger, injury, death, and the problem of identity.
Marilyn Nelson's historically-based sonnet cycle, A Wreath for Emmet Till, is the result of her desire to explore a true landmark event via poetry and to find a way to present Emmet Till's story to a younger audience. She creates a "crown" of sonnets: fourteen individual sonnets with a concluding sonnet made up of the first lines of the previous fourteen. Like Trethewey, she links the sonnets by repeating, sometimes with variations, the last line of each sonnet in the first line of the next one. Thus, the concluding sonnet is repeating lines that have already been repeated, creating a poem that is a close-woven summation of the cycle. In her introduction, she says, "The strict form [the sonnet] became a kind of insulation, a way of protecting myself from the intense pain of the subject matter, and a way to allow the Muse to determine what the poem would say" (Nelson, 2005). The variety of voices in A Wreath for Emmet Till demonstrates just how complex the event actually was. For the benefit of her younger readers, Nelson includes in the back a gloss on each poem. She reveals in her fourth sonnet that Till was a stutterer, and had been taught by his mother to prepare to speak by whistling; this bitterly ironic fact may explain why others had thought he "whistled at" a woman with whom he wanted to speak. Another poem gives an imaginative voice to the lynching tree. Nearly every sonnet connects with a universal theme, image, or idea explored by others, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, the Bible, Walt Whitman, and Roman mythology. Rather than shying away from non-African cultural devices and landmarks, she embraces them all, and places Emmet Till's memory squarely among other significant American and African American monuments.
Antonella Francini, in an article entitled "Sonnet vs. Sonnet: The Fourteen Lines in African American Poetry," states that "the fourteen lines in African American poetry have opened a space within tradition where, at least aesthetically, a dialogue between races and cultures seems possible" (Francini 2003). Her substitution of "dialogue" for the more commonly used term "dialectic" implies that poets who enter the realm of the sonnet will, eventually, find themselves sitting in adjacent couplets, remarking on the "endless lines" surrounding them, and sharing an iamb or two.
My research has led me to several conclusions about the nature of African American formal poetry:
1. The choice to write a formalist poem is one way, particularly for early African American poets, to gain credibility with a predominantly white audience. It is also an opportunity for a disenfranchised person (or people) to use language in powerful, subversive ways in order to further their own agendas.
2. Many African American poets started with well-known, conventional forms as any apprentice or journeyman writer would do. That they continued to write sonnets throughout their careers implies that these forms did not fetter their ideas, but inspired them. The sonnet cycle appears to be a particularly effective form for interpreting and presenting historical material with multiple voices.
3. Creating and maintaining rigid binary "rules" governing what belongs to either black or white culture is self-defeating to all culture. Furthermore, artistic freedom demands that a poet's choice of form should be honored, whether he chooses to write in the language of the oppressor or in his own idiom. Finally, no culture remains the same over time. Everything evolves, including art.
4. The art of signifyin', that is, using language to mean several things at once, can be exploited to an impressive degree in formalist poetry. It is part of the trickster tradition that was transported from Africa to America. Signifyin' revels in the subversion of form and content, and creates a cultural "space" in which new, evolving forms can flourish.
Including more sonnets in an African American Literature course will allow students to consider the ways in which African American poets explored traditional forms, using them to convey important ideas while subtly re-working these forms in a creative and often subversive way. Hopefully, when students have a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture, they will realize that when an African American poet, writer, artist, speaker, or politician speaks "proper," or "sounds white," it ain't necessarily so. In the hands of a skilled trickster, a significant number of subversive ideas can be "signified" in a most respectable way.
At this point, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the literary and rhetorical contributions made by America's first African American President, Barack Obama. His memoirs and speeches demonstrate his ability to blend his gift for traditional African American oration with his Harvard Law School education. The course I teach opens with a commencement address by then-Senator Obama to graduates at Knox College. This speech, while demonstrating the sophistication and depth of a well-educated 21 st-century orator, includes several examples of what scholar Malefi Asante refers to as "nommo," a style of delivery that is unique to African Americans (Melbourne S. Cummings, 2002). A few studies have examined particular elements of Obama's speech, including rhythm, repetition, call and response, and mythoforms (Howard, 2011). The latter can be defined as a resonant understanding of certain symbols, rituals, etc., shared by a human community. An example is President Obama's effective use of images that evoke important moments in United States history. The list of devices attributed to nommo is long, and includes several other elements that will be found in this study of the African American sonnet: lyrical language, historical perspective, indirection, and signifyin'. (Howard, 2011)
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