Conjuring Hope in a Body: Lucille Clifton's Eschatology
2005; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/014833310505400205
ISSN2056-5666
Autores Tópico(s)Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies
Resumoworld is turning in body of Jesus and future is possible --spring song by Lucille Clifton, from Good News About Earth In a 2000 interview with Michael Glaser, African-American poet and memoirist Lucille Clifton identified hope as a central function of her work. She said, I think writing is a way of continuing to hope. When things sometimes feel as if they're not going to any better, writing offers a way of to with something beyond obvious feeling ... because you know, there is hope in connecting, and so perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone. And writing may be sending tentacles out to see if there is a response to that. (311) For Clifton, who wrote her first collection in late 1960s as Civil Rights movement began to fade, hope writing offers is one transcends and resists discouragement of present, that obvious feeling. It looks toward future, a future will get [...] better not through escape from life situations, but rather through trying to connect with responses of others. Clifton's statements linking her writing of hope to future and to relationship suggest an eschatological framework for reading her poetry. (1) Eschatology, theology of hope, possesses several characteristics make it a worthwhile critical lens. According to Jurgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope, eschatology properly conceived is future-oriented, resistant to present, missional, and destabilizing to both knowledge and personal identity. That is, hope is comprised of anticipations which show reality in its prospects and its future possibilities, a future orientation manifest within (35,270). Hope's statements of promise, declares Moltmann, must stand in contradiction to reality can at present be experienced. They [...] lead existing reality towards promised and hoped-for transformation (18). Since future is primarily the thing we cannot already think out and picture for ourselves, hope in God of future unsettles knowledge (16). It leads our modern institutions away from their own immanent tendency toward stabilization, [making] uncertain [...] and open[ing] them (330). For individual, committing to theology of hope means a deferral of haven of identity; mission of hope is served through self-emptying sacrifice of hopeful person (91). Clifton's poetry, widely understood as celebrating black culture and developing a vocal black female self, appears quite different when viewed as eschatologicah strains of self-sacrifice and performative rhetoric come to light. (2) Clifton's Good Times, first volume in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980, was declared by New York Times to be one of year's best books in 1969 for its hard, angry poems. In terms of Clifton's literary context, interviewers and critics have often sought to place Clifton's early poetry within Black Arts Movement, but designation is one she has always resisted. She has written poems for Black Panthers, for Malcolm X, for Eldridge Cleaver and for Bobby Seale, but she refuses to be categorized as part of literary arm of Black Power movement or as reflecting a Black Aesthetic. Her black aesthetic, she jokes, was succession of children emerging from her body during development of 'black is beautiful' ideology. In an interview with Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo, Clifton asserts Black Power Movement's sudden realization and response to programmatic racial inequity seemed to her somewhat strange. She had been knowing inequities, and found her poems conscious of blackness, without an obsessive need for constant repetition. Still, with her use of vernacular black speech and simple language, Clifton's work certainly converses with Black Arts poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. …
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