Taking Up Space: Ancestry and Lineage in Lucille Clifton's Work
Collage honoring poet Lucille Clifton. Photo of Lucille Clifton by Lynda Koolish.
By Karla Méndez
Tracing the life and work of poet Lucille Clifton and her roots in ancestry, radical truth-telling, and memory.
Introduction
Lucille Clifton grew up in a family that was shaped both by silence and storytelling. Her mother wrote poetry in the quiet margins of her life. Her father told her stories of their ancestor Caroline Donald, stolen from West Africa and enslaved as a child. These stories, these relationships, formed the framework of Clifton’s work. The private and often unspoken interior world of Black women and the histories that are inherited, pressed into our bodies long before we arrive.
Clifton’s poems rarely announce themselves with pretense. They look you in the eye and ask you to notice what you’ve been taught to overlook, to spurn. The body, the self, the wounds and the memories it holds. In writing this profile, I find myself drawn not only to her biography but also to the ways her work interrogates how the Black female body is seen and perhaps more importantly, the ways it sees itself. Her poems challenge the idealization of the European body by centering the beauty, complexity, and sacredness of the bodies we possess.
This profile is in many ways about my relationship to Clifton’s work. About the first time I felt a poem push back against a lifetime of social conditioning. About the way she writes the Black body and thereby rewrites the gaze that has historically been trained upon it. As I trace her life, her influences, and the evolution of her writing, I hope to honor not only the poet she was, but the poet she invites each of us to become, someone unafraid to take up space.
An Invitation
I remember the first time I read Lucille Clifton’s poetry. It was for a Black Feminisms course and I was leading class discussion on Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays. Cotton begins her book with Clifton’s poem “homage to my hips.” I thought about that gesture, a declaration about bodies that are unruly, big, “too much,” but still deserving of reverence. To read the poem beside Cottom’s essays was like feeling something become loose within me. Clifton’s language was deceptively simple, but it felt like being granted permission. Reading her lines: hips were “mighty,” hips that “don’t fit into little petty places,” hips that were unapologetic in the movement through the world. Sitting in that classroom, I thought not only of the poem, but about the inheritance Black girls receive. We are told, both directly and indirectly, to shrink. To fold ourselves in palatable shapes. To take up less space so that we do not cause discomfort to others. Clifton’s poem felt like a block in that logic. Her words broke open a door I hadn’t realized I was being pressed against.
“This profile is in many ways about my relationship to Clifton’s work. About the first time I felt a poem push back against a lifetime of social conditioning. About the way she writes the Black body and thereby rewrites the gaze that has historically been trained upon it.”
Inheritance of Words and History
Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles to Samuel and Thelma Sayles on June 27th, 1936 in Depew, New York, a small town on the outskirts of Buffalo. An early influence, her mother wrote poetry in secret as Clifton’s father forbade her from writing. Thelma would scribble lines on scraps of paper, hiding them between the pages of books or tucking them into drawers. Her mother was unfortunately a casualty of a society (and a husband) that had no use for the creative interiority of Black women. Her voice remained largely unheard and as she died young, Clifton was left with an inherited awareness of how vulnerable and precious a woman’s creative life can be. Her poem “fury” detailed her mother’s frustrations, particularly a moment in which Samuel forced her to throw her poems into a fire to destroy them.
In many ways, this stolen possibility has shaped much of Clifton’s poetry. From the brevity, the stripped-down language, the feeling of urgency to say something before the silence rushes back in. To read Clifton is to recognize that words are a form of survival. That the interior world she writes from is one that earlier generations of women–like her mother–were denied from occupying or owning. Her mother was not alone in inspiring Clifton. Growing up, her father would tell her stories of their ancestor Caroline (Ca’line) Donald, her great-great-grandmother who was born in the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1822. At the age of eight she was kidnapped, trafficked across the Atlantic, forced to walk from New Orleans to Virginia where she was sold. In her Generations: A Memoir, Clifton shares some of those stories, tracing and honoring Ca’line’s life from enslavement to her death when she herself was eight years old.
For Clifton, this was a great source of pride. Through the stories, Clifton’s understanding of herself was constructed. She was shaped by both loss and a lineage of women who refused to disappear, something I could deeply relate to. She utilizes repetition in her work to symbolize the weight of inherited grief and the strength that comes from knowing that your people survived. In writing about lineage, Clifton reaches backward in her family’s history to stabilize the present and to understand her own body as an extension of those that came before her. This makes me think of when I first encountered her work and how perhaps, through engaging with it, I was also reaching for lineage. I was looking for models of expansive Black womanhood rather than the containment I had seen before.
“To read Clifton is to recognize that words are a form of survival. That the interior world she writes from is one that earlier generations of women–like her mother–were denied from occupying or owning.”
Refusal to Translate
Clifton enrolled at Howard University in 1953, studying under Sterling Brown, the legendary Harlem Renaissance poet and folklorist whose commitment to everyday Black speech, to the music and muscle of the language used every day left an indisputable mark on her and her work. Many, including Clifton herself, have described her work as “simple,” but for her it was a deliberate move. She refused to decorate her poems. She wanted to present the truth of language, of life, of identity. Howard taught her that the language of Black life didn’t need to be translated to matter. It already held value for those that read it. Clifton would later transfer to State University of New York, Fredonia, due to the cost of attendance at Howard. She graduated in 1957, walking away with not just a degree with the realization that a writer’s education doesn’t just occur in a classroom. It’s in our lived experiences, in our ancestry, in our survival.
After graduation, she worked as a claims clerk for the New York State Division of Employment and then as a literature assistant in the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. During this time, she was introduced by Ishmael Reed to Fred James Clifton, a philosophy professor at the University of Buffalo. The Cliftons would go on to have six children together. In 1966, Reed gave some of Clifton’s poems to Langston Hughes, who in 1970 published them in the second edition of his anthology The Poetry of the Negro. The year before, Clifton’s first collection of poems, Good Times, was published by Random House after an editor at a dinner party hosted by Claudette Colbert asked to see a manuscript. It was later named one of the top 10 best books of the year by the New York Times.
“Perhaps that is why her work resonates with me so deeply. She writes from her lived experience, from inside her life. Her poems invite you in, ask you to sit, talk. It is as if they know how difficult it is to carry yourself, to hold onto yourself in a society that is constantly trying to tell you who you are or who you should be.”
The poems in the volume were inspired by Clifton’s children, an early example of her focus not just on interiority, but Black American urban life. Her second volume, Good News about the Earth: New Poems, published in 1972, reflected the political and social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, and the individuals who were at the forefront of the changes occurring in the United States. Clifton’s early work (and that of her mother) is a reminder that becoming a poet, writing poetry, is often an invisible act. It happens in the margins of labor, the pauses we find between our responsibilities. Perhaps that is why her work resonates with me so deeply. She writes from her lived experience, from inside her life. Her poems invite you in, ask you to sit, talk. It is as if they know how difficult it is to carry yourself, to hold onto yourself in a society that is constantly trying to tell you who you are or who you should be.
A Legacy as Compass
Whenever I read Clifton’s work I return to that classroom. At the time I didn’t know that I would continue to carry her words with me, her poems as a kind of compass. I didn’t know that they would bring me back to my own body. My inheritance, my own interiority. I just knew after reading “homage to my hips” that something in the lines felt like a truth I had been looking for. After tracing Clifton’s life, I see how she was refusing disappearance through her work. She was honoring those who came before her and extending an invitation to the women who, like me, would read and seek refuge in her work.
About the author: Karla Méndez is an arts and culture writer whose work examines the histories of Black and Latin American women and their representations within visual art, literature, poetry, and performance. She is interested in how women put forth representations of themselves that are accurately representative of their expansiveness and how they use these avenues to engage with topics of identity, gender, race, and the female body. Ultimately, her work seeks to explore and reinstate forgotten and ignored histories as a site of care for ourselves and our communities.
She is the lead columnist of Black Feminist Histories and Social Movements, a column for the advocacy organization Black Women Radicals. She is a contributor for the Boston Art Review and Elephant Magazine and her work has appeared in the Brown Art Review and Ampersand: An American Studies Journal.