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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
Mullen's work has also garnered critical praise because it incorporates forms and ideas that critics have awaited. As Elisabeth Frost, Marjorie Perloff, and Barbara Henning have noted, Mullen revises Gertrude Steins Tender Buttons in her volume Trimmings, and she incorporates Steinian language play in later work as well. Kate Pearcy, in "A Poetics of Opposition: Race and the Avant-Garde," notes that Mullen's work "represents a convergence of [the aesthetic program of the language school) and . . . the ontological authenticity of 'the black voice.'"43 Mullen confirms this reading, noting the influences on her poetry of the language writers, the French experimental writers of Oulipo, and the literary theory she read in graduate school. Mullen's work has garnered critical adulation then not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly.
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For instance, in many stanzas of Muse & Drudge, Mullen uses and twists the discourse of advertising, especially the cosmetics industry, which urges African American women to lighten, bleach, straighten, and otherwise blanch their beauty to mimic white features. Mullen echoes but alters familiar beauty industry slogans, defamiliarizing them to expose their racist assumptions:
if your complexion is a mess
our elixir spells skin success
you'll have appeal bewitch be adored
hechizando con crema dermoblanqueadora44
mellow elbow lengthy
fading cream and peaches
bleach burn lovingly
because she's worth it45
In both stanzas, Mullen uses the American and Latino languages of advertising, which prey on the insecurities of women viewers and seek to convince them that lighter skin is more beautiful and lovable. "Fading cream" lightens skin and moisturizes pesky "ashy skin," prevalent on the elbows, but Mullen notes that the desired complexion, "peaches and cream" (pink and white), requires bleaching and burning, as do the processes for lightening and straightening African hair. Placing L'Oréal's slogan for hair dye in the final line, right after "bleach burn lovingly," Mullen underscores the irony of a discourse that sells products by simultaneously appealing to a woman's self-worth and targeting her insecurity.
Linking her poetics to her past in several interviews, Mullen traces a story of intentionally acquiring a broader knowledge of African American culture in college and afterward. Raised in a religious, educated household in Texas, the descendent of teachers and Baptist ministers, Mullen grew up between several cultures-white, black, Hispanic-and ignorant of many elements of African American culture, such as the blues, which her family considered "low-down."46 At the University of Texas at Austin, she took a folklore course to "learn what [her] oral tradition [was]." Muse & Drudge represents a synthesis of much of what Mullen learned over years of cultural observation and absorption.
Whereas Brooks's discovery of racial identity took the form of revelation at Fisk, Mullen studied and wrestled with various notions of African American identity. Brooks's new conception of herself and of her prophetic role authorized a new, direct way of calling readers to find sources of pride and dignity in African American culture. Mullen notes that her education and research have given her a stronger sense of racial identity, but that that identity is now plural, encompassing blues and folk traditions, Mexican and Texan influences, as well as avant-garde literary traditions.147 Perhaps because such plurality is more difficult for readers to "place," Mullen notes that she has lost some African American readers, and perhaps gained others, as her work has focused increasingly on language and cultural constructions of race:
