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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
Aware of the current chasm between innovative and representational poetries, Mullen seeks to write in a way that is "black and innovative," to "use both" to create a new poetry with hybrid vigor. Critics have relished the political implications of this new blend in Mullen's work, but overlooked it in Hunt's. Though Mullen's higher visibility as a rising-star poet with several books may partly account for that favored treatment, Mullen's work is also more recognizably, explicitly about African American (and ethnic American) identity on every page. Mullen's poem also plays with language in nearly every line, while Hunt's poems in Local History reflect on our uses of language, but do so in fairly traditional poetic prose.
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Mullen's poetry is also quite musical, as Sandra Cisneros implies in her blurb on Muse & Drudge: "Harryette hype hip-hops and bops the taut poetry trapeze. Makes me want to marimba." Many of Mullen's lines are memorable for their layers of signification, internal rhyme, rhythm, and lyricism. In her interview with Elisabeth Frost, Mullen notes, "Poetry does come out of song. If it gets very far from song, it is difficult for many people to connect with it. . . . Music has always been fundamental to me, as well as folklore and poetry, and the church-Psalms and Proverbs, the gospels, spirituals, and all the preaching."52 While Mullen mentions church music in her interview and alludes to blues in her poetry (using phrases by Ma Rainey, Besse Smith, and other blues musicians), her poetry perhaps most closely resembles rap and hip-hop, as Cisneros notes. Like rap and hip-hop, her lines rhyme insistently but irregularly; they are brief and do not use repetition or refrains. And like rap by other women artists, Mullen's lines often bolster the speaker's sense of self, through language play and "signifying," providing a feminist counterpoint to the cultural discourses and representations that erase black women.53
Among Mullen's favored techniques are puns, such as "déja voodoo queens," and allusions. Several critics have commented on the volume s opening line, "Sapphire s lyre styles," which refers at once to Sappho, a precursor in fragmentary lyric and to Sapphire the contemporary writer (and gem), who in turn refers to the Amos 'n' Andy character of Sapphire, whose name has passed into the lexicon as a synonym for an emasculating African American woman.54 Mullen's puns, which are often more tragic than comic, register one meaning in the readers eye and another in the ear. The line "debit to your race" reverses the meaning of the phrase it echoes, "a credit to your race," and is used here to highlight and empty out the racist assumption that individuals represent their race, raising or lowering its "credit rating."55
This homophonic play in particular marks a departure from the writer-reader collaboration in much innovative writing in the 1980s. Rather than moving reflective readers along a signifying chain of silent wordplay, Mullen's text rephrases black orality as aurality. The wordplay takes place not in a conceptual realm of denotation and connotation, but over the airwaves. Readers' translation from the words seen on the page to the words heard in the mind's ear reveals a gap or duplicity between the two. The new meaning we hear, which the text prints, relies on an old meaning or phrase that is familiar enough to echo, an aural palimpsest below what is seen. This doubleness is a form of compression. These lines then-"stark strangled banjo," "mnemonic plague," "warp made fresh"-encode two disparate meanings (28, 64). A "stark strangled banjo" evokes a lone, frustrated, or suppressed musician, playing on a remote porch; that image chafes against the "star spangled banner," a euphemism for patriotism (and baseball) and officiai, national music. The banjo conjured in the ears seems a realistic, corrective image to the abstract, idealized banner, waving before the eyes. A "mnemonic plague" isn't nearly as lethal as its echoed cousin, "bubonic plague," but aural memory can infect our understandings of, or even alter, what we hear. The "warp made fresh" echoes the "word made flesh"; the phrase thereby evokes a culturally authoritative source for belief in words' transparency. If the word is "warped" from the original with each iteration, something like Plato's endless imitation of a form, what is incarnated is nevertheless fresh and new in its divergence from an original that dogs our mnemonic ruts.
