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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
As noted above, Muse o- Drudge collects and defamiliarizes familiar phrases from American culture: the idiomatic phrases, official language, and slang that constitute us with each utterance. In addition to illuminating how the languages of advertising encourage women's insecurities, many phrases affirm women's beauty and independence: "black-eyed pearl / around the world girl"; "lady redbone señora rubia / took all day long / shampooing her nubia / she gets to the getting place/ without or with him" (40, 51). Other lines fend off insuit: "ain't your fancy / handsome gal / feets too big / my hair don't twirl"; or highlight restrictions on girls: "keep your powder dry / your knees together / your dress down / your drawers shut" (17,38). Such phrases represent some of the many ways American culture defines women's identity and sexuality through languages of approval and disapproval.
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In addition to gaining audiences among poets and critics, Mullen may gain a generational following among students, who may have read her work in college classes. Many manifestos of language writing idealized the collaboration between reader and writer in the making of meaning, but Muse & Drudge, especially when read in a classroom, lends itself very well to such collaboration. Because it is "polyvocal," "layering and juxtaposing communolects," the poem rewards collective reading, wherein a number of readers contribute information, decode allusions, and assemble meanings. Some readers will know much more than others, depending especially on their knowledge of jazz and blues and current slang. The volume has been read in classes in adult literacy, contemporary poetry, and American literature.56 Readers compose their plural subjectivities in the process of rereading our collective culture through this text.
I taught the volume twice at a men's college to students who were predominately white and Southern, so very few students recognized the text's allusions or slang; incomprehensible to them were "dicty kickpleat," "soulless divaism," "hussified dozens" (15), and "ruses of the lunatic muse" (21), perhaps because these phrases use terms that are African American (dozens), gendered (kickpleat), urban, or campy (divaism).57 They did, however, supply meanings for "Patel hotel" and "the sun goes on shining / while the debbil beats his wife" (10). One student from North Carolina volunteered that the expression refers to rain that falls while the sun is out; a year later I ran across the phrase in a Native American context. Mullen uses the phrase in the midst of a passage that invokes alcoholism and domestic violence: "a broke johnny walker / mister meaner / bigger than a big man / cirrus as a heart attracts / more power than a loco motive / think your shit don't stink / . . . battered like her face / embrazened with ravage" (5-6).
In her inventive spelling and wording, Mullen is less interested in representing dialect than in making one word signify two or more meanings. The spelling of "debbil" with b's instead of a v not only replicates Southern dialect but echoes the word "debilitated," weakened, perhaps by alcohol, perhaps by a frustrated wish for power, and so implies both social and psychological sources of alcoholism and domestic violence. Similarly, Mullen's use of "embrazened with ravage" evokes "emblazoned with rage." The latter phrase has one fairly stable meaning-that a face showed strong rage-while the former phrase may signify "embrasure," an opening, as in fortresses from which one shoots enemies, or "brazen," bold and forceful, as one wishes a woman might become in response to battering. The phrase evokes, but does not denote, meaning as it coins new words. Some readers like the poetry's indeterminacy very much, while others may remain frustrated with the lack of certainty, narrative, or closure. Though I share the students' bewilderment in some passages, I am quite convinced that Mullen's work represents a new kind of polyvocality in poetry, a multiplicity that younger readers may recognize in rap, hypertext, the X-Files, and other incarnations of the postmodern. Those readers may in fact be more proficient at reading such jump cuts than their professorial elders.
