Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde: The Black Feminist Poets Essay

Racial and gender roles narrow-mindedness regulated life of the society for a long time. Racial discrimination has lasted for nearly 240 years in America. At the same time women could not vote, work and even have opinion of their own. It means that the position of black women was powerless. Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde, who were black feminist poets, express protest against double discrimination in their poetry.

Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde reflect their life stories of double discrimination as black women in their literary works. The voices of Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde express protest of all black women. The main themes of their poems are their past, moral strength, and everyday problems of all black women. Angelou and Lorde describe episodes in the history of the country from a black woman’s point of view. Unlike other black women, Maya Angelou dares to detail her life in her poems. Audre Lorde “chronicles the psychological, emotional and physical processes of her battle with breast cancer and mastectomy” in her literary works too. (Nelson 238)

Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde use their life experience of racial and sexual discrimination as inspiration and source of themes for their poetry and prose. The themes of double discrimination are developed in the poems “Woman Work” and “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou and poems “A Meeting of Minds” and “To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman” by Audre Lorde.

Expressing their protest against sexual discrimination Angelou and Lorde do not agree that kitchen and other household chores are the only spheres for women’s self-realization. They are indignant at the fact that women are not allowed to choose a profession and plan their careers as they wish. Maya Angelou depicts the endless woman’s household activity in her poem “Woman Work”:

I’ve got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop. (Angelou 1-4)

These lines look like a part of every woman’s daily list of the planned activities, there is no punctuation in it. The poet simplifies the sentences and chooses short words with the aim to demonstrate primitiveness of the activities and their routine character. At the same time the short lines and words make the poem rhythmical and produce the impression that every kind of work is immediately followed by another one, while the list is endless.

The author asks natural forces to help her and provide at least a short break between the activities, as she can pause if it rains or snows. Angelou is assured that it is senseless to ask people for support. Women can not build a career and do not earn money. Nobody notices this injustice and the final lines of the poem show that the tired woman may find relief only in admiring the beauty of nature:

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You’re all that I can call my own. (Angelou 27 – 30)

Her heart is not hardened yet and there is nothing beside this landscape that could comfort her; there is no other property belonging to her.

Audre Lorde expresses her attitude to the limited world of a woman in her poem “A Meeting of Minds”. The poet demonstrates her indignation at the fact that women have no the basic rights:

In a dream

She is not allowed

Dreaming

The agent of control is

A zoning bee. (Lorde 1 – 5)

The author compares the woman’s desire to work and make a career to the night dreams, she thinks that career is an essential part of woman’s life, that is as natural as the night rest. The agent of control is similar to the social prejudices and rules. The public opinion is like a zoning bee. At the same time buzzing of a bee is as unclear and meaningless as some rules of the society. The poet shows women’s inability to express their feelings: “She is not allowed/ To kiss her own mother”. (Lorde 14 – 15) The restrictions based on the social narrow-mindedness as to the gender roles disturb the poets; they express their protest against sexual discrimination in their poetry.

Experience of racial discrimination is another theme of Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde’s poetry. Being strong personalities, the women do not agree to be hurt and their lifetime struggle for the place under the sun is full of difficulties. They are sincere expressing their feelings and do not hide the details of their life stories. Speaking about experience of her moral resurrection after the numerous attempts to discriminate her, Angelou uses the verb “may” describing her attitude to her oppressors:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise. (Angelou 1 – 4)

This construction demonstrates powerless position of a black woman, when everyone can hurt her while she remains a passive observer of this injustice, and allows doing it. It is amazing, that the poet manages to find numerous verbs with the negative meaning to express the shades of the scornful attitude to Afro-American women. The phrase”I rise” is repeated ten times. Nobody helps the author to rise, it is her own credit. Her life consists of highs and lows and she has to rise again and again. The poem encourages other black women and men to struggle against racial discrimination.

The poems of Lorde are full of pain because of her racial discrimination in the past as well. Lorde entitles her poem “To The Poet who Happens to be Black and the Black who Happens to be a Woman”, emphasizing the double character of her discrimination. “’You were so dark,’ my mother said/ ‘I thought you were a boy’”. (Lorde 7 – 8) This note demonstrates that the girl has been discriminated since her early childhood. The blacks get accustomed to the oppressed position, even mother humiliates Lorde for her dark colour of skin. The poet expresses her feelings and emotions. The poem is depressing and expresses the views of entire social group. Touching upon the questions of racial discrimination of the blacks, Angelou and Lorde describe their feelings and share their experience of indignity in the society and in family.

Black women have always been appreciated for their spirit. Long years of fighting for their rights made them optimistic and strong. This mental and emotional strength is shown in the poems of Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou, discussing the questions of racial and sexual discrimination and expressing protest of all black women.

Works Cited

Angelou, Maya. The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. New York: Vintage – Random House, 2009. Print.

Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: Norton and Company, 2000. Print.

Nelson, Emmanuel. African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook. Westport:: Greenwood Press, 2002. Print.