The Between Story: Physical and Psychic Trauma in the Poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Lucille Clifton

Abstract

Rhetorical choices used by Black women poets makes their work a militant force in the theoretical war against racist and sexist oppression. Research on trauma and testimony supports a breakdown of the person’s or character’s sudden brush with death –a moment that will never be fully realized, however it is at the center of explicating the rhetorical signs of trauma. Through a reading of Sonia Sanchez’s poems “Wounded in the House of a Friend” (Sanchez, 1995: 5), “Poem for Some Women” (Sanchez, 1995: 72), “Eyewitness: Case No. 3456” (Sanchez, 1995: 70), and “Poem at Thirty” (Sanchez, 1985: 4), with Lucille Clifton’s “My Friends” (Clifton, 1987: 147), “Shapeshifter Poems” (Clifton, 2000: 52), and “Song at Midnight” (Clifton, 1993: 24), my analysis will trace how traumatic wounding constitutes a psychic wound. It then applies the racialized and gendered reading of the subjects in the poem (insidious trauma), and how time and space relates to the subjects, space, and silences (traumatic realism). With the use trauma theory, I will illustrate how Sanchez and Clifton’s aesthetic forms adapted the militancy of the Black Arts Movement to address the silenced voices. In particular, the silenced voices of subjects continually subsumed beneath the phallocentric undertones challenged by Black feminist discourse, art, and poetry will be addressed.

Keywords

• trauma theory
• insidious trauma
• traumatic realism
• feminist poetry
• racism
• sexism