Contemporary Black American Women Poets: Resisting Sexual Violence

While recreating the textures of their own and other black women's lives in their works, contemporary African-American women poets often play the roles of social critics and revisionist historians. As such, they try to keep alive the memory of the black American female experience, to reveal some of its ignored or suppressed aspects, and to address certain problems related to it. One of the problems on which they focus in their poems is the sexual abuse of black females, originating in precolonial African communities and aggravated by violent transplantation to the New World where they became the chattels of European settlers. This essay deals with the way these poets have reflected this problem in their texts. The poems selected for discussion cover a period of almost thirty years 1963-1991 and are written by ten contemporary African-American women, all of whom see themselves as inheritors of a legacy of violence which they do not deserve. While presenting scenes of sexual abuse, these poets frequently suggest its ideological, sociopolitical and economic causes, and stress its brutalizing effects on the victims. Moreover, they challenge the stereotypical images of black women as inferior, sexually promiscuous and morally fallen creatures, images created and perpetuated by the women's oppressors to justify the colonization of their bodies and minds. Note 1