Red Clay Suite

As I read through Red Clay Suite, I felt the struggle of being a woman of color. As a woman of color myself, some of the lines really struck a chord within me. She talks about loss of history, not belonging, and domestic violence even. How do we keep moving forward after so much pain and trauma? The poems felt like a way of healing. Trying to process all of these situations she has been through, maybe not even just her, but her ancestry.

In Let Blood Go, she speaks to this history writing:

Should I feel afraid driving here

When I know this dystopia,

can name the sins of familiars?

And goes even further to say that there is comfort in seeing a Confederate flag. Because we know this pain. This narrative. We’re so used to it, it no longer becomes a sign of painstaking fear, but just “this is how it is.”

We further see it in her poem The Blues I Don’t Want to Remember vs. What is Written for Me. The contrast between her father abusing her mother, to a man then abusing her. What we know then becomes what we are used to. It’s a cycle of these wounds continually being passed down and around. It never ends. But these words on a page are a start, a start to ending the cycle because she is processing and healing.

Roll my neck, flex my blackness,

hope that sassy stays in style

Red Clay Suite Response

Talk about an ecology…. 

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers captures her ecology so vividly- literally incorporating imagery of the land, the mother, the father, the components of her being. 

She starts her book with red clay. Oddly enough I found this very biblical. God made man from the dust of the Earth. Clay- The makings of our bodies. 

Again I am reminded that religion is just a collection of reinterpreted indigenous knowledge. We from the earth. Mother Earth. Clay. The same Earth that we return to when our time is up. 

I think Honorée made the decision to start her book with Red Clay Suite very intentionally. It immediately brings the reader to the ground. The imagery instantly set the tone and scenery (ecology?) for the rest of the book. I felt like I was driving through the south, on my way to visit my grandma Ann in the hot Mississippi moisture. Driving through reddish brown plains. 

One of my favorite poems in the collection was The Compass of Moss

I’m absolutely fascinated with the ways we have made use of our ecologies for survival, despite the fact that *most* of our ancestors were in unknown lands, amongst unfamiliar flora. I love the way she blends dry and wet landscapes into her narratives- perfectly encapsulating the journey to the south- or away from it. 

Who better to tell our stories than the land from which we come? This land onto which we have bled, bred- this land is a living history book. When we write with the land, it tells so much of our stories for us. 

Honorée has inspired me to settle better into the mix of the ecologies that exist around me. To pay attention to where I am and to how it relates to my life. 

When we write with the land, it tells so much of our stories for us. 

Red Clay

        I tried to read dirty south moon to mulitple people out loud multiple times, always tripping on the words no matter how many times I had recited the poem to myself- 

without fail everytime I faulted. 

As I read each word, their echo would follow, the ringing of the rhythm of the piece drowning out my own voice,causing me to loose my place. Line after line I would reorient myself, holding on to a corner of a single e at the end of the line to ground my eyes 

I found my eyes engaged in a game of jump rope, double dutch-

page, words, face, page, words, face, page.

When Jeffer's words came out clear, immediately, my eyes went searching to find the reaction in the audience's facial expressions- scanning for pain, anger, devestation- everytime I saw less than I wanted. I desired for them to share my rage, my tears when witnessing the retelling of this dark and sped up destruction. 

Didn't they know Jeffer had put on a single page what had happened over long,orange warm hours? Did they not know that in a single afternoon two generations had been ripped from the wind, wings forever clipped and shoved to the ground? 

I know those who I tried to read to, I know them well. 

They are not vessels of horror or unkind in the least, yet I found that a great number of them could not feel the knives upon their own bellies, refused to place rough jewelry around their necks for fear of discomfort. 

This made me consider- Jeffer's work drenched in blues calls for ears ready to listen, ready to discover history, just as she choose to embody her own. The songs she sings on these pages are reserved for those that enter with understanding that truth telling can leap on you with backhanded fierceness, leave a black and blue mark in the morning that will throb through the night long. 

Red Clay Suite Reflection/Response

After reading “Red Clay Suite” by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers I found my thoughts stuck on identity. Who am I? What histories do I know of my family of “my people.” In the theme of identity I also allowed my mind to wonder to my experiences, my traumas, the warm moments in life and the bitter cold ones too. “She isn’t mad at my grandmother, either, for sitting right in the living room, singing spirituals to cover up the noise.” (p.60) Thinking of the times a woman’s work was never done “to pretend for others” (p.63) Although I cannot claim to share this person’s experience I know my own truth to be one of pain, as so often the women in my life had to adhere to many pains, and pretend as if the salt in their wounds knew nothing of ache. At times I found warmth, like the sun on a clear day with no interference from the wind, those were the moments that kept my tears at bay as my many thoughts ravaged my insides and I pushed forward to the final pages.

I am very social and friendly, and I claim to love time for self but the truth is I cannot stand sitting alone with myself, even less when there is a mirror present. These poems forced me to look in the mirror, and instead of finding the monster under my bed I said “I don’t look half bad.” These poems are very personal and in reading them I had to reach deep within my guts to see my blood runs red like any other. In reading Lexicon (p.46) I obviously jumped to my mother, as it was written for the author’s mother. The line “how much weaker than a girl a woman can be.” needed to be read three or four times until I came to conclude that my strength as a child is what has gotten me to my present location. I love to accredit my mother as my life, as the person who is most important even over my own life.  How wrong is it for a child to want to perish before their parents? I found myself addressing this question in my head as I reread that line over and over.

These poems really sat next to me as I looked into my mirror, realizing I am my own person. Only now to place value on my feet’s own ability to hold my weight. My hand’s need to sort through bricks on my back, and my eyes vision to leave some of those bricks in the seat on the bus as I made my way to the exit. I now think of my life’s journey as a struggle to remember rays of sunshine as blizzards blow in attempt to harden my skin.

This reading has come in a time where I am working to better myself holistically, so I shall not accredit these revelations to reading this single book, but will acknowledge it reminded me of my own intentions for myself in the weeks, years to follow.

winding road - Red Clay Suite

Red Clay Suite by Honorée Fannone Jeffers

Wow. Wow. It’s getting harder for me to try to write a cohesive response to these books, it feels as though my brain goes in one hundred more new directions with each one we read and I don’t know how to start.

The first section of Red Clay Suite stood out to me because of the recent class discussion that’s still floating around in my brain. How does one identify with home, with land? Ideas of migration, forced migration, elective migrations, traveling to find something, to find a sense of home. “Migration Cantos” says so much about the imaginary lines drawn up and down this country; how made up they are, but also the very real impact they have on us. Right from the beginning, there is a sense of travel; “Migration”, “I follow the interstate line”, etc. It is like the reader is sitting in the passenger seat of a car while the speaker drives from state to state and back again. But there are so many twists and turns!

“The Compass of Moss” stuck out to me. How the speaker felt the history of the Underground Railroad alive in the “tiny, white Ohio college town” she is visiting, and the different emotions that bubble up from that (29). Even though the speaker is “among friends” she feels so ill at ease in this town, so frightened:

“but I was scared in that fairytale village.

Don’t most stories hold a Grimm twist,

a flaxen-locked dame ravished by dark beast--

why not the same in reverse?”

There’s so much happening in this one poem and even in this little excerpt. I love how the speaker challenges the age old white supremacist association of dark with bad, and vice versa. She succeeds in making this small, white town feel chilling and sinister. And then there is this beautiful cathartic moment with the moss covered trees;

“stopped to check the oaks (for Harriet)

to see if that slave tale held true,

that moss grew only on the north side.

For once I got it: when the clouds

cloaked the guiding Star,

the compass of moss pointed the way

for poor souls. Follow.

Then I teared up, spilled over,

wiped my face. Shaken.

Why couldn’t I let it go?” (30)

I don’t quite understand the last line (Does she mean the history of this place? why should she let it go?), but the others really hit me. The way she writes about her tears, so straight to the point, without fuss, I really loved that. I found the succinct language no less emotional than any flowery description of a good cry. The speaker going out into the trees to check the moss, thinking of Harriet, having this moment of emotion with the trees, with the moss, with history. And then, again, it goes from bittersweet to strange and sinister again, when a murder of crows (I know that’s really what they’re called but wow) call to her “Ah ha, ah ha, so now you think you’re free?” (30). I’m not going to try and unpack what that ending might mean, I’ll only say that the twists in tone and emotion that I got from this one poem echoes through much of the rest of the collection for me. Twists and turns in a road.

Red Clay Suite

A letter to Nina Simone, from a Nina Simone.

Ms Simone, someone has written a love note to you. Of this, you probably aren't surprised. Ms Simone, I imagine you in a comfortable chair. Looking over the water and understanding that you have been receiving love notes for as long as you allowed. I know there’s more to what we’ve gotten to see of you.

I can imagine a house filled with the ancestors. The ways Jeffers calls upon the past, both writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sharon Olds, and her family- like her father.

It is the power of memory that runs through this work. And it is through memory that Jeffers examines the land in which she finds herself. Memory serves as an ecology within itself. On the plane of memory is where this work operates and I find myself comfortable here.

There is a deep connection to family and the land that is expressed as Jeffers moves through them. She travels, back to a home she feels disconnected to. She travels in communication with both literary and familial ancestors. It conveys a heaviness, the weight of remembering runs deep in the current of this work.

Ecologies of Southern Lands
Reflections on Red Clay Suite 

"I cried when I moved out here/and saw trees so short and few,/the prairie altogether flat, and earth near scarlet like my Georgia/earth but that's where kinship ended./Andthen, the land started hurting me/like an amputated part of my body." (66)

The sense of the author's strong connection to the land of her present and past and of her ancestors is tangible.  That she feels the earth hurting her like am amputated part of her body.  That the land holds so much and is related to her sense of grief, of her loss, of her familial history recent and deep in the recesses of her lineage.  So many lines cut deep relating to the land:

"bits of home on my tongue and I give praise.    56
I take the land as text as a preacher might           7
if the earth is denied me, then what do I know? 24
to lay me down beside the truth of this land"       54

And also there is the strong sense of nostalgia for the land she has called home.  This book holds me in a similar place, and i drink the imagery down with so many memories. The land and the food take me there, the cobbler and neckbones and greens and fried fish on a meatless Friday and fried chicken and peaches and names familiar like Flat Rock Primitive Baptist and the red clay for miles.  looking out the window to weathered tobacco barns and sitting on the porch and listening to thunderstorms on my mom's porch, I can feel it when I read this book and close my eyes, feel the sticky of the red clay soil.  And this book brings me to my father too.  In a different way and yet there he is.  The argument we were in when i woke to the call of the news that he was dead and and the sound of the wind chimes out back behind the apartment where he would sit staring out, smoking cigarettes and drinking in his anger and solitude. And the reconciling that goes on looking at photographs of him with eyes younger then mine, seeing him as a little boy and seeing an innocence, seeing his light above my memories of his heavy burdened brow, yellow stained teeth, and sense of a life unfulfilled. 
"That dying is such a brisk business./ This is the weight of what grief is." (63)
How we carry in our body the land, topography of our memories, and of our sorrows. How we carry in our body the memories of our bodies and of our ancestors.
And too how land is learned and sewn and tilled and comes back to sustain us, and how we learn or are not taught how to work the land to feel her nurture us. How that knowledge comes to us or is broken by the histories of too much dissonance and too much disconnect and too much sorrow. 
How she could have grown corn/so tall, she said, if only she had the land./...How she finally taught me, insistent./How a last meal must be clean.

Yearning

I feel so much yearning throughout Red Clay Suite. Jeffers yearns for a home that doesn't hate her, for the Cherokee traditions that have been denied her, for peaches, for another landscape, for a father. Wherever Honoree Fanonne Jeffers ventures, she is aware of herself as an outsider.  In the "tiny, white Ohio college town" that offers her a residency, she "roamed rooms, dressed for disaster, shoes by [her] bed's edge. This was Hell" (16). She's become so used to discomfort that it's what she knows best. In "Let Blood Go," she writes: "There's comfort in Confederate / flags, gun racks in backs of pickups, / coldness in the eyes of some whites, / resignation in the eyes of others" (18). And once she's left the South, she longs for it: "I'm feeling the hot arms of the South, / the old men who sell fresh produce / from their roadside stands. I'm feeling the hunger for the fruit of my youth" (55).

Jeffers' poetry made me think about what happens when our associations with home are about not belonging. How we still yearn for it all the same -- and harder in a sense, because we're yearning for all that we wish it had been.

I prayed with a clean heart
then drove through to clear skies.
I swore to myself, to my mama,
to God above,
I'd never leave Dixie if I saw it again.
I lied, forgive me.
Red clay, I lied. 

Being an outsider isn't just categorical or structural. Feeling like you don't belong is such a deeply formative psychic state that it radically shapes how we move through the world.  Home is meant to be an anchor, a reference point. It is supposed to teach us how to grow into adulthood and make another home. And if you've never known what home feels like, how are you to make a home of your own? How do you know what it feels like, when your associations of home are fear and grief and violence? When nostalgia fills you with the "blues you don't want to remember"?

I relate to these experiences viscerally. My parents divorced several months after I was born and I spent my entire childhood and most of my adolescence traveling between the houses of people who hated each other. There was "my mom's house," "my dad's house," "my mom's house," "my dad's house." There was never simply home. Each parent taught me to be deeply mistrustful of the other and competed for my affection; in the case of my stepmother, she flipped the script and made me perform to win hers. My mom and I also moved every one or two years, so by the time I was ten, I had been in four different school systems and lived in five different cities. Certainly, I had the privilege of being seen as white and perceived as middle-class and all the benefits that come with that --  though, as they often are, the realities were more complicated... my Jewishness and its ancestral legacy of nomadism and marginalization and being from a people who have never had a home, has complicated, though not overruled, my relationships to whiteness & class -- but what I'm trying to communicate right now is that despite somebody's reasons for feeling a sense of "unbelonging," those experiences shape us. And so we must shape them into art.

What may happen when you've been born into a family or a home that have taught you that you don't belong, is that you may search out for proxies:"Let Daddy in, sweetheart / Let your daddy in / You search for this honey in anyone's / mouth for close to thirty years" (43). You may cling to false memories: "I see this land the way I remember / and do the same for childhood love -- / the rough hand that touched me / but didn't scrape down to bone" (24). We look for what we want to see, what we know how to see, we because "if this earth is denied me, then what do I know?" (24).

There is no resolution here, no end to the longing. Jeffers' last poem, "Upon Learning That My Indian Student is a Sundancer," is as pregnant with yearning as a prayer. A yearning to return to the story of her Cherokee roots that has been denied to her, mangled, seemingly erased: "i want      i want      grandmother" (68).  If Jeffers cannot belong to a land in this time and place, at least she can dream herself back into relationship with her ancestors.

i know     too late    

grandmother     i don't 

her name     her name    her name


Such ache in these lines. But then in the final stanza, Jeffers' book is revealed to us: its deepest whispers and most sorrowful refrains, the clay that has formed the book and made it whole, made it into art:

red clay    she knew    fever

hawk hoof    children    say

chant    tea   love    holy

mother    blind eye    kiss

dark    way     mark     she knew

Moon || Red Clay Suite.

Moon


A poem has never made me sick before.

I have cried, and I have shared in grief.

But I have not felt the signs: goosebumps on my arms, the prickling that precedes nausea, or the raw meat texture in my throat of my body upturning.

When I read dirty south moon, I was sick. It was my body’s way of processing what I could not understand. In order for me to justify this for you, you have to know that it happened here:

child falling out          who stops crying         stomped upon

by men swelled pale with lies             no blink of its eyes

no staring at mother’s face              no bewilderment at first light


I found out Mary Turner was seven months pregnant when she was lynched, days after her husband was lynched, by a mob of more than 15 white people who were never tried for their murders. And then 500 black people fled the town because of the violent rampages where 11 more black people were lynched.

They cut her baby out of her. The baby cried two feeble cries; Mary had been set on fire and lynched and cut open.

One breath at a time.

And that’s what the poem feels like to me. One phrase at a time, separated by pauses. Incomprehensible reality told breath by breath, because there is no other way.

This poem is swaying like the necklace of a woman’s body Jeffers evokes. The throat is where air escapes and joins the body. The poem lives caught in the throat like a life stolen.

This poem twists as it goes. It haunts. The speaker in this poem insists, again and again, that we look at the moon, not for an answer nor an apology, but so that we never look away.

There are so many things that Honoree Fanonne Jeffers touched on in her poems that reached right through to my heart. There were a number of times I found myself overwhelmed with emotion, particularly the poems regarding her mother and father, and working the earth and gardening. The sacredness and sustenance of food and family, and of how so much of however we are nourished or starved physically, spiritually or emotionally, comes from these two sources of promised and potential nourishment in our lives. What is hoped for is rarely received, but what is often received, is what shapes our lives and makes us who we are.

In "The Blues I Don't Want to Remember," she is a child battlefield, unintentionally or intentionally being used to gain ground on her mother. The father calling every bit of sweetness he can conjure through his rage, to manipulate his child into opening the door and giving him access to her mother. Jeffers speaks to the shaping and long-lasting effects of her father's words on her parentified child-self:
"I was six and the song
of a man could still fool me."

and on her future self,

"I searched for this honey in anyone's
mouth for close to thirty years."

One can easily see how this would give form and shape to the poem, "What Is Written For Me," in lines like,
"Another man.
Slapped me with the open palm
of one hand, twisted my hair
around the fingers of the other.
He let go and I followed him."

There is a dutiful resignation that is supported and taught by culture and family, as women are taught to "Stand By Your Man." Tammy Wynette co-wrote and made that song famous, even as she allegedly suffered physical abuse at the hands of her husbands. There is an implicit message women receive about their worth through a variety of media, but most important is through the lens of family as "What's taught is what's known," (from "Nowhere to Stand" by k.d. lang)

In her poems we can see that it is often times not the big moments that impact us and leave their mark on us but smaller more imperceptible moments that can cut right through to the present moment and affect us deeply. One of my favorite poems is "Suddenly in Grace." It brought back memories of how hard my mom worked to put food on the table and of how much we relied on my grandfather's garden  to feed us. The bundles of carrots, beet greens, tomatoes, peppers and zucchini we would bring home along with jars of canned fruit from my grandmother's cellar. What my elders were trying to teach me about the value of good, clean fresh food and the work that went into getting it, and preparing it. Pitting cherries at my grandmother's kitchen table, washing and slicing apples for cobbler, the tomatoes picked and eaten like peaches with the juice dribbling satisfyingly down my chin. The prayerful, ritual of cooking and eating together, my mother determined to have us still eat our meals together after the divorce.

"How her back was turned to me
where she stood at the sink.
How she kept from speaking to my anger, lips tucked,
a bland face, head bowed suddenly in grace.
How she was determined to feed me."

I think of my own mother cooking and preparing dinner after working all day and before going to school at night, and how she could make something delicious out of almost nothing.

Through pain and memory how do we move forward as people and how do we heal ourselves from a painful past?

“lay me down beside the truth of this land” 54

The language, heartbreak, sadness and nostalgia of Red clay suite by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers felt familiar through the lens of someone with a completely differently history and past than myself but why did I relate to so much of her poems? Themes I felt closely connected to were a contemptuous relationship with the father, love and fondest for the mother, complicated relationships with cis men and connection to land.

 First I have to say, my favorite part of the Red Clay Suite is Jeffers speak of land, her fondness and nostalgia towards the land of the South and her mother. I love the image of Red clay, it makes me think of the texture and how this soil is rich in nutrients. Clay also holds plenty of water and can make many things like home, utensils, pots for food and water. Jeffers also references clay to her mother “my red clay mother, muse” (40). There is a tenderness towards the land and her mother in a way that she connects two in this line. She also speaks of land and memory in The subject of gardening, “My mother looks at the empty field, tells you a hard story, I don’t care what they are trying to grow here now. All that there used to be cotton and it wont give them nothing else” (54). This speaks on sorrow of the past, and how the land is forever changed because of slavery.

Also, Jeffers speaks a lot on her father, “my father, kind to strangers, slapping one of us upside our heads at home, searching for beauty in everything except his family” (47). She speaks of a father that was different behind closed doors, a man that made the women in his life feel unlovable hence like the land they too were damaged.

One poem that stood out to me and felt relatable was What is written for me: “I want someone who sired a girl. Who should’ve stayed unborn, this shameful woman child, an easy prophecy” (45). There were so many relatable feelings of being a child of shame and unworthiness of love. Jeffers speak on toxic masculinity about “one man screamed at me one night, liquor lighting him up inside” (44) woo! I tear up reading and writing that part because it’s so damn relatable then ending the poem on the note of an unloving father was all too relatable and I know I am no the only one which makes me that much more grateful that Jeffers wrote this book, through pain and memory how do we move forward as people and how do we heal ourselves from a painful past?

Becoming our own Parents - a response to Red Clay Suite

I’m so angry with you and I haven’t yet learned
how much weaker than a girl a woman can be.
How silly I am to assume you are stronger than he. (47)

Recently, in a conversation with my therapist, I was discussing my thoughts, feelings, disappointments, and worries about my parents. Things I hadn’t thought about in maybe a decade came floating out of my mouth as if it was only last week they happened. In our session my therapist looked at me, sighed a big sigh with me, and then said something along the lines of “Maybe it’s time to take all your expectations of your parents, put them into a little box inside you, mourn the loss of what you wished they could’ve been, and then become what they couldn’t, care for yourself they way you wanted them to care for you — fill that wound with your love.” In essence she was telling me to become my own parent. This concept of transforming the ways in which our parents continue to cause us pain makes me think of the (heartbreaking) poem “The Little Boy Who Will Be My Father” (51-52). Jeffers writes,

Bread, jelly, lots of milk is what I wanted,
not to see my father naked in the light.
I’m closing my eyes to that memory.

I can still see him
I can still see him

Now.
I’ll open my eyes and see the little boy instead —
face like my own,

In a way Jeffers recreates this father in the image of the speaker with the line “face like my own.” The image of this little boy with a similar face and a smile is an image that the speaker can love, one that can be looked at and take the place of “him” — the father she “can still see” naked in the kitchen. Further in the poem the lines “I like to think of my father this way / before he is changed into what I should not say.” Often times we think of rhyme as having a childlike innocent tone associated with it and I think in this case there is a sense of reclaiming of innocence and a reclaiming of childhood.

The realization that your parents are human, that they are flawed in ways you may or may not be aware of is one of the recurring sentiments that pops up for me throughout Red Clay Suite. In the stanza I quoted at the beginning of this post, from “Lexicon,” brought those sentiments into focus. “I haven’t yet learned / how much weaker than a girl a woman can be.” That line cuts deep, we want so badly for the women we emulate to be strong, to be super and as a child we haven’t all learned what can break someone, or rather that there is strength in leaving.

The familial is imbedded in the text in the same way that it is integrated inside the land. A line I find beautiful and intriguing is “And first thinking of my prairie father, / poet, and then of my red clay mother, / muse,” the familial is bound to earth, to art, to the speaker.

xoxo,
Rai

Where do our fathers fall on the ecologies of our bodies? How do they map themselves on our skin?

I forget that my father makes up part of me just as much as my own mother does. My first instinct when it comes to thinking about my father is to look for the ways that my body blames him. My mind goes directly to all the times he's put me through traumatic experiences. My voice strains anytime I have to speak with him on the phone like its a rehearsed script. The way Jeffers explores the impact her father has had on her ecologies made me question why my first instinct is to reject my fathers presence on my skin. My complexion closer to his then my mothers. My stubborn attitude a reflection of his own (both in the good way and the bad). I think Jeffers frames this struggle with wanting to let your father in after he has hurt you in "The Blues I don't Want to Remember". She speaks of this in between space where she is trying to heal from her trauma but she also isn't quite sure if she is ready to "just let daddy in". Because just like we feel lour mother pains and our mothers mothers pains and the mothers before them we also carry our fathers pain as well. I think as daughters we try to push away that part of ourselves because we are taught to disassociate ourselves from out fathers, especially when it comes to familial trauma. However, we also feel that in between space that Jeffers touches on, because our fathers are very much apart of our ecologies both spiritually and physically. another revelation that I had when reading these pieces about her father was that because of this disassociation that we feel we forgot how to navigate the world with the part of ourselves that relate to our fathers. We struggle to build relationships with other men because of the wounds we have not healed that have been passed down to us from our fathers. So how can we heal that? How do we begin to love our fathers again and no blame them for the pain we feel? How do we forgive them? I think Jeffers provides us with at least one answer to these questions. To look at our fathers as the little boys they once were. Think about the ways they have hurt. Think about the innocence and vulnerability that comes with that adolescence. Because that still exists in them somewhere, before they were a father they were men and before they were men then were little boys. I tried to envision my father like this and i felt my body go tender in the places they once hardened at his name. I forgave him. And even though I was able to conquer this, like Jeffers does in her pieces, I also remember that just because I was able to forgive does not mean I am ready to open the door yet and that is okay. Navigating our father-daughter relationships is not an over night process and that's okay. 

Red Clay Suite and agrarian reality

Romare Bearden, Baptism 

Romare Bearden, Calabash

Paul Cezanne, Esquisse de Baigneurs

Paul Cezanne, Pastoral, or Idyll

I looked up these two artists in reference to Blues Aubade (or Revision of the Lean, Post-Modernist Pastorale). These are just four pieces from a massive body of work by two very different artists. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers doesn’t mention these pieces in particular but does refer to both Cèzanne and Bearden in this poem, so I thought I’d look at some examples of their art and include them here.

            It’s important that I’ve heard of Paul Cèzanne and not Romare Bearden. Cèzanne is a white post-impressionist celebrated by the art world and Bearden is a black social realist, also celebrated by the art world, but not ‘holy’ the way Cèzanne is. Bearden’s ‘collage of agrarian truths’ contrasts with Cèzanne’s pastorals, because it has to work to be recognized. While comparisons to Cèzanne are inevitable, Honorée has to hope space will be made for comparisons to Bearden:

            “Before I start meditating on the apples green buttock, / I hope there is time for a second walk // to another field that breaks me down, for prayer / and work, the precarious undoing of my birth.”

           Black Pastoral is the title of the section that this poem introduces, and one of the reasons I chose to include Cèzanne's Pastoral, or Idyll as an example of his work. Revising the pastoral is what Honorée intends to do, and I thought the similarities and differences between the bathers in Cézanne's work and the woman washing her feet in Bearden's show how the artists portray similar subject matter differently. Both artists were revolutionary in their own ways, but Cèzanne’s artistic revolution isn’t relevant the way Bearden’s is, not for Honorée. While the Cèzanne’s of the world occupy some ‘holy’ space of pastoral beauty and ‘fine art’, the Bearden’s of the world break through with harsher realities of pastoral life. This poem, a self-titled “Revision of the Lean, Modernist Pastoral”, considers the marginalization of artists of color, who have to fight to be seen and heard. ‘Social realist’ (to summarize Wikipedia) is the visual artist equivalent of a ‘political poet’. Being willingly or unwillingly pigeon-holed into these categories is often the fate of artists of color. Honorée expresses the frustration of writing a pastoral reality in contrast with the white-dominated illusion of pastoral bliss.

            Red Clay Suite is so firmly rooted in place, even though the place is in-between. Especially I think in the first section Migration Cantos, which is a journey from Oklahoma to Georgia, there’s a sense of being in-between. Physically in transit between two places, but also (in Passing) between two identities. Red clay grounds us to a region, not a state or a town, but to something natural and malleable that lives in the memory of a place, like clingstone peaches, collard greens, and the church rock that was ground up into gravel.  

             

The Blues in Red Clay-Suite

I think the most striking thing about Red Clay-Suite is the consistent references to trauma against black southern women by the men in their families. This struck a particular chord in me, because Jeffers really pinpoints the complexity of the role the black man has in the black familial structure, and how that complexity runs in the both the love and hatred that black women have against black men. She doesn't shy away from these truths, but instead paints a picture of the psychological dissonance that black women endure when actively choosing (or not choosing) to interact with black men.
I found this most revelatory to me in particular, because I made a conscious decision years ago to consciously limit my interaction with cis heterosexual black men (all cishet men, really) as much as possible in my personal life, because of the physical, mental and emotional trauma and disrespect that I have endured at earlier moments in my life. Because I made this decision a long time ago, and have formulated my reality in this manner, I often don't find myself in environments or situations where my choice has to be explained, but when seldom I do, I find myself explaining the types of traumas that Jeffers hauntingly describes. Poems like "What Is Written For Me" are painstakingly accurate in displaying the complexity of love and fear that black women endure in their relationship with black men. She writes:

One man.
Screamed at me one night, liquor
lighting him up inside like a prophet
I was a woman.
A woman.
but followed him into the dark field,
anyway, unafraid as only
a child should be
When finally sure he meant
to kill me -- that's when my love
for him came down in a revelation

First, we can examine the allusion to Christian religion. The specific use of "prophet," "woman" and "revelation" stick out heavily in the first stanza, and I think Jeffers is alluding to how the invasion of this faith in the black home can be considered the causation of the imbalance between black man and women. Even further the use of "woman" is a direct allusion of the creation story of Adam and Eve, and through this Jeffers is further hinting to the imbalance of power in the relationships of black men and women, because its considered that Eve is subsidiary to Adam because she is created from his rib. This is further enacted when the speaker follows the man "into the dark field" and even after she is certain he will kill her has a "revelation" of the depths of love  she has for him. In this moment, Jeffers is effectively revealing how emotionally and psychologically enmeshed black women are in the protection of black men. The speaker is so unaware of the levels of abuse she endures, confusing it for love, that she sacrifices her own life to follow him. This is Stockholm syndrome. But I argue that Jeffers is examining the ways in which black women justify the abuse of black men, because we don't naturally see them as abusers. Most of the time they are our fathers, our lovers, and our sons, and what this does is create a dissonance of being able to label them/treat them as our abusers.