american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

54 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Black Feeling Black Talk and Black Judgment, both published in 1968,
contain many political poems of authoritative agency. After numerous
readings, “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro”
(The Collected Poetry 19–20) stands out as a premier example of an
authoritative political poem, although not as her most successful. Its
authoritative voice is a primary product of how the poem values life.
Reginald Gibbons has noted that political poems must take a stand on
the value of life itself; he writes, “It is no surprise when a great and
political poem like Neruda’s ‘Alturas de Macchu Picchu’ prizes life
over death, but a political (and especially a revolutionary) poem must
also begin to say whose life” (288; original emphasis). In “The True
Import” and other poems in Giovanni’s 1968 books, black life is infinitely
more valuable than white life, and her poems protest white
racism and the institutional structures that support it. Giovanni’s
political position in these poems—in many ways representative of the
Black Arts Movement—has created contentious debate, some of
which I outline in order to contextualize the confrontational and
authoritative voice of Giovanni’s poem.
There are two primary schools of thought with regard to the inflammatory
rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement. On one hand, critics
such as J. Saunders Redding attack the 1960s Black Aesthetic for what
he considers its hate and reverse racism (cited in P. Harper 239). This
group would likely view “The True Import” as an unequivocal document
of racism and anti-Semitism. This understanding allows—
perhaps rightly so—no room for strategic rhetorical intent and
generally offers no further depth. On the other hand, critics such as
David L. Smith, though they do not apologize for anti-Semitic lines
like those in Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art” or in “The True Import,” find
a cogent social and political framework for the controversial rhetoric of
the Black Arts aesthetic. Smith suggests that Baraka uses the term
“Jew” in part because American culture “provides us with an effective
language of oppression” but not one of liberation, and that “Jew” brings
“emotional force” to the poem. This type of poetic strategy is an example
of what Smith calls “an art which outrages by being outrageous”
(“Amiri” 243–244). In the same vein, Phillip Brian Harper suggests the
primary reason for the use of racist language in the late 1960s:
the “enemy” of the Black Arts Movement was the white “establishment”
(238) without differentiation and without apology. Smith’s approach
provides a de facto consensus point I take from here on: “too often the
work is marred by the swaggering rhetoric of ethnic and gender
chauvinism” (“The Black” 93), which emblemizes an uncompromising
rhetorical strategy pledged to revolution by any means.