american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

56 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
“The True Import” was written as “a protest against [any] attitude”
(Giovanni 374) that puts a premium on dying for civil rights, as in
these lines: “We ain’t got to prove we can die / We got to prove we
can kill.” According to the poem’s speaker, her audience must learn
“to kill WHITE for BLACK.” For many in the Civil Rights
Movement in the 1960s, compromise was not an option. 13 Malcolm
X’s famous declaration “By any means necessary” is the implied
framework for many of Giovanni’s 1968 poems, including “The True
Import.” But to reiterate, it is not this attitude that makes the poem
less successful than the following Giovanni poem; the poem’s very
insistence on direct action makes it incapable of discriminating
between action against oppressive white institutions and action
against white people in general.
Phillip Brian Harper has shown that “The True Import”
“expose(s) the logic of the Black Arts ethic that governs work from
the movement generally” in its use of the second-person pronoun and
in its complex address to two audiences—one black and one white
(240, 247). But Giovanni’s “My Poem” (The Collected Poetry 86–87),
from Black Judgment, is a better example of authoritative agency even
if it is less confrontational than “The True Import” and less representative
of the Black Arts Movement. If the speaker’s voice in “The True
Import” sounds like an insistent but insecure bully peer-pressuring
her friends to act, the speaker of “My Poem” is a confident, convincing
revolutionary proclaiming an inspiring belief in her cause. The
repetition, orality, and fundamentally oppositional character remain
but largely absent is the assaultive voice. As such, the first-person singular
speaker plays a major role in “My Poem,” unlike in “The True
Import,” which contains not a single “I.” Here is the first stanza:
i am 25 years old
black female poet
wrote a poem asking
nigger can you kill
if they kill me
it won’t stop
the revolution
It is important that the speaker names herself and asserts her identity
immediately; the lowercase “i” remains so throughout the poem, a
technique that suggests the speaker’s identity is secondary to the revolution,
to black lives in general. The poem gains a large part of its
political vibrancy from the strategy of selflessness, itself a vital element