Opal Palmer Adisa employs the modes of autobiography, dramatic
monologues, lyrical observations, encomiums, prose poems and
prophetic rants in a collection that enacts the construction of a
sense of identity whose dimensions encompass a Rastafarian sense of
inner 'i-ness', gender, race, geography, the spiritual, the social
and the political. In several poems, Palmer speaks through the
voices of iconic historical figures such as Phyllis Wheatley, who
after the process of cultural loss and enforced imitation finds her
own voice, or a ghostly Nat Turner who speaks as an invisible
presence in the white world storing away his knowledge of that
world to use the next time round. There are contemporary icons,
too, such as the late Audrey Lorde, Barbara Christian and June
Jordan, strong women who are held up as models of writers committed
to the responsibility of speaking out, of pursuing beauty in their
writing and personal relationships, of supporting community and
fighting injustice. Palmer speaks more directly of self in poems
that explore the experience of being a Black person in the world of
Oakland, poems which range from a pained but empathetic response to
the racial transformations of Michael Jackson, her experience of
Black male chauvinism in the classroom and a moving account of the
senility of a beloved grandmother. The empathy in Opal Palmer
Adisa's work is nowhere more clearly seen than in "Ancestry", a
poem that rejects the customary practice of choosing only the
past's heroes to relate to, embracing both rebels and betrayers,
fighters and the acquiescent: 'i claim all of them/ and you who
turned against us/ and led them to our secret place.../ i claim you
aunt jemima/ and uncle tom.../ we are all one family...' Then,
almost at the end of the collection, comes a poem called "Beyond
the Frame" that in its oblique but inescapable images of childhood
sexual abuse, suddenly begins to suggest what kind of act of will
has gone into the construction of an 'I' who is 'an incisor gnawing
my way.'
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