Go Back and Fetch It

To understand the great body of work that Lucille Clifton left after her death in 2010—the evolving body, for more poems are being excavated all the time—you must understand that Black history informs much of her work. There is the generous verse she offered everyone, regardless of racial or gender identification. This was her benediction, and because of that gift, many want to read disembodied, deracinated impulses in Clifton’s poems, seeking a so-called universal meaning.

But make no mistake: Clifton was a Black woman. Not only female-identified, not only Black-identified, but a combination of those forces. And so—real talk, as the kids say—to capture the full power of this poet, you must grasp her archival tendencies, her layers of cultural and historical allusions. This is the prodigious intellect of Lucille Clifton—and her glory.

Real talk.

Yet let me go back to the ways of old, to the African American preacher tradition, which is certainly the inheritance of the woman I call “Miss Lucille.” The woman who testifies and prophesizes and remembers.

As a Black preacher might ask, can I take my time?

***

When I travel back to 1619, I’m not forgetting Lucille Clifton’s poetry. I’m taking it with me—to that year some have called the founding of Black history. Though Africans most likely had a presence in North America before then, many intellectuals and scholars have named this year a starting point because it locates the arrival of Africans who had been captured and sold into slavery. They disembarked in Jamestown, Virginia. Then, sometime after 1621, there is the first intact African family recorded in the colony of Virginia: “Antoney Negro: Isabell Negro: and William Theire Child Baptised.”

We know that these Africans came from across the water, across the Middle Passage of the Atlantic Ocean, a terrible birthing that pushed them out coughing into madness and oppression and loss. These were the waters of nation-making for Black people in America.

In 1662, the colony of Virginia made a simple yet monumental law: from then on, the children of African (now called Negro) women would follow the condition of their mothers. The law would come to be called Partus Sequitur Ventrem, a Latin phrase (added in the 19th century) that means “Offspring Follows Belly.” Thus, “Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe,” a traditional Black proverb, takes on not only cultural implications but legal implications as well. This was a shift of traumatic proportions for children of African descent. Although (so-called) legitimate white children still could be claimed by their fathers, according to English common law, the possibility of legitimacy for Black children would be lost for 200 years, until after the Civil War. Partus Sequitur Ventrem stripped legal power from enslaved Black fathers. They could not claim or pass their freedom on to their children.

This is a devastating moment in African American history, but when you look at the history of Black folks, there are always—miraculously—blessings within the curses. A way to bend ugliness so it points toward beauty, for there were (and still are) African matrilineal tribes, kin groupings that trace bloodlines through the mother. And, we can assume, lines that trace memory through the mother too. After the 17th century, the second generation of Black folks in North America exhibited what were called creolized identities: they were neither fully African nor fully acculturated to the expectations of their European masters. They had inherited various practices from their African parents, such as songs, folktales, rituals, and foodways. However, what many contemporary Blacks in North America view as wholesale “African” practices are, in fact, a cultural hodgepodge gathered from diverse peoples and tribes descended from that huge continent.

One matrilineal cultural group is the Akan of West Africa, from a territory once called the Gold Coast, now the country of Ghana. During the European slave trade, the Akan were labeled with a made-up, generic word, Coromantee, a name that did not respect inter- and intra-tribal differences. However, the Africans called Coromantee probably did speak one common language. For Europeans of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Coromantee occupied legendary status, particularly when it came to their intractability. In other words, they were troublemakers. For example, Onesimus, a Coromantee slave of the Reverend Cotton Mather (of Salem, Massachusetts, witch trial fame), gave his owner plenty of trouble. Throughout Mather’s diary, there are recorded instances of back talk and sundry bad behaviors.

However, the Coromantee were also considered highly intelligent: Mather credits Onesimus, “a pretty Intelligent Fellow,” with introducing him to smallpox inoculation. Onesimus told his owner that inoculation was practiced among the people of his homeland.

An Akan practice that remains today is the Adinkra iconographic system. Within Adinkra, symbols correspond to words, proverbs, or metaphysical notions. They have been found stamped on cloth and pottery. The two most well-known Adinkra symbols are gye Nyame, which means “except God”—as in, nothing is above you except God—and Sankofa, which means “go back and fetch it.” Sankofa is represented in two ways: as a heart with curlicues and, its most popular representation, a bird that sails forward but looks backward. The short definition refers to a proverb: “It is not a taboo to return and fetch it when you forget.” Because many Adinkra symbols were documented only in the early 20th century, it is not possible to know whether Adinkra iconography was brand-new at the time or an ongoing, centuries-old system. For my purposes, though, that does not matter because I am taking the symbol as a critical metaphor, one that can be applied to poetry produced by writers throughout the African diaspora: I will call this Sankofa poetics.

First, to apply Sankofa, a poet must be Black or of African descent.

The second requirement of Sankofa poetics addresses African or African American cultural or ancestral concerns. For example, a poet might interrogate the connections between oral traditions and history while recognizing that facts can be recorded for archival purposes, and so can emotions. Given slave history, many view trauma and anger as quintessentially Black emotions—but joy and wonder are Black as well. Whatever use the past is, Sankofa applies. Remember that the word means “go back and fetch it,” but that definition doesn’t refer only to a return to Africa, for fetch means “retrieve.” Thus, whatever is found in the past is useful for the present as well.

The third, and final, requirement of Sankofa poetics is that the poet must be concerned with innovation or improvisation, such as the use of blues, jazz, unique page aesthetics, new approaches to European forms, or a new approach to lyricism. (This is by no means an exhaustive list.) If one looks at, say, a jazz performance of a well-known song that (as we used to say in the 1980s) “freaks it,” we can see both the musician’s respect for the original song and a pulling away.

But when I say improvisation, I’d like to emphasize the Black notions of resistance or troublemaking as well. Many times, innovation in poetry is thought to involve mystery—an inability to comprehend what a poet is saying. Though metaphysical complexity is admirable (and beautifully useful) for a Sankofa poetic—many Black poets exhibit shamanistic qualities—a complete shutting out of accessibility is, if I may, a Western notion. And if a critic applies a Sankofa framework, it becomes possible to connect innovative, experimental, or troublemaking Black poets to African diasporic cultural influences.

Troublemaking can mean danger, as when a Black woman asks, “You know what?” and you definitely don’t want to know. Yet troublemaking can be playful and satisfying too.

***

Can I take my time?

Lucille Clifton’s is undoubtedly a Sankofa poetic. She was/is Black, not only in heritage but also in her political sensibilities. These concerns fulfill the first requirement of Sankofa.

When we apply the second requirement of Sankofa—preoccupation with African ancestry—the legacy that Clifton accesses was passed down through story and blood: the salt of the Middle Passage. She is aware of the waters that pushed her African ancestors over to this side; thus, it is more than appropriate that her posthumous, glorious work, edited by poet Aracelis Girmay, is titled How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions, 2020). For example, in the final two lines of her untitled poem, “[light],” she declares “mine already is / an afrikan name.”

Clifton repeatedly reaches back to public horrors such as slavery and lynching and to intimate familial matters, such as kinship, family-making, sensuality, and, yes, joy. Sometimes—incredibly—she includes several of these aforementioned matters in the same poem, as in, for example, [“harriet”], a poem alluding to Harriet Tubman, an actual activist against slavery—and a formerly enslaved woman herself—whose life story has reached mythological status:

if i be you
let me not forget
to be the pistol
pointed
to the madwoman
at the rivers edge
warning
be free or die

The lines “let me not forget / to be the pistol / pointed” refer to a legend about Tubman, who threatened to kill an enslaved person she was helping to escape. According to the (perhaps apocryphal) story, this person—sometimes recalled as a man, sometimes a woman—was afraid of the unknown and wanted to return to slavery. Tubman refused to let this enslaved person return home and offered a choice: “be free or die.” Yet these lines allude not only to history—true or not—but also to earlier African American poetry. Robert Hayden’s lesser known poem “Runagate Runagate” imagines the life of Tubman: “Dead folks can’t jaybird-talk, she says; / you keep on going now or die, she says.” (I say lesser known because many readers—regardless of race—are unaware of Hayden’s historical poems about African Americans, which address not only Tubman’s life but also the Amistad slave ship mutiny and Phillis Wheatley Peters’s life, just to name a few.)

Three times, Clifton uses incantatory utterance—“if i be you”—to compare herself to Tubman and to Sojourner Truth, another famous, formerly enslaved woman. The speaker of [“harriet”] internalizes the history of these two women who have become fabled beacons to contemporary womanist/feminist Black women. Despite the trauma both Tubman and Truth endured during slavery, the speaker picks up a mantle of joy, resilience, and faith: “trust the Gods / love my children and / wait.” There is a life beyond bondage, beyond suffering, this speaker promises. And there is a continuation of kin.

It is crucial for Clifton to document emotion as well as lineage and public events, to collect what is called the “fictive kin” of extended family networks as well as biological, blood relatives. In her foreword to How to Carry Water, Girmay writes, “Such repetitions of names and stories move across her work. Histories written in circles much like time and weather are recorded in the rings of a tree … the shape of this Selected of poems rendered with documentary, spiritual, and mystical sensibilities.” It is noteworthy that Girmay understands that Clifton doesn’t always write in a linear fashion. Rather, one must read several collections of her poems, as well as her germinal memoir, Generations (1976), to witness Clifton’s ongoing historical and ancestral reclamations.

While reading Clifton’s poems and recognizing her allusions, I recall a conversation that the Black woman-poet Remica Bingham-Risher and I had, years ago, in which we laughingly declared that “it takes other writers, ourselves included, two pages to do what [Clifton] can do in four lines with no punctuation and no title.” Indeed, there are rich, matrilineal allusions in How to Carry Water. Girmay includes “ca’line’s prayer,” an early poem, from 1969, written in the voice of Clifton’s direct, blood ancestor. Though Ca’line is paternal kin, an ancestor of Clifton’s father, most of the family members descended from Ca’line that continue to appear in later Clifton poems are female. In this poem is a family history that spans 200 years:

… remember me from wydah
remember the child
running across dahomey
black as ripe papaya
juicy as sweet berries
and set me in the rivers of your glory
 
Ye Ma Jah

History hovers over each line, lending rhythm, even as the meter of these lines is irregular—now seven syllables, now five, etc. Yet the accents and assonant music are strong, stressing overt African references: wydah, dahomey, papaya, and Ye Ma Jah.

Again, it’s important to step carefully and thoughtfully through Clifton’s archival iterations. Wydah, sometimes spelled Whydah, refers to an African territory in the kingdom of Dahomey, a slave-trading stronghold during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, the me here is not only Clifton’s direct ancestor Ca’line, “the child / running across dahomey” but also all the people who were captured from what Clifton describes as an Edenic locale, with “ripe papaya” and “sweet berries.” Those 20,000 Africans a year who, like Ca’Line, were taken from their Dahomeyan homeland and sold into slavery.

The last line of “ca’line’s prayer”—“Ye Ma Jah”—offers Clifton’s knowledge of Dahomeyan spiritual and political histories. At various turbulent moments during this period, Whydah was under control of the Asante. Though Whydah is in Dahomey, the practice of gathering fictive kin means that African people(s) of many nations, tribes, and clans became "Negro" as they passed over the Middle Passage. As we know, through the years and centuries, "Negro" became Black and, finally, African American. Traditions combined into a sometimes-tender heritage, and Ye Ma Jah references not only the Yoruba kingdom that temporarily controlled Whydah but also an African religion based upon the honoring of the orisha, African deities.

Through Sankofa, Clifton “reaches back and fetches” a preponderance of kinships, spiritualities, and histories. In the 20th century—when “ca’line’s prayer” was written—and now, in the 21st century, the Yoruba religion gained traction among people of African descent. Ye Ma Jah, often spelled Yemoja, is a Yoruba deity responsible for bodies of water. In various, later iterations, she has been linked to religious devotion known throughout the Caribbean and various other locations where the transatlantic slave trade flourished.

In “Amazons,” Clifton returns to Dahomeyan history, to the legend of African women warriors who are her blood ancestors through her father. The presence of these women, fierce, armed bodyguards of male leaders in the kingdom, were variously documented: in a 1726 letter, King Agaja of Dahomey writes that he keeps “two or three hundred of my inferiour Wives, [the chief favourites being about my person in sundry stations,] some to fan and cool me, others to keep the Flies away with Whisks, others holding my Arms, as Gun, Pistol, and Sabre.” Other British explorers in the 19th century recalled seeing Dahomeyan woman carrying spears and “brandishing their weapons.”

Again, Clifton references history as well as her own ancestry, taking the legend of Dahomeyan woman warriors as a metaphor for strength under bodily adversity. In “Amazons,” she writes about her battle with cancer and her fear of losing a breast. Yet she frames the possibility of what others might view as mutilation as an embrace of solidarity with the one-breasted Dahomeyan warriors and with her female comrade in poetry, Audre Lorde, who recorded her own experience with breast cancer in The Cancer Journals (1980): “my sisters swooped in a circle dance / audre was with them and i / had already written this poem.”

And Clifton furthers the notion of troublemaking as “reaching back,” a syncretic gesture calling upon fictive and actual kinship. Africans from across the water not only exercised exogamy in marrying across tribal lines but also combined foodways and folklore—and resistance strategies. One resistance is the retention of memory, a refusal to forget, despite white Americans’ attempts to erase Black history and elide transgressions against African Americans. Thus, in her playful yet defiant poem, “why some people be mad at me sometimes,” Clifton explains why she is the source of white American anger:

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.

***

Can I take my time?

If you were expecting a regular review essay, you’re disappointed right now. Others have done that kind of writing—important, essential writing—but this essay is an ancestral tending, an offering to the altar of that powerful woman I still love, who occupies every corner of my heart. After she died, I began to call her more than my mentor and friend. I called her my second mother—for she mothered me, looked out for me, protected me, saved my career. (That’s a conversation only a few are privy to.) She was a seer, a root worker who helped straighten my path and who comes to me in dreams. A spiritual guide.

Her verse is so gracefully economical that some could not recognize her prophecy, her metaphysicality, until after she passed away. I thought I knew all of it until I began to grieve who was lost. Miss Lucille showed me my history, my Sankofa, my Africa that I tried to repudiate, until the ancestors began to scold me. They knew what I needed. She knew too. And though she had passed away, I tried to pull her back to me.

She has been my ancestor for 10 years, and still, I reach for her poems. I continue to reach for her waters.

 

A Clifton Archival Coda

I know we poets don’t always like the inelegance of scholarly citations. They don’t look good on the page (at all), and they seem to tangle up the movement of our language—but I’m trying to change that. Because—since I’m being real, here—for several hundred years, whenever African American women have provided information to non-Black audiences, we had to give “receipts”—documentation that proved we were telling the truth. That’s what I’m doing here.

Further, this essay is about the need to “go back and fetch” information. I am a poet who has spent more than half her life in the historical archives, and Lucille Clifton spent even more years in the archives than I have. Thus, I hope you will forgive that I insist on including a list of the texts I cited in this essay. In addition, I’d like to begin what has been called (on social media) a syllabus on Clifton’s poetry and her prodigious and brilliant cultural, historical, and literary allusions.

So here goes.

For information on 17th-century enslaved African Americans in Virginia—starting in that important year 1619—there is John Camden Hotten’s (edited) documentation of the history of the Virginia Colony, The Original Lists of Persons of Quality; Emigrants; religious exiles; political rebels; serving men sold for a term of years; apprentices; children stolen; maidens pressed; and others who went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600–1700: with their ages and the names of the ships in which they embarked, and other interesting particulars; from mss. Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, England (1874).

To read about the 1662 changing of the status of Black women’s children and how this affected Black families, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22, no. 1 (2018): 1–17. This change of the status of Black children was given the Latin term, partus sequitur ventrem, in William Waller Hening’s The statutes at large; being a collection of all the laws of Virginia, from the first session of the legislature, in the year 1619 … (1819–1823).

Several texts address the invented English term Coromantee and its designation for enslaved people(s) taken from the formerly named Gold Coast of West Africa. A great reader-friendly text is Walter Rucker, Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). To read Cotton Mather’s strangely fascinating (but incredibly racist and borderline narcissistic) 17th-century diary entries about his “troublemaking” enslaved servant, Onesimus, see The Diary of Cotton Mather, 1709-1724 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1912) and Cotton Mather, Some Lost Works of Cotton Mather, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (John Wilson and Son, 1912). For a discussion of Akan Adinkra symbols, the Sankofa symbol in particular, see Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001) and Erik R. Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

To read about Clifton’s family history, her Generations: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1976) continues to be a luscious, timely read. Clifton was descended from the women warriors of Dahomey. Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) give important historical background on that region as well as others. For information about the Dahomey women warriors, Stanley Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey (New York: New York University Press, 2011) reads like creative nonfiction though it’s a scholarly book. Another great text is Robin Law’s excavated letter by an actual king of Dahomey, “An Alternative Text of King Agaja of Dahomey's Letter to King George I of England, 1726,” History in Africa, 29 (2002): 257–271.

Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola, “Introducing Yemoja,” in Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas, ed. Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola (Albany: SUNY, 2013), xvii–xix, gives a background on the important Yoruba orisha, Yemoja, who appears in Clifton’s poem, “ca’line’s prayer.” As an interesting aside, Clifton contemporary (and friend) Audre Lorde wrote about Yemoja in The Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978).

Robert Hayden’s poem about Harriet Tubman, “Runagate Runagate,” appears in Robert Hayden: Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Norton, 1985). Finally, the conversation my poet-sister-friend Remica Bingham and I had about Miss Lucille’s amazing ability to condense layered allusions into economical spaces is documented by Bingham in “Between Starshine & Clay: An Interview with Lucille Clifton,” The Writer’s Chronicle (February 2011).