Lucille Clifton
1936 - 2010Further Resources
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In Praise of Black Weariness
I think of Black weariness as a specific condition born from the Middle Passage and ongoing genocide, a continual state of being that is distinct from resolvable feelings like "sleepiness." Black weariness is both intentional and environmental, a technology of survival in a world which has never left us any other choice. It is found in the procedural, grief-laden repetition of M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong! #14" ("the truth was/the ship sailed/the rains came/the loss arose") and the directness of jay dodd’s "In the Age of Audacity" ("i don’t want a Solution/i want People to know/Everything hurts"). It's the flippant, sacred feeling writer Morgan Parker gestures towards in "Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s" (“Since I thought I'd be dead/by now everything/I do is fucking perfect"). Black weariness is the creation of luxury and time under impossible conditions. It's a balm, a speculative tradition, a freedom practice
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Blackness and apocalypse
These poems are primarily meant to reflect my ongoing interest in how black writers have navigated the end of the world, the ends of worlds, cataclysms and shifts in the landscape. How over and against that utter lack of safety or security, they have dared to imagine a future. And what’s more, a global vision in which the present social hierarchies and arrangements do not carry the day. In the midst of storms, hurricanes, political upheaval and nuclear threats, these writers, and the tradition in which they work, assert an alternate, unflinchingly optimistic story of humankind. They dare us to dream of other ways that things could be, count that dreaming as praxis, and build with our most radical visions in mind. Every apocalypse is also a revelation, an opening, another chance. These poems are rooted in that long-standing, fundamental truth. They are preparation for the earth that is yet to come.
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