19 pages • 38-minute read
wishes for sons
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Background
Historical Context
The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s was the cultural subsect of the Black Power Movement, focusing on the creation of music, literature, drama, and various visual arts by Black artists and intellectuals. Participants of the Black Arts Movement shared similar ideologies of self-determination and Black pride, creating art in direct response to the Black community’s struggle for rights and liberation in 1960s-1970s America. Author and activist Cheryl Clarke writes in her novel After Mecca: Women Poets and The Black Arts Movement that:
Black women were key poets, theorists, and revolutionists during the era of the new black consciousness movement of the late twentieth century, but they had been integral voices since the time when Phillis Wheatley (1774) and Maria M. Stewart (1832) claimed the public and intellectual spheres for African women in North America (Clarke, Cheryl. After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. Rutgers University Press, 2006).
The emergence and subsequent prominence of Black poetry was pioneered by women like Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Lucille Clifton. For these writers,
poetry was a principal instrument of political education about the new blackness […] the experimentalism of new black poetry, its critique of Western canonical constructions, its revision of African American literary and cultural conventions, and its visionary salience set it apart from the work of the previous generation (Clarke, Cheryl. After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. Rutgers University Press, 2006).
At the intersection of race and gender, poets like Lucille Clifton broke down the long-held ideology that Blackness is monolithic, instead offering new and nuanced perspectives on the subject from inside the movement itself. “wishes for sons” adheres to Clarke’s definition of new Black poetry as experimental: The poem critiques/deconstructs Western canonical constructions by eschewing capitalization, for instance. It also offers visionary food for thought by attempting to bridge the gap between genders through advocacy. Clifton uses hyperbole (she uses canonical constructions here to her advantage) to advocate for empathy among genders. Though Clifton’s poem is often analyzed based on an outdated male-female binary, its “visionary salience” (Clarke) also lies in the fact that it lends itself to current debates about womanhood, gender, and sex, and the breakdown of outdated gender binaries through more empathetic approaches to lived experience.
Authorial Context
Lucille Clifton, born Lucille Sayles in DePew, New York (1936), married Fred Clifton in 1958, and had six children by the time her first collection of poems, Good Times (1969), was published. Clifton had four daughters (Sidney, Frederica, Gillian, and Alexia) and two sons (Graham and Channing) all of whom she raised to be compassionate and empathetic people (Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopedia. “Lucille Clifton.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9 Feb. 2022). One of Clifton’s main goals as a writer and mother was to ensure that her children felt seen within the media they consumed (be it the books they read or the TV shows they watched). As such, much of Clifton’s poetry reflects the intersectional experiences of being young and Black as well as female and Black in America. Clifton began writing and publishing children’s literature that aligned with this same goal so, as her children grew up, they could see themselves represented authentically in various forms of media.
Author Dianne Johnson writes about this representation of the African American community and consciousness in her essay “The Chronicling of an African-American Life and Consciousness: Lucille Clifton's Everett Anderson Series.” Johnson writes that the now famous Everett Anderson stories hinge on the following point:
Everett [the series’ protagonist] is Black, as are many of his fellow characters. They are. And it is a condition of their being. This fact is simultaneously neither remarkable nor ignorable. It is for this reason that the boys share a brotherhood. When their blackness deserves or demands special attention, then it is accorded. When it deems no particular attention, it is left so. Everett's maturation process, like that of his peers, consists partly of learning how to mediate between the two levels of consciousness (Johnson, Dianne. “The Chronicling of an African-American Life and Consciousness: Lucille Clifton's Everett Anderson Series.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 14 no. 4, 1989).
Clifton’s womanist parenting (see: Further Reading & Resources) extended into her work as a writer, seeking to normalize minority experiences for her own children and all those that her books touched. “wishes for sons” touches on several of Clifton’s concerns as a mother, writer, and cisgender woman. She normalizes her experiences with menstruation and uses them as a lesson to teach her sons, and by extension men, that women and people who menstruate are not shameful or sinful or “other.” Menstruation is a bodily process, and it should be met with understanding. It is imperative that readers recognize all of Clifton’s distinct identities (that of a Black woman, mother, writer, feminist) when interacting with her work, be it her poetry or children’s fiction, in order to fully understand her position as an author and womanist.
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