Pat Parker

Poet and activist

• Born: January 20, 1944
• Birthplace: Houston, Texas
• Died: June 19, 1989
• Place of death: Oakland, California

Parker began writing her poetry at a time when African American women were beginning to develop their collective literary voice. Through her poems, she gave voice to the often-silenced gays and lesbians in the African American community and helped them create their literary identity.

Early Life

Patricia Parker was born in Houston, Texas, on January 20, 1944, to Marie Louise Anderson and Earnest Nathaniel Cooks. Her mother was a domestic worker, her father a retired tire retreader. Parker was the youngest of four sisters and was born two months prematurely; as a result, she caught pneumonia as a baby and had to stay in the hospital for three months. Her hospitalization imposed considerable hardships on her family, but she survived and grew to be a strong, intelligent, and independent child. Growing up in a poor community in a mostly black part of Houston, Parker was exposed daily to hardships such as racism, sexism, classism, poverty, and Jim Crow laws.

When she graduated from high school 1962, Parker left her home in Texas and moved to California. It was in California that she attended college and earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Los Angeles City College and San Francisco State College. In 1962, she married Ed Bullins. After their divorce in 1966, she married Robert F. Parker, whom she also later divorced. To support herself and her two young daughters, Parker found a job working as a medical administrator. Around the time she took this position, she began to seriously write poetry.

In the early 1960’s, when Parker moved to California, the gay liberation movement was still in its early stages. By 1969, Parker had begun to identify as a lesbian and made a niche for herself among the literary community that would later form the Tide Collective. The collective published the newsmagazine The Lesbian Tide from 1971 to 1980. During this time, Parker also met Judy Grahn, with whom she later collaborated on many writing projects.

Life’s Work

In 1972, Parker published her first book of poetry, Child of Myself. In this debut collection, Parker’s poetry serves as a declaration of selfhood and authority over her own life; she asserts her independence and equality to men. Many of the poems in this book respond to a patriarchal society that promotes the belief that women are inferior or secondary to men. The volume’s title refers to a woman being a “child of herself”—not indebted to a man for her origins.

Parker published her second collection, Pit Stop: Words, in 1973. This book’s work explores pain, despair, and self-destruction. In 1975, she collaborated with Grahn to record selections of their poetry on an album for Olivia Records. Parker published her third collection, Womanslaughter, in 1978. In this work, she criticizes the legal system’s failure to protect women from domestic abuse and the reluctance of law-enforcement agencies to prosecute their abusers. Parker was abused by her first husband, and her sister was killed by a former husband. From these and other life experiences, Parker drew inspiration for her third collection of poetry.

In 1978, Parker published another collection, called Movement in Black. Her next volume of poetry was Jonestown and Other Madness (1986), its title a reference to the 1978 mass suicide of followers of cult leader Jim Jones in Guyana. This collection confronts racism and the impact of racism on the African American psyche. It also challenges ideas of madness, justice, and gratitude by forcing the reader to contemplate the concept of suicide.

Parker lived in California for her entire adult life and, in addition to writing, she worked at the Feminist Women’s Health Center from 1978 until breast cancer rendered her too ill to work. She died of breast cancer in June of 1989 at the age of forty-five.

Significance

Parker is considered a revolutionary figure in the campaigns for awareness of both African American lesbians and African American women writers. Through her writing, she broke down barriers, fostered dialogue, and paved the way for the black women’s literary movement. In strong, staccato lines of poetry, she offered defiant sentiments in support of women’s, African Americans’, and gay rights. She embraced her identity as an African American, lesbian mother from a working-class background and celebrated all those aspects of her life in her poetry.

Bibliography

Brimstone, Lyndie. “Pat Parker: A Tribute.” Feminist Review 34 (Spring, 1990): 4-7. Written a year after Parker’s death, this tribute examines her bold celebration of all facets of her identity and her influence on other writers such as Audre Lorde.

Garber, Linda. “Pat Parker (1944-1989).” In Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, edited by Yolanda Williams Page. Vol. 2. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Includes a biographical sketch, list of Parker’s major works, description of critical reception, and bibliography.

Parker, Pat. Movement in Black. 1978. Rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1999. Published ten years after Parker’s death, this expanded edition of her 1978 collection Movement in Black includes a new introduction and tributes written by many of the poet’s friends and contemporaries, such as Audre Lorde and Angela Davis.

Smith, Barbara. “Naming the Unnameable: The Poetry of Pat Parker.” In The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Analyzes poems from Parker’s first two collections, Child of Myself and Pit Stop. Describes Parker as one of the first writers to give voice to African American feminists and lesbians.