The Poetry of Evans by Mari Evans

First published:Where Is All the Music?, 1968; I Am a Black Woman, 1970; Nightstar, 1973-1978, 1981; A Dark and Splendid Mass, 1992

Type of work: Poetry

Writing as a Woman of Color

Mari Evans’s work in the last decade of the twentieth century remains as original and striking as it did when she published her first poetry in the initial stages of the emerging social revolution in black consciousness in the mid-1960’s. The title of her second collection, I Am a Black Woman, became a signature statement for a generation of African American women, proclaiming in unapologetic, forceful terms the fundamental facts of existence for a hitherto nearly invisible, effectively silenced people. Her poetry, like that of Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Carolyn Rogers, was a profound demonstration of the aptness of Robert Frost’s claim that poetry should be “common to experience but uncommon to expression”; the work of Evans and others provided, for the first time in American literary history, the vernacular language, particular rhythms, and psychological perspective of African American women in published form. In addition, she shared the political awareness of such poets as Amiri Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones) and Haki R. Madhubuti (then writing as Don L. Lee), who insisted on the obligation of the poet to speak as the forceful voice of a suppressed segment of the population that had been victimized—or terrorized—by racist society.

While poetry has always existed in an oral form in the African American community, very few black men, and even fewer black women, were able to break into print during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the critic Barbara Christian has pointed out, the “rich, oral tradition” of African American culture ran “counter to the accepted norms of European poetry,” so that the highly gifted Phillis Wheatley, for example, fashioned herself into a convincing replica of an eighteenth century English poet in her published work. Moreover, anthologies of black poetry present little work by women of measurable poetic accomplishment before Margaret Walker (born in 1915) and Gwendolyn Brooks (born in 1917). The implication of this apparent dearth of preservable poetry was that poets such as Wheatley seemed like unusual exceptions rather than the voices of a neglected mass; when Evans, among others, found the means to get her work into print, its first appearance had the exhilarating effect of opening a huge field, introducing a voice largely unfamiliar to most readers or listeners.

Writing as a Craftswoman

The pioneering aspects of Evans’s work are undeniably significant, but they may have tended to obscure other elements that are equally important in terms of her achievements and that are an integral aspect of her continuing poetic interest. Like Brooks, Evans has worked from a thorough familiarity with the traditions of English poetry and with the dedication to craft that is the mark of the serious artist. As she mentions in the essay “My Father’s Passage,” she learned from Langston Hughes the necessity for a commitment to writing as a way of living, and this led her to a definition of writing as craft, “a rigorous, demanding occupation, to be treated as such.” She worked as an assistant editor at a chain-manufacturing plant, the “first Black employee to work anywhere in the company other than the foundry or delivery,” and for three years apprenticed, in a sense, with a skilled professional writer whose demands for revision were not initially welcomed but who gave her the basis for her command of style and form. At the same time, the openly racist arrangements of the company led her toward the position taken by many other members of her generation who saw themselves as the vanguard of the Black Arts movement. Consequently, Evans has combined her mastery of traditional English with a sensitivity to the particulars of what Madhubuti has called a “blackening” of the language, insisting on an awareness of how writers working within the African American tradition have used language devices in unconventional fashion.

This widening was a part of a post-World War II embrace of the concept of the poet who could incorporate into poetry the language of citizens without literary training, as Walt Whitman proposed to do, and who could use the “healthy speech” (as Henry David Thoreau defined poetry) of people with no conscious literary ambition in a poetic form. Evans shared with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Robert Creeley the feeling that a poem was not meant to be a rigid container for one’s ideas or emotions but rather a supple, flexible construct that developed in accordance with the demands of the subject and mood. Her first published poems appeared in periodicals such as Negro Digest and in the landmark collection Black Voices (1968), edited by Abraham Chapman; some of these were gathered into Evans’s initial volume, Where Is All the Music? Among these early poems, the often-anthologized “Black Jam for Dr. Negro” expresses the same attitude of disgust or contempt as Baraka’s “Black Bourgeoisie” and Madhubuti’s “But He Was Cool or: he even stopped for green lights,” which are extremely critical of the accommodationist stance taken by some African Americans who “accepted” white ideas of beauty and behavior. Evans uses the robust vernacular of the plain speech she heard around her to resist the bogus manners of the officially credentialed “Dr. Negro”: “my ancient/ eyes/ see your thang/ baby/ an it aint/ sh*t” she asserts, enraged that someone has decided to “cut my afro turn/ my collar/ down” and commit other acts of cultural suppression.

Evans’s first collection is more the product of an artist in a stage of development than of one who is fully prepared to set out the dimensions of a vision. In 1970, six years after her first poems were published in journals, Evans collected some of her earlier work in I Am a Black Woman. The volume moved beyond expressions of resistance to a directly political, defiantly feminist, conspicuously blackened poetics that conveyed the mood, contributed to the tone, and cast the die for a mode of discourse that has come to seem the dominant female poetic voice of its time. Her title is both an echo of and a contemporary response to Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a woman?” demand that her gender be recognized. More than a century later, Evans has removed the interrogative doubt to proclaim her race and gender with pride, reiterating her identity by placing the poem at the beginning of the collection and then repeating the last part at the book’s close.

Developing an Assured Voice

The feeling of assurance, the emphasis on the “I” observer as a seer, and the willingness to exhibit and share strength are characteristic of Evans’s subsequent poetry. To combat the enforced impression that there is something inferior about being black and a woman, Evans creates an initial image of a soulful beauty enduring through centuries of tribulation, “the music of my song/ some sweet arpeggio of tears/ is written in a minor key.” This introduction leads to a compressed historical survey, moving from the agony of the middle passage (“I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea”), through the pain of slavery (“I lost Nat’s swinging body in a rain of tears”), when rebellion usually ended in death, to the sacrifice of African American soldiers at Anzio, Da Nang, and Pork Chop Hill in wars fought for a democratic ideal unavailable to African Americans. Bringing the poem to the present, Evans shifts from mourning fallen warriors to active involvement in political action (“Now my nostrils know the gas”). In a second section, she acknowledges the protean, mythic quality she embodies and connects her existence to the cosmos, claiming an eternal, life-affirming essence previously denied:

Iam a black womantall as cypressstrongbeyond all definition stilldefying placeand timeand circumstance  assailed   impervious   indestructible

In a summary statement of unquenchable optimism, speaking like a prophet in a voice that encompasses historical epochs, she counsels, “Look/ on me and be/ renewed.”

The strength of Evans’s voice in this poem is built on a historical foundation of silent yearning. The unspoken heritage of black experience is expressed in language that is both contemporary and biblical. Because of its assurance, there is no dramatic sense of a poet progressively gaining control of means and material; instead, from the start the work gives the impression of a mature style that gradually ripens and becomes somewhat more reflective. Although she declares that “a black woman” is “beyond all definition,” the unspoken assumption of the poems that follow is that Evans will be able to offer some sense of how she has been formed, of what matters to her, and of how she lives. The example of her spiritual mentor Langston Hughes, who “sang the shimmering depths of Blkactions,” gives her a strategy that depends on the conviction that the richness of the culture she expresses can be captured and conveyed in poetry and the belief that this poetry is a vital contribution to “an evolving Family/ Nation.” The subjects that engaged Evans in her first book remain the ones that continue to interest her, as well as to extend—in her responses—the “definition” of black womanhood. Their treatment across her three major collections is a more effective method of considering her work than a division within each volume.

A crucial component of the cultural vitality she considers and celebrates is the figure of the hero, sometimes seen in the form of a legendary giant such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., but also regarded for the potentially heroic act of an unknown citizen or even a social renegade. The poem that honors Malcolm X, “El Hajj Malik Shabazz,” is a tribute to the continuing impact of the man, written in dense, charged language that projects a troubling, inspiring presence (“ . . . and we/ inbreathed him and he became a part of me/ and you/ carry him in you/ and he is restless and demands/ Demands an action”). The poetic reflection on King never mentions his name but uses the reaction of the American media (“a million hard white eyes/ swung impiously heavenward”) to indict a social policy that has been responsible for “quiet” assassinations that “occupy the heart/ four hundred/ years.” The unnamed, indefatigable old people in “The Elders” are a symbol of black endurance, “bony symbols of indomitable will” who “survived cotton and cane/ branding iron and bull whip” and continue on into the turmoil of the present smiling “through smoking Watts.” In an appropriate use of a vernacular that conveys the immediacy and enthusiasm of a living language, Evans says “they be our national treasure.” The activist Hoyt Fuller is remembered in a personal eulogy, “Brother, Comrade, Confidant.” Horn player Lee Morgan and other great jazz musicians and artists who kept the soul and spirit of African American life vibrant in their art are presented in poetry that attempts to use the rhythmic structures of jazz to capture the moods of the music in verbal arrangements.

Evans’s recognition of the central place of music in African American life is also evident in her use of the blues tradition to show how a folk-centered form of expression can be updated to carry a contemporary feminist philosophy (as in “Liberation Blues”). She also demonstrates how the blues form has survived because its archetypal complaint about careless love (“Blues in B”) still applies. The blues’ ability to carry a message of pain and remorse (“Cellblock Blues”) in an almost prearticulate language (“Doin black/ time by the hour/ don eeeven be about no days”) appeals to an instinctive feeling for almost metaverbal communication. Similarly, the cumulative power of the biblical cadences of the sermon of exhortation are used in musically inclined, stirring poems delivered as if from a pulpit or a platform to an audience hungry for affirmation and direction. “If we would rise/ O brethren/ first/ we stand/ At one with time,” she says in “The Time Is Now.” “Touch Your Finger to the Wind,” her address to her “Kinsmen,” challenges them to “peel the opaque from your eyes/ denounce the scented blossoms what/ bouquet more delicate and deadly/ Ours to be plucked and savored, what/ delusive dreams”; here, Evans uses vivid, flamboyant language to redirect sensual passion toward productive social activity.

The need to identify heroic figures, to invoke the force of the black arts, and to deliver sermons of hope stems from the necessity to preserve African American traditions in the face of racist pressures that are designed to degrade or dissolve those traditions. The social situation in which this has been happening for four centuries has moved Evans to comment that “I think of myself as a political writer”; while this is not the dominant thrust of her work, poems such as “Vive Noir!,” with emphatic assertions such as “i’m/ gonna spread out/ over America/ intrude/ my proud blackness/ all/ over the place” have left the impression, especially in earlier critical commentary, that she is basically a political poet. Actually, her more specifically political poems are versions of social commentary in which the political content is implied more than instructed, as in “The Friday Ladies of the Pay Envelope,” which describes prostitutes “in the broken doorways” accepting payment with “their drydamp/ limpworn hands.” “When in Rome” is written from the point of view of a rich woman’s servant who is the dubious recipient of largesse. Even the most overtly political poems, including “Alabama Landscape” and “The Great Civil Rights Law (a.d. 1964),” are cast in the form of historic recollection so that the lessons of history grow from the angle of vision and the context.

Like Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, who have also written some powerful, angry, even violent political poems, Evans has a lyric ability that she has employed throughout her poetry. There are many examples of what can be called love poetry, including the poignant, plaintive “I Have Not Ceased to Love You,” which has a lyrical conclusion:

I have not ceased to love youNor have I ceasedto care

This is quite a linguistic distance from “III Entitlement,” which begins “them muthuhfuhyuhs think they baddd”; the contrast serves to suggest the limits of any attempt to categorize so accomplished a poet.

All the poetry Mari Evans has written since her work began to appear in journals in the early 1960’s has been a continuation of the poetic persona who introduced herself by saying, “I am a black woman,” the singular expression of a strong, confident, evolving artist, teacher, and political activist. A poet working in the oral African American tradition, an honors graduate of Howard University, a professional writer with a command of her craft that is evident in the range of her subjects and her language, Evans has joined and directed a cultural legacy that is enriched by her participation.

Bibliography

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. Offers a context for understanding Evans’ writing. Particularly helpful is the chapter entitled “Afro-American Women Poets: A Historical Introduction.”

Cook, Mercer, and Stephen E. Henderson. The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. An examination of the mood of the 1960’s, when a great deal of poetry designed as political protest was written. Evans is covered briefly but as a significant figure.

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Includes Evans’ important essay “My Father’s Passage,” in which she describes her philosophy of composition. Contains considerable additional information about Evans and two critical essays on her poetry.

Keys, Romey T. Foreword to Nightstar, by Mari Evans. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1981. A brief but incisive introduction to the second major volume of Evans’ poetry.

Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Refers to and discusses Evans’ work in the course of interviews with Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. An overview that does not go much below the surface but that provides a historical perspective from a trans-atlantic point of view. Evans is mentioned only in passing.