Black Nature / Human Nature

There are, as the saying goes, two kinds of people: those who are most comfortable in what we call “the natural world” and those who are most uncomfortable in that kind of nature. For decades—nearly a century, really—African Americans have been collectively shelved under Uncomfortable in Nature. As a result, our poets have been disregarded and neglected by the overlapping American literary traditions of nature poetry and ecopoetry, rooted as they are in the Romantic poets’ reveries and ecstatic outbursts about Nature’s mystery and majesty.

This brand of literary marginalization runs deeper than the general exclusion of African American poetry from collections and discussions of American poetry, as evidenced by the fact that it has continued, almost unabated, for much longer. Interestingly, one of the phenomena that helped African American poets break through exclusionary barriers and gain recognition within “mainstream” and establishment literary circles is also partly responsible for the ongoing perception of African American poetry as having nothing to do with Nature—namely, the Black Arts Movement. During the Movement’s heyday, from the mid-1960s through the late-1970s, the association of black poetry with urban environments—which had roots in the 1920s image of the modern, Northern “New Negro”—solidified to such an extent that the phrase “black nature poetry” became an oxymoron. If “the natural world” was constituted by trees, lakes, fields, and undomesticated animals, one could tell just by looking around at the busy, building-lined streets of Harlem that such was not the world of the black poet and, thus, not the proper subject for her poems. As Nikki Giovanni’s 1968 poem “For Saundra” notes pointedly, there was “no green” in the scene outside her window.

With Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Camille Dungy interrupted the narrative that had authorized and reinforced the white exclusionary practices and black self-imposed limitations behind the perception of “blacks” and “nature” as unrelated. The anthology derails arguments that African American poets don’t write about “nature” by highlighting a distinctive thread of poetry running through the African American tradition, from as far back as the late 1700s through the present, featuring oceans, mountains, forests, and fields. The work in this thoughtfully organized collection pushes us to recognize that poems that treat “the natural world” in a less-than-celebratory manner are no less “nature poetry” than poems that wax rhapsodic about nature’s beauty and quiet peace. At the same time, the anthology participates in the movement by ecopoets and ecocritics toward an increasingly complicated understanding of what “nature” signifies in the first place, by including poems that help us see the nature of the urban setting: trees planted in the sidewalks, birds landing as a flock upon the telephone wires, even the roaches, but most significantly, perhaps, the millions of people who make up the city. For those of us either Writing About Nature While Black or generating scholarship on African American poets as “nature poets,” the Black Nature anthology swept in like (dare I say it?) a breath of fresh air.

I have been known to do both; thus, I am particularly grateful, as a poet and as a scholar, that the literary landscape now includes this text. But in addition to what we might call my professional appreciation of what it means culturally to have Black Nature in existence and circulating, there is the joy and wonder I have experienced personally as a reader of the anthology. Not that the professional and the personal are truly separable for me, but speaking specifically of my individual emotional and intellectual experience of the collection provides me an opportunity to linger over two poems that struck me deeply, but fall outside the focus of my criticism on African Americans’ poetry about nature. Both relate back to my opening sentences and the long-time disconnect between the idea of “nature poetry” and poems about the ways nature can make us uncomfortable.

Wanda Coleman’s poem “Beaches. Why I Don’t Care for Them” evokes a particularly African American discomfort with an element of nature that looms large for Californians...