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chapter 7 Elegies for Thelma for lucille clifton, what freud called the work of mourning has been a lifelong work in progress. She is naturally drawn to the elegy, a fluid form that enables her to meditate on both life and loss. Her memoir, Generations, and most of her poems are elegiac in nature. Her poems about deceased family members and assassinated black leaders are obvious examples of elegies, but she has also written elegies for herself, her body, the black community, and American society. The pervasive elegiac strain provides an important counterpoint to the joyful resilience that attracts many readers to her writing. In Clifton’s poetry, we quickly find that the pain of loss and the hardwon victory of survival are virtually inseparable. Almost any handful of her poems could illustrate her handling of the elegy, but because her relationship with her mother has proven so important to her life and writings, the elegies for Thelma Sayles can illustrate Clifton’s use of this emotionally charged and historically significant form.1 Clifton has written about her mother throughout her career as a professional writer. In Generations: A Memoir, she declares that “Mama’s life was—seemed like—the biggest waste in the world to me, but now I don’t know, I’m not sure any more” (GW 273). Definitive only in its ambivalence, this disarming admission is characteristic of Clifton’s complex commentary on the parent whose memory she valiantly seeks to preserve. In death, Thelma seems to be always with Clifton, in the form of an unanswerable riddle continuously rephrasing itself at the edges of the poet’s consciousness. Her conflicting emotions seem only to heighten Clifton’s desire to fashion with words an umbilical cord leading back to the prelapsarian safety of the womb, where the maternal bond is incontrovertible and absolute. 1. For analysis of the modern elegy, see Ramazani. For a concise historical overview of the elegy, see Morton W. Bloomfield, “The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode: Praise and Alienation ,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 147–57. 142 elegies for thelma 143 In 1969, the year that she published her first book of poetry, she also published “The Magic Mama” in Redbook and “Christmas Is Something Else” in House & Garden, essays about Thelma that provide enlightening context for the elegies to come. Although Redbook labels it as fiction, “The Magic Mama” is actually a memoir. The piece captures the painful, powerful emotions her mother inspired in Clifton and forecasts the importance of Thelma to her daughter’s elegiac body of work. Recalling her mother’s epilepsy, Clifton writes: The thing to do, then, is to watch her. Always, every move. And to be afraid if she should go out of the house until finally she stops going. And worry her all the time with Mama you okay and Mama what’s the matter until she would stay home to get away from the children’s fear and shame. Shame of Mama. At night, listening for the animal sounds and rushing in to hold her arms down and try to protect her tongue; lying awake and listening so that I can rush right in and let the Daddy and kids rest, not be disturbed. Then one night, hearing and turning over and pushing the arms against the ears and trying to go on to sleep anyhow, why don’t she stop by herself, why don’t she leave me alone. Pause. And oh, Lord, rushing up and in and being extra careful, extra gentle, crying, begging the gone-away-for-a-minute lady to forgive this daughter. Again.2 This fluid rendering of love, sorrow, and guilt reveals the depth and complexity of Clifton’s devotion to her mother. Thelma Sayles died in 1959 at age forty-four, when Clifton was only twenty-two. Thelma had collapsed in a hospital, where she was finally being tested and treated for epilepsy. The timing of the essay’s publication, in the year that Clifton made her public debut as a poet and children’s book author, suggests that she was weighing her abundantly promising life against her mother’s foreshortened , constricted one. “The Magic Mama” is an elegy in prose, a précis for the poems Clifton would go on to write both for and about her mother. Thelma is also the subject of “Christmas Is Something Else,” published...

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