Mama Yetta and Other Poems (review)

Hermine Pinson. Mama Yetta and Other Poems. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2000.

Mama Yetta and Other Poems, the most recent collection from writer Hermine Pinson, adds another voice to the growing number of Black poets and novelists who are writing to excavate and recover the memory and history that they have been denied. From Lucille Clifton's "Sisters" and Amiri Baraka's "So the King Sold the Farmer" to Octavia Butler's Kindred and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, more and more African-American writers are taking on the challenge of reimagining a Black historical past, writing through and across the unmeaning of historical loss.

Pinson and other Black postmoderns use a combination of the most common elements in the writer's toolbox--imagination and longing--and the most unexpected--magic and myth--to create a bridge across the erasures and silences that have hindered previous attempts to recover Black historical memory. In Mama Yetta magic collapses the gulf between the writer's lived experience of the present and her longed for understanding of the past, enabling her to cross into and experience that unwritten, unspoken history, to exorcise its demons, and to embrace its heroes. Several of the most memorable characters in recent Black literature have emerged out of this very strategy. The mischievous ghost child in Toni Morrison's Beloved and the shape-shifting god of Charles Johnson's Middle Passage transport both writer and reader across the failures and deficiencies in the historical record so that they may assess, first hand, the cruelties and complexities of the past.

In Mama Yetta the language of magic and myth enables Pinson to probe the complexities of family memory and personal history beyond the point where conventional methods of discovery would normally fail. Pinson's particular obsession is with overcoming the limitations of an oral tradition of family record-keeping. In a short explanatory statement on the back cover Pinson pays special homage to a series of "family stories set in the bayou lands" of Louisiana and Texas. Passed down from one generation to the next, these tales are the foundation from which "Much of Mama Yetta draws its strength," but it is the language of magic and myth that enables the poet to enter these ancestral/historical landscapes and make them her own.

The title piece in this collection explores the relationship between the poet, her history, and the language of magic. Named for the poet's paternal grandmother, Mama Yetta considers both the importance of memory and the means by which Pinson, as postmodern Black subject, can bring the rich legacy of her ancestry to bear on her late 20th-century reality. Pinson recalls her childhood under the watchful, often critical eye of her grandmother with the loving admiration and the compassionate forgiveness that so often accompanies resolution and understanding. Her unflinching portrayal of the harshness of old school Black discipline ("Yetta, your loving me was a trial by fire. Who spanks a child, then demands to be kissed--") humanizes Mama Yetta and rescues Pinson and her work from the sentimentality and cliché that often plague African-American tributes to the "strong Black mother." Pinson remembers more smacks than hugs ("How could I know you loved me so, even when you slapped me for impudence" [51]), and she recalls feeling irritated and confused by her grandmother's meticulous supervision of the daily chores ("you . . . scolded me for not knowing how to set a proper table" [51]). Only in adulthood has she come to understand that the spirits of the ancestors thrive among the mundane tasks of everyday life, and that their presence renders even the simplest chores a tribute to their memory--and she describes this realization with a combination of wonder and regret: "How could I know history lived again right in your kitchen" (49).

Today Pinson uses this knowledge to maintain her link, across the silence of the grave, with the woman who first invested her with a love and respect for the past. For...