Anne Spencer's "Natural" Poetics

CLA JOURNAL 185 Anne Spencer’s“Natural”Poetics Carlyn E. Ferrari “. . . Nature merely demands that we be fresh in the Spring.” “If people were like flowers, an hour is all I’d ask of them—and you— if people were like flowers [?]” – Anne Spencer Janie’s pear tree, Maud Martha’s daffodils, and Shug Avery’s transformation of God from male authoritarian into trees, birds, and air represent a rich—yet overlooked—tradition of Black women’s natural world writings and theorizing. Embedded in the narratives of Black women’s writings is a poetics of the natural world, a poetics that enables Black women’s subjectivities to be reimagined.1 Though environmental literary criticism remains an overlooked site of inquiry in Black women’s writing, Maureen Honey addressed the significance of the natural world to New Negro women writers nearly thirty years ago in her seminal work Shadowed Dreams. Honey argues that such women writers as Anne Spencer, Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Mayle, Ethel Lee Newsome, and Mae Cowdery identified with nature because it was something that, like Black women, had been corrupted and dominated by white male oppression; therefore, they used nature as a vehicle through which to articulate their gender and racial oppression (8). For Black women, in particular, nature can be a difficult symbol through which to mediate one’s gender and sexuality because of its fraught colonial legacies.2 Just like the land, Black women and their bodies were marked as a natural resource to be exploited. Western understandings of humans’ relationship to the environment posit that human beings are dominant over the natural world and non-human creatures. This thinking stems, in part, from the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 1:28, which reads: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, 1 In my use of “poetics,” I am referring to the theory and practice of studying linguistic techniques in literature. This should be distinguished from “discourse,” which I am using to signal the existence of a body of scholarship on the subject of Black women writers’ self-representation. 2 I use “colonial” to signal “colonization,” the process of appropriating a geographical region for one’s own use, which also involves domination over, removal of, and/or genocide of indigenous peoples. Within the context of this analysis, I am alluding to both the pre-history of the United States in British North America and colonization projects under 19th and 20th century European and North American colonialism that rendered Black women an always-available natural resource to be exploited in various ways. 186 CLA JOURNAL Carlyn E. Ferrari and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’” (KJ21). This notion of dominion, however, did not extend to black individuals. As Carolyn Finney explains in Black Faces, White Spaces, ideologies about African Americans and their relationship to the environment were being developed at the same time as other racial ideologies, and black people have been systematically and institutionally denied access to the environment just as they have been excluded and alienated from other facets of American society (35). Both in American society and in the American literary imagination, the outdoors is represented as a “white space.” However, African Americans are deeply, intimately, and historically connected to the environment, and their stories have yet to be told; their environmental imaginaries have yet to be considered. This deep, intimate, spiritual connection to the natural world is clearly seen in the poetry of Anne Spencer, as it was her renowned garden at her home in Lynchburg, Virginia, that served as her muse. Both Spencer’s daily life and poetry were“interwoven with her garden”and, through her poetry, we see the significance of the natural world from the often-negated perspective of an African American individual (Frischkorn and Rainey 45). In addition to providing a voice for black environmental imaginaries, Spencer’s poetry also challenges pervasive stereotypes specific to black women and their bodies. As a black woman writing about nature in an intimate fashion and looking to nature for inspiration...