Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton

6. Diabolic Dialogism in “brothers”

chapter 6 Diabolic Dialogism in “brothers” lucifer, the light-bearing Prince of Darkness, appears to be Lucille Clifton’s favorite alter ego, a talkative angel with human flaws. The life of the primordial party, Lucifer brings Adam and Eve the glad tidings about sex in the “tree of life” sequence in Next. Lucifer’s role in the grand upheaval explains his appeal to Clifton, long fascinated by biblical characters ’ flaws and foibles. Her humanizing of Lucifer is in keeping with her belief that the human and the divine are intertwined, our understanding of the one contingent upon an awareness of the other. Although this is evident in all of her biblical poems, the theme is elevated to the level of theodicy—a defense of God’s enigmatic silence—in “brothers,” the culminating eight-part sequence written from Lucifer’s point of view in The Book of Light, the 1993 volume following Next. A great deal of interesting context surrounds the Eden myth at the heart of “brothers.” J. Lee Greene has argued persuasively in Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel’s First Century that a radical refashioning of this myth is integral to African American literature. Regarding Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” Greene notes that “Wheatley uses biblical allusions to treat tropologically and dialogically African Americans’ marginal status in American society.”1 Like Wheatley and the later African American novelists Greene analyzes, Clifton writes with full awareness of an Anglo-American literary tradition begun during colonial times. “Building upon the image of America as a New Eden,” says Green, “Anglo-Americans from the colonial period onward appropriated, transformed, and conflated passages from the JudeoChristian Bible to justify their exclusion of Africans and descendants of Africans from the American family.” Clifton, however, is among those black writers “who have proffered a view of American history that on the whole inverts the pervasive paradigm of Anglo-American literature.”2 As 1. Greene, 1. 2. Ibid., 1–2, 6. 127 128 wild blessings Chapter 5 demonstrated, she repeatedly juxtaposes poems about African American life with portraits of biblical characters in order to expand our understanding of both. Clifton is not just reimagining the figure of Lucifer as described in the Bible, though the Bible is her primary source. Nor is she merely retooling Paradise Lost, though Milton’s epic poem is an important reference point. Explaining why she took on the Creation story in her poetry, she remarked , “If Milton can do it, so can I!”3 Clifton’s jesting acknowledgment of her towering precursor indicates that the Bloomian anxiety of influence is alive and well among contemporary poets. But like Charles Chesnutt in the nineteenth century and Clifton’s friend Ishmael Reed, Clifton honors Milton even as she challenges his authority. Though she does not regard him in the same worshipful way that Phillis Wheatley did—even in her last, impoverished years, Wheatley “did not sell her valuable edition of Paradise Lost; it was sold in payment of her husband’s debts after her death”4 —Clifton clearly respects his epic precedent even as she appropriates the story of the Fall. Her sequence of short poems about Lucifer ironically invokes Milton’s lengthily described Satan, Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve; Assaying by his Devilish art to reach The Organs of her Fancy, and with them forge Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams, Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint Th’ animal spirits that from pure blood arise.5 Clifton’s eight-part meditation, “brothers,” comprises a mere 114 lines, a pithy rejoinder to the 258 pages of “English Heroic Verse without Rime” that make up Paradise Lost.6 3. See Chapter 9, 188. For an analysis of four other black authors (Phillis Wheatley, John Boyd, Charles Chesnutt, and Ishmael Reed) who respond to Milton, see Carolivia Herron, “Milton and Afro-American Literature,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 278– 300. 4. Herron, 286. 5. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (1957; reprint, Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1980), 297. 6. Ibid., 210. diabolic dialogism in ‘‘brothers’’ 129 In addition to the Bible, Paradise Lost, and the African American literary tradition responding to Anglo-American versions of the Eden myth, her portrayal of Lucifer has important antecedents...