Consider, for instance, these lines from Robin Coste Lewis’s incredible poem “Plantation,” in her 2015 collection, “ Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems,” addressed to another woman of color: “Then your tongue / was inside my mouth, and I wanted to say // Please ask me first, but it was your / tongue, so who cared suddenly // about your poor manners?” For Lewis and others, including Tracy K. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.”įorty years later, it is still a bold move for black women to take on the erotic in writing. This was no small achievement, as the poet and activist Audre Lorde argued in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”: “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. This has been an on-again, off-again problem in American letters since the nineteen-seventies, when authors ranging from Toni Morrison to Lucille Clifton, Gayle Jones, and Ntozake Shange began to write from inside black women’s lives, from a landscape that was dominated not by visible or invisible men but by black female characters, living intricately and boldly in their times, in their minds, and in their bodies, and pursuing joyful and complicated sexual lives. She pauses before adding, “And I got plans for it.” It can be startling to hear a woman of color describe and claim her own body: despite advances in our culture, some eyes still roll when a black woman says “I” or puts herself forward in this political climate, it can be perceived as an aggressive act or as hysteria or-the worst-as special pleading.
“I only got one body,” a black woman says, deadly earnest, on a recent episode of “Random Acts of Flyness,” the HBO series about race.
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