Journal Article

From Rupture to Remembering: Flesh Memory and the Embodied Experimentalism of Akilah Oliver

Smith, Laura Trantham

2010

Overview

Like Spillers in the epigraph to this essay, Oliver implies that the markings on and sufferings of past bodies \"transfer\" symbolically and representationally - that past bodily experiences and inscriptions shape contemporary meanings of blackness and black female identity.1 Spillers expands on this idea, stating, \"In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness\" (257). [...] consider the poem \"summon, she said, her by the name you loved\": what was I supposed to say the possibility of your breasts more enticing more beautiful than a threat of rain across hard earth, the scribes lost their way somewhere between the native wailing ghosts of new mexico and south carolina cotton fields, or was there sugarcane there, someone who knows should teil the urban black kids of uzi mtv and comic strip breakfasts, hail the gains of integration and cross the divide of race mythology, something is always lost when something is gained, who was prepared to pay the price for memory's transference from the sacred to the profane, from porkchops to mcdonalds. working backwards.

• Publisher: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States,Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States,Oxford University Press
• Subject: African American authors / African American poets / African American studies / African Americans / American poetry / Baraka, Amiri (1934-2014) / Black history / Children / Clifton, Lucille / Criticism and interpretation / Gender identity / Harlem Renaissance poetry / Literary criticism / Love poetry / Memory / Mythology / Nonfiction / Oliver, Akilah / Parataxis / Poetics / Poetry / Slavery / Violence / Women poets / Works