Audre Lorde, Coal (1976)

"Coal"

Affirming an un-self-conscious Black essence...

coal, staple fuel--celebrates "the total black, being spoken / from the earth's inside"

diamond idealized form--jewel, diamond

political identity precisely through an empowering biologism

Call to poetics of Blackness, emphasized role of poetry as expression of intrinsically Black vision

Coal--spoken, then sabotaged--"there are many kinds of open"

Ambivalence in the negative oppositions set up between coal and diamond

so likely to be passed over as different forms of the same mineral essence

Diamond--luxury privilege; coal--material comfort

* Only the jewel is allowed apotheosis (highest pt)

Words/jewels complicity in business transactions

* Words, and by extension, the tropes in the poems, are contaminated by their openness, necessary though such openness may be for words to function in language

"The total black...from the earth's inside" --although celebratory is also open to connotations of rape/violence of forcible extraction

feminized trope of the womb--receptive and violated--

last line--enigmatic openness--duplicitous value

violations, but if we don't performs the necessary violations we leave her unspeaking in the silent recesses of earth

"being spoken" / vs. written?

Poetry is not a luxury: poetry as revelatory distillation of experience, provides the illumination by which people scrutinize their lives and give substance to their unformed ideas. Each woman's being holds a dark place where her true spirit grows hidden, forming a reservoir of creativity, power, and unexamined/unrecorded feeling.

The expression & use of anger--not destructive. Transform rage at racism into triumphant self-assertion

Clarity of anger (fire-->jewel)

Father's grave vs. changing living selves (also "Now that I am Forever with Child"--"flowing through selves toward You")

and "Paperweight" --shedding of the past--a book of leavings

"Paper is neither kind nor cruel / merely white in its neutrality / I have for reality now / the brown bar of my arm / moving in broken rhythm / across this dead place."

Materiality, "uses" of the page--make husband's dinner?