“I Experience Simultaneously a Continuity and a Discontinuity with the Past”:
Expressions of Black Alterity in the Early Poetry of Harryette Mullen
Purnell Cropper
Dr. Al Glover, Faculty Mentor
While the black arts movement demanded African American writers focus exclusively on subjects deemed appropriately black and approach those subjects in a particular mode of speech, Harryette Mullen did not give herself fully to the trend. The poems in Tree Tall Woman are about “relations among black people,” but these angles are achieved without Mullen continually pointing out that she is writing from the perspective of a black person. Mullen would break from the southern voice established in Tree Tall Woman in her subsequent collections when she “began to think of the subject as the problem.” In her later collections, Mullen expertly manipulates and deconstructs language to show how language and identity are constructed. But, her poems in Tree Tall Woman are uncertain or unconscious performances of these tensions, where Mullen negotiates the identity politics of authenticity and race and class.