'After Mecca': The impact of black women on black poetry after 1968

‘After Mecca’: The Impact of Black Women on Black Poetry After 1968 examines the influences of poetry by black women on the Black Arts Movement and the resurgent feminist movement in the United States between 1968 and 1979. The study is text-driven, though it notes social, cultural, and political contexts. Close readings of poems integrate issues of social and political relevance, predominantly the Black Arts Movement. It will chart the emergence, in the late sixties, of a new black poetry and examine its relationship to the black community struggling for rights and liberation. It focuses almost exclusively on poetry written by African-American women. The trope, “Mecca,” resonates with the sixties black consciousness movement, which called for a turning away, on the part of African-Americans, from the (white) West. In turning away from European and Euro-American values, black poets, playwrights, and musicians created a new literacy of blackness, which continues to engage the public. The Black Arts Movement was generative of this new literacy as the Black Power Movement was generative of the new political agency black people assumed during this period. It is the intention of this study to render an analysis of the gender and sexuality tensions which held sway in the context of blackness by reading the poetry of the black women poets who wrote within its circle and those who wrote against its influences. Wherever they stand in relation to the Black Arts Movement, most black women poets writing during this period wrote because of it.; Extended readings of “In the Mecca” by Gwendolyn Brooks, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange's, and The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde's are offered. Close readings of poems by Jayne Cortez, Carolyn Rodgers, and Alice Walker, and others recur throughout. The final chapter explores the adoption of Black Arts Movement literacies by black lesbian feminist writers and provides insights into the feminist writing community that also adopted Black Arts strategies to build its movement.