Conjuring Hope in a Body: Lucille Clifton's Eschatology:

the world is turning in the body of Jesus and the future is possible --"spring song" by Lucille Clifton, from Good News About the Earth In a 2000 interview with Michael Glaser, African-American poet and memoirist Lucille Clifton identified hope as a central function of her work. She said, I think that writing is a way of continuing to hope. When things sometimes feel as if they're not going to get any better, writing offers a way of trying to connect with something beyond that obvious feeling ... because you know, there is hope in connecting, and so perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone. And the writing may be sending tentacles out to see if there is a response to that. (311) For Clifton, who wrote her first collection in the late 1960s as the Civil Rights movement began to fade, the hope that writing offers is one that transcends and resists the discouragement of the present, "that obvious feeling." It looks toward the future, a future that will "get [...] better" not through escape from life situations, but rather through "trying to connect" with the responses of others. Clifton's statements linking her writing of hope to the future and to relationship suggest an eschatological framework for reading her poetry. (1) Eschatology, the theology of hope, possesses several characteristics that make it a worthwhile critical lens. According to Jurgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope, eschatology properly conceived is future-oriented, resistant to the present, missional, and destabilizing to both knowledge and personal identity. That is, hope is comprised of "anticipations which show reality in its prospects and its future possibilities," a future orientation manifest within "present mission" (35,270). "Hope's statements of promise," declares Moltmann, "must stand in contradiction to the reality that can at present be experienced. They [...] lead existing reality towards the promised and hoped-for transformation" (18). Since the future is primarily "the thing we cannot already think out and picture for ourselves," hope in the God of the future unsettles knowledge (16). It "leads our modern institutions away from their own immanent tendency toward stabilization, [making] them uncertain [...] and open[ing] them" (330). For the individual, committing to the theology of hope means a deferral of the "haven of identity"; the mission of hope is served through the "self-emptying" sacrifice of the hopeful person (91). Clifton's poetry, widely understood as celebrating black culture and developing a vocal black female self, appears quite different when viewed as eschatologicah strains of self-sacrifice and performative rhetoric come to light. (2) Clifton's Good Times, the first volume in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980, was declared by the New York Times to be one of the year's best books in 1969 for its "hard, angry poems." In terms of Clifton's literary context, interviewers and critics have often sought to place Clifton's early poetry within the Black Arts Movement, but the designation is one she has always resisted. She has written poems for the Black Panthers, for Malcolm X, for Eldridge Cleaver and for Bobby Seale, but she refuses to be categorized as part of the literary arm of the Black Power movement or as reflecting a Black Aesthetic. Her black aesthetic, she jokes, was the succession of children emerging from her body during the development of the 'black is beautiful' ideology. In an interview with Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo, Clifton asserts that the Black Power Movement's "sudden" realization and response to programmatic racial inequity seemed to her somewhat strange. She had "been knowing" the inequities, and found her poems conscious of blackness, without an obsessive need for constant repetition. Still, with her use of vernacular black speech and simple language, Clifton's work certainly converses with Black Arts poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. …