"Call Me Black": Gender and the Black Aesthetic
Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper used literature to share her story; in this way, she was a daughter of the Black Arts Movement. The Black Arts Movement was at its peak between 1965 to 1976, an offshoot of the Harlem renaissance and the Black Power Movement.[1] Often called “the aesthetic and spiritual sister” of the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement is about “the relationship between art and politics.”[2] Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper transitioned from life as a student to life as an academic during this period. Upon her convocation into Oberlin College, Sullivan (at the time known as both Donna Sullivan and Akiba Sullivan) was enmeshed into the Black Arts Movement. After being one of the few black students in her high school, she attended Oberlin at the height of the Movement; black students who engaged with black student life (through the house or the department) were often ensconced. They noticed a problem and they set out to solve it. In Oberlin, the Black Power and Arts Movements meant the creation of the Black Studies program, the Afro-American Community and Student Development Program, the African Heritage House, a focus on Afrocentricity, and a push for black nationalism. As an English major, Sullivan’s entryway into the Movement was via the written word. As a student, Sullivan focused on the work of Langston Hughes, falling deeply in love with the Black Aesthetic and the role of women in his works.[3]
Sullivan was tremendously interested in the dynamics of the Black Arts Movement, particularly through literature. One can only assume she was an avid reader of The Crisis, the magazine in which her poetry was first published. The Crisis was founded in 1910 by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official magazine of the NAACP.[4] The magazine became wildly popular soon after its founding; becoming one of the most widely read periodicals “about race and social justice in U.S. history.” During the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, the magazine highlighted the literature and art of African Americans.[5]
Sullivan has had several submissions to The Crisis during her time as an academic. She may have been taking after her muse, Langston Hughes, who had many entries in The Crisis. Her poem “Call Me Black” was the first of these submissions and is a direct response to the poem “Call Me Negro” by the author Rhoda Janet Rhodes. “Call Me Negro” was published in The Crisis one year earlier and centers on the sexual trauma her ancestors experienced at the hands of white men.[6] She claims her identity as a black woman who is the product of many complex racist histories. By creating dialogue between these works, Sullivan secures her place as an active reader, contributor, and interlocutor to The Crisis and the Black Arts Movement.
The lyrical nature of Sullivan’s poem is impossible to ignore. The poem reads as if a song, the reader wants to speak the lines out loud. Sullivan states her presence in the poem by using the term ‘I’ and demands that the reader “call her Black.” In doing so, Sullivan exerts her power over the reader and her own self. She is fully in command, playing dynamically with changing tenses. She speaks to the reader in the present, refers to her heritage in the past, “there are African roots to my hair,” and refers to her own future by saying, “my lips were shaped to give / big fat kisses to my men.”[7]
Sullivan expresses her sense of self and her history in this poem, a common mechanism of the Black Arts Movement. Author, scholar, and major contributor to the Movement, Larry Neal explains that the Black artist during this period aimed “to speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people.”[8] Scholar Cherise Pollard explains that during this time period, artists “believed that creative works, especially poetry, gave voice to the social frustrations, cultural pride, and political aspirations of this struggle as it motivated black people to fight not just for social equality, but for palpable shifts in the American power structure.”[9] As a result, the artists honored the Black aesthetic, innate within that is the “destruction of white ideas, [and] white ways of looking at the world.”[10] According to Pollard, the black aesthetic “celebrated the African origins of the Black community, championed black urban culture, critiqued Western aesthetics, and encouraged the production and reception of black arts by black people.”[11]
“Call Me Black” aligns with the tenants of the black aesthetic. Sullivan is clear in her identity, she says, “so if some foreign chromosomes thinned my lips / or lightened my skin and eyes, / don’t think that they have also / unclenched my strong black fist.” She tells her audience to “call me black”, despite her mixed heritage.[12] In this line, Sullivan both acknowledges her heritage and colonization’s role in it. She ascribes to the black aesthetic by abolishing the white lens she may be viewed through. In acknowledging the “confrontation between the colonizer and the colonized,” Sullivan reclaims her blackness.[13] Sullivan’s sense of self is an opposition to the colonizer.
When discussing Sullivan’s contributions to the Black Arts Movement, we must acknowledge her role as a woman. The Movement was dominated by black men. Black women had to work “both within and against the men’s assumptions about the relationships between race and gender and art and politics.”[14] Pollard explains that there were pathways for black women to publish their work, like Black Fire, and these women often “used highly coded language to open up revolutionary possibilities.”[15] In doing so, these women created “a radical blueprint of resistance by laying bare their tales of resilience and triumph over oppression.”[16] Juxtaposed against how black men wrote about their masculinity, we gain a greater understanding of how Sullivan considered gender and identity. The black man wrote about himself as “emboldened by his new, black perspective, he towers over European hegemonic structures; his genitalia become a palpable weapon against these oppressive forces,” while the black woman is not given the same power.[17] Sullivan follows the “radical blueprint” created by her foremothers, offering a suggestion of her gender, pointing to her sexualization, and simultaneously shifting the conversation to her role as a powerful person.[18] She subverts the traditional dynamic of powerful men.
Sullivan published this poem as a sophomore at Oberlin. She stepped into academia with a lens of young black power. She carried this power - an air of intelligence, curiosity, and defiance to hegemonic structures throughout her career as an intellectual. By utilizing the Black Arts Movement Sullivan became a key player, showcasing her roles as both an artist and an academic.
Works Cited:
[1] Pollard, Cherise A. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement Rutgers University Press, 2006. 173.
[2] Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." The Drama Review: TDR; the MIT Press Vol. 12, no. No. 4 (Summer, 1968), https://www.jstor.org/stable/1144377. 29.
[3] “Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper.” Spelman College. https://www.spelman.edu/docs/faculty_cv/donna-akiba-harper-cv.pdf?sfvrsn=f8329550_0. Curriculum Vitae.
[4] Anonymous. https://www.thecrisismagazine.com/ Accessed May 2020.
[5] Pruitt, Adrienne. "The Crisis Magazine." https://dca.tufts.edu/about/news/The%20Crisis%20Magazine Accessed May 10, 2020
[6] Rhodes, Rhoda Janet. “Call Me Negro” (Poem). The Crisis. Nov. 1971.
[7] Sullivan, Donna. "Call Me Black" (Poem). The Crisis. March, 1972.
[8] Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." The Drama Review: TDR; the MIT Press Vol. 12, no. No. 4 (Summer, 1968), https://www.jstor.org/stable/1144377. 29.
[9] Pollard, Cherise A. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement Rutgers University Press, 2006. 175.
[10] Neal, 1968. 30.
[11] Pollard, 2006. 175.
[12] Sullivan, 1972.
[13] Neal, 1968. 35.
[14] Pollard, 2006. 175.
[15] Ibid. 174.
[16] Jones, Feminista. Writing Truth to Power. The Crisis, December 9, 2019.
[17] Pollard, 2006. 177
[18] Sullivan, 1972.