Angelina Ward Grimke — страница 2

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implied in the meaning of appeal, "asks," and find it referring instead to "moves" or "draws." Moreover, Grimk? is a Sapphic poet in the sense that her poetry is admired for its beauty as much as for its other cultural achievements, whatever attitudes toward those achievements have been. Sappho’s poetry has been, through the centuries, admired often not mainly for how it embodies the specifically gendered desire it is clearly pregnant with, but for how it carries out an irresistible appeal to the assent of taste. Grimk?’s, at its best, has that species, if not that rank, of power of that kind. Yet her case is in certain ways profoundly more complicated than Sappho’s. That sheer beauty, which attempts to seduce any reader of poetry, is

inseparable from both the lesbian lover’s purpose, to seduce the beloved, and the lesbian advocate’s agenda, to seduce the otherwise-than-lesbian-gendered reader into identification with the Sapphic lesbian and consequent tolerance for the lesbian to pursue her object. And Grimk? is out to seduce the white reader as well, into a cross identification that claims equality for an African American poetry, even under the strain of the Sapphic burdens and her own personal conflicted racia background. Her mixed blood heritage, the particularly harsh circumstances of her father’s birth as the bastard sone of a slaveholder by a slave and the failed marriage of that father to a white man woman, all may add more weight to the racial agony of a divided, uncertain and often hypocritical

nation felt as a personal condition, as well, as her poetry digests that circumstance. "A Mona Lisa" provides an excellent example of her work at her most artful and graceful bearing up under the triple load of being black, being a poet, and being a lesbian, in a way that seems effortless Let us first take up the title. Why "Mona Lisa"? The Mona Lisa is a unique signature of the achievements of the Western heterosexual male art object to command attention, admiration, respect, and even love. And the Mona Lisa smile seems to hide the secret of Western Civilization, or the secret(s) all women keep or may keep from men (such as the answer to the questions "Who is really the father?" or "Are you ready?" or "Are you pregnant?" or even

"Do you love me?"), or the secret the artist always withholds from the audience, or the principle of all secrets that makes them intrinsically provocative. (Admittedly, the secret may simply be that the model had bad teeth, and Da Vinci simply by accident or design, made that smile an emblem of so much possible speculation.) Further, the Mona Lisa is often regarded as a uniquely superb technical masterpiece in a particular Euro-centric patriarchal cultural legacy–it has no equal, in a tradition that has no equal, and it demonstrates that the tradition has no equal even were there no other evidence, the argument runs. So Grimk?’s use of "the Mona Lisa" as a flattering commonplace to her beloved, a metaphor much in circulation, a way of saying, "This

poem is about a woman as beautiful as the Mona Lisa," may not be all there is to the matter. Her choice may involve, conjure, all the subterranean resonant anxiety of the straight Euro-male’s expected reaction to Da Vinci’s mysteriously smiling dame. And as male readers have found Sappho’s eros an appealing moder for their own, so may male readers of Grimk?’s poem, Grimk? may have implicitly intended to claim. Furthremore, Grimk? may be suggesting that she, Grimk?, as an artist, is Da Vinci’s equal, in "painting Mona Lisa," a woman the equal of a man, and a black the equal of a white, a lesbian the equal of a heterosexual, a black lesbian the equal of the white man responsible for the greatest work of art in a certain male history, the Renaissance, in the

cultural surround of Grimk?’s own work, the Harlem Renaissance. Thus framed, the poem, like the painting leads us to the diptych structure of the poem, its two parts. The upper half consists of a series of four statements of desire: "I should like…" The lower half consists of three questions: "Would I…? Or…? Would my…?" The poem is divided, like the human face, the face of the Mona Lisa, into unwavering eyes above and a lower half expressing the profoundest resonating doubts. Human beings, unless conditioned to do otherwise, meet eye to eye rarely–it is an anxiety producing situation to stare back at a stare, usually, as we check surreptitiously as to whether the other person is in fact paying us attention we may want or need or not–to answer a