The Concept of Black Women Empowerment: A Study in Lucille Clifton's Selected poems

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the concept of black women empowerment in the contemporary poetry of Afro-American poets. The paper offers a brief exploration of this concept, defining it and showing the reasons behind its appearances. Then, the paper goes into examining this concept in Lucille Clifton’s selected poems. The paper sheds light on the multiple poetic strategies on which Clifton depends to stir the concept of black women empowerment in her poems. Most prominent of these empowering strategies are: showing the physical bodily features of Afro-American women as an assertion of their own identity, exposing the strength and endurance of black women via reviving models of strong black women in myths and history, as well as demonstrating the super role of black as mothers, showing their ability to hold responsibilities and to manage the crises which are brought upon them by their womanish nature.