48 Matthews

sight's
enough!
Hope I lives till I get home
I'm tired of eatin'
what they eats in Rome . . .) (26-34).

Rather than being "filled up," Mattie is fed up. Subsequently, "home" is
superimposed over the ironically empty box that constitutes "Rome." Thus,
Mattie is brought to a consciousness of the value of her "home," her race,
and her self. In this and other poems, Evans's use of language claims to pos-
sess the power to shake the world (political, racial, gendered, and geo-
graphical) through the word- a power which reaffirms Gayle's faith in the
power of "the serious black artist" to wage "war with the American socie-
ty" (xvii).
"Black jam for dr. negro" too employs vernacular as it offers a "correc-
tive" to middle-class and assimilationist blacks who resist the Black
Aesthetic's revolutionary power. Words like "fro" and "thang" ge
towards a "street" language- language far from "dr. negro's" ken.
like "what you sweatin'" further works to establish this distance bet
the speaker and his/her critic who keeps "pilin it on rubbin it / in."
meets the funk in the repeated return to and revision of the refrain:
my / thang," "see your thang," "it aint / shit / your thang," and so
("Black jam" 77). The increased volatility and profanity of the repeti
invokes Henderson's dozens and rap, asserting a "street cred" aest
The dropped gs on the present progressive verbs further work to de
distance between the speaker who is "real" and the dr. negro whose "
/ puked and rotten / waitin' / to be defended" (78). The language of
poem thematizes its political charge: elitist blacks who demand one "cu
fro off / turn / my collar down" (77), not be themselves, but rather a
their artificial pose or "thang," are detached from their people, culture
self.
At the same time, several poems in I Am A Black Woman employ non-
revolutionary language- a move that is discomfiting to many past and
present critics.16 For example, Clarke notes that Evans's "earnest" language
is marked by a "formality" that differs from the "confident and ironic" lan-
guage of a Sanchez poem (75), therein suggesting that Evans doesn't quite
fit and implying that there is an essential blackness to language. The poems
of the first section indeed assume an earnestness and lack of irony as they
detail sorrow, abandonment, and abuse. For example, "Here- Hold My
Hand" is an earnest recognition of the end of an affair:
Here

hold my hand
since

there is nothing