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Ariel
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“From the me to the you”:
Margaret Walker’s Interpersonal Politics
Margaret Walker’s Interpersonal Politics
This essay argues that Margaret Walker’s 1942 poetry collection For My People contains a radical theorization of Black political sovereignty enabled by inter-subjective exchange. Often overlooked as Walker’s juvenilia, accused of aestheticization and abstraction, the collection both benefitted and suffered from its association with the Yale Younger Poets prize. Early readers like Stephen Vincent Benét praised it for its “sincerity,” a thinly-veiled assertion of its ability to represent a picturesque version of Black folklife. But rather than representing Black culture as a static object to be regarded from a distance, Walker forged a poetic form that tightly bound the training she received at the Iowa Writers Workshop to the vernacular forms of her youth. Nowhere is this more evident than in the short sonnet sequence the closes the collection. Walker does not only repurpose existing form for new representational ends, she uses the interconnectivity of the sequence to approach a set of questions from multiple angles. Her poetic speaker interrogates the conditions of dispossession, financial insecurity, and lost dignity that plague the Black and working class communities. In a sonnet called “Iowa Farmer” she seems to find one solution: it is not only the farmer’s state of independent self-sufficiency that points towards the poem’s underlying politics. It is in the moment of exchange, a moment during which Walker’s speaker is regarded as equal to her white, Midwestern, male interlocutor, that we can glimpse a sovereign Black future. Taken together, the poems suggest that the root of systemic racism is in the denial to regard marginalized subjects as human. Walker posits moments of interpersonal exchange as the seeds in a movement toward more expansive form of political acknowledgement.
Ariel Martino is a PhD Candidate in English at Rutgers University—New Brunswick and a 2020-2021 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. She is completing a dissertation called “Governing Aesthetics: Form and Politics in Black Hemispheric Literature” and has a review essay forthcoming in Criticism.