Honoring the Lineage: The Epic and Historic in Phillis by Alison Clarke
Many are likely familiar with the opening lines of Homer’s Odyssey, which invoke the muses and ask for their artistic strength to bless the following account. A similar tone permeates Alison Clarke’s Phillis, a poetic biography — or “herstory,” as Clarke calls it — about the eighteenth-century African American poet, Phillis Wheatley. Along with deities — the goddess Diana, Mother Mnemosyne — Clarke honours the lineage of women who may have inspired Phillis and those who drew strength from her life for years to come:
“I am a puppet, with invisible strings./ I thank you all, The Mystical Sisters And/ Daughters./ And My Mother…/ Ancestors, you have kept/ Me Sane.”
Phillis is an atemporal collection, a “sacred circle:/ one with no beginning, and no end, as the past, present, and/ future converge.” The three sections each fulfill a distinct function. In part one, Clarke paints a complex historical tableau of Phillis’ life, partially reconstructed from known historical fact and supplemented with the breath of the poet’s thoughts and dreams, Phillis’ determination to become a poet while honouring her ancestors in continuing to fight for freedom and recognition. Part two builds on this by tracing Phillis’ legacy over the course of the next two and a half centuries. Here more than in the other two sections, the “you” in the poems is frequently a conflation of selves — Clarke and Phillis, the other historical figures that Clarke writes through. Rather than a negative, this ambiguity is one of the collection’s strengths. Through this technique, Clarke gives weight to her words by making the reader slow down and dwell on them, on the weight they continue to bear today, all while offering further words of resistance and power: “Us women, we get it done. Us black women/ we get it done. It’s in the details: the Doin.’” The third section serves as a way of wrapping the collection up, not in the form of a neat bow, but by reiterating the importance of cyclicality that is determination, leaving the reader with one final call to fight in “Dream”:
Yes, I am grateful for what I have
Been GIVEN
But, that’s not Enough —
I wanted to do more:
Fill the depths
With knowledge,
The students willing vessels
At the same time, Phillis is also a testament to the power of literature, particularly poetry, both within Phillis Wheatley’s present and now, centuries later, a reminder the reader receives from Phillis herself: “Where I can sculpt with The Word, that/ is home, and that is anywhere; I am not limited to Borders.” Both Clarke and, through her, Phillis engage with memory and identify poetry’s ability to bring to the surface that which is hidden, the histories and cultural traditions waiting to be brought to the surface. Most often, this is done through systematic erasure, like the “tribunal, all albescent men” that Phillis faced in “The Colony House” who “decide if I’m a poetess or/ a fraud-ness.” Clarke works against these forces with her poetry, using her craft primarily to commemorate but still taking the time to critique through a balanced blend of fact and fiction.
For those who are interested in learning more about Phillis the historical figure, Clarke provides a concise and thoughtful essay in the form of the book’s afterward. Phillis is perhaps best categorized as a combination of epic and historical fiction. It is also entirely a celebration of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley as she is elevated to the rank of poetic muse and goddess in her own right, “the Maecenas The Ovid The/ Homer [who] May […] take Refuge In The Stars.” Traversing a register of voices, including Phillis’ own, Clarke reminds readers of the vibrancy of poetry as a medium capable of containing the multitudes of histories waiting to be written into being.
