In a different chord: interpreting the relations among black female sexuality, agency, and the blues

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Nghana tamu Lewis

Houston Baker characterizes the asexual and consubstantiating life of the blues when he analogizes the medium to a "streamlined athlete's awesomely dazzling explosions of prowess." As he explains: "The blues song erupts, creating a veritable playful festival of meaning." What we are left with, he concludes, "is not a filled subject, but an anonymous (nameless) voice. The blues singer's signatory coda is always atopic, placeless. The signature comprises a scripted authentication of 'your' feelings. Its mark is an invitation to energizing subjectivity" (5). (4) The voice of the individual blues singer transcends the speaker at once to express and represent the "experiences" of self and audience as it calls for a rearticulation and regeneration of the song. The responses always echo elements of the first singer's experiences. But as they emanate from different bodies, the songs/responses necessarily change as different voices begin to sing. Consequently, as the singer's response (to the audience) demonstrates her identification with the "group experience," it also reveals and sustains her individuality. This process diminishes the lines of distinction between women's and men's blues on issues of aestheticism, authorship, audience, and agency. It dictates the non-reductiveness of the blues--the fact that, given any relatively homogenous group of people, no single form of the medium can represent holistically the experiences of every individual; but every form of the blues has the ability to "tap into" the experiences of some people. Finally, and, perhaps, most importantly, the process frees meaning because it makes imperative the duty of the reader/listener to engage with the writer/singer in the hermeneutic process. Meaning in any given blues text is never static and in fact always represents the site of a dynamic network of evolving, multidimensional experiences and communicative acts and reactions, calls and responses. Yet even when we consider in isolation poetry by Langston Hughes in which female blues singers centrally figure, Hughes's gender-determined statements about the blues are roundly disproved.

Ironically, much of Hughes's earliest blues poetry was collected in his Selected Poems (1959) under the heading "Lament Over Love" (also the title of a poem in this section). While the prevailing concerns of the blues-singing females in this section are men and love, I would argue that these issues are also intricately linked to concern over a number of other factors that constitute black female subjectivity, including personal welfare and socio-economic status. The texts demonstrate a range of attitudes toward and responses to these issues by merging shifting images of weakness and power, despair and hope, and dependence and independence as the women describe, analyze, and/or react to their situations in song. (For the purposes of this essay, I will analyze in detail only three poems, although I maintain that the argument holds true for all the pieces contained in the "Lament Over Love" section of Selected Poems.)