Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen

Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison

In Local History, Erica Hunt offers neither dismantled, postmodern subjectivity, nor plainspoken racial identity. In contrast to Brooks's call to black readers to recognize racial and political solidarity, Hunt calls readers to be conscious of the social relations that grant them status as subjects: a home, a job, literacy, and the ability to communicate with others via verbal and other signs. Race is one factor among many determining one's identity and one's freedoms. While Hunt does not "hail" readers around a central political identity, she does construct a fairly coherent voice within each poem: she often uses an "I," which functions as the text's central perceiver. Like other language writers, Hunt explores in abstract, philosophical language how language and ideology shape human consciousness, but her explorations as often seek to represent experience as they seek to destabilize the terms in which we represent experience. For instance, in one of the few lineated poems in the volume, "Woman, with wings," Hunt writes,

Work is pushing past resistance,

past the sense

it has all been written

before, spilling off the inventory shelves.

Sometimes you can read

with the headlights on, sometimes

you can drive to moods for which

no correlates exist, only curves, shaded

paths in the wilderness, occasional plots of

land ignored by absentee owners.38

This poem contains a rather straightforward description of writers block, especially the block that attends contemplation of an overpopulated literary world. Using an extended metaphor of driving as writing and journeying, Hunt locates, by the end of the poem, a somewhat conventional resolution in an image of escape from convention, domestic and poetic:

The cars ahead of us have disappeared.

Finally the way is clear, we have come to a way out;

past the flocked walls, the manipulated

seams, past the unzippered feeling, the tacit

violence between its teeth,

the trick with the mirrors and speed."

While the poem contains some imaginative leaps and interesting juxtapositions, it shares more commonalities with poems in mainstream literary journals than with much language poetry.

However, Hunt's interest in exploring how the self is composed of multiple discourses, an interest shared by many language writers, drives many poems in the volume. The discourses she examines include regional dialect, gender, race, generational experience, and literacy. In the poem "City," Hunt describes New York's dialect as an eerily familiar tongue that creates an instant, and perhaps illusory, sense of community with one's urban neighbors: "It was very soon after we arrived, when the city, however plural, we heard as a dialect, as a distinct manner of speaking. We were as startled as if we had heard a stranger using our mother's habits of speech, a turn at once familiar and uncanny, that made us fall into an intimacy with our neighbors, joined by a mother tongue" (27). Through the phrases "mother tongue" and "mother's habits of speech," Hunt conflates a national, native tongue and a private, family argot. That speech, in turn, transforms "strangers" into "neighbors" and so redefines others' identities and roles within the community. Elsewhere in the volume, some colloquial lines are attributed to neighbors, illustrating the city's deceptively familiar dialects: "You may not have broken your neck damn fool, but you sure have broke up that sled"; "Lifting that elevator and toting them stairs, up the tenement !lights .... we thought scrape, we ate scrape and we lived scrape" (32,66).