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Guest Column: Naming the Problem That Led to the Question “Who Shall Teach African American Literature?”; or, Are We Ready to Disband the Wheadey Court?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Nellie Y. McKay
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Extract

We whose names are underwritten, do assure the World, that the poems in the following Page, were (as we verily believe,) written by phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa. […] She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.

Attestation in Phillis Wheatley's

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

The poems written by this young negro bear no endemial marks of solar fire or spirit. They are merely imitative; and, indeed, most of those people have a turn for imitation, though they have little or none for invention.

Anonymous reviewer of Wheatley's poems in 1764 (Shields 267)

It was not natural. And she was the first. […] Phillis Miracle Wheatley: The first Black human being to be published in America. […] But the miracle of Black poetry in America, the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected […] frequently dismissed […] because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom. […] And it was not natural. And she was the first. […] This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America; that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.

June Jordan (252, 254, 261)

More than two hundred years have gone by since the spring of 1773, when Phillis Wheatley, subject of the epigraphs of this essay, an African slave girl and the first person of her racial origin to publish a book in North America, collected her best poems and submitted them to public scrutiny. In search of authentication, she appeared with them before eighteen white men of high social and political esteem, “the best Judges” for such a case in colonial Boston. Wheatley's owners and supporters arranged this special audience to promote her as a writer. According to popular wisdom of the time, Africans were intellectually incapable of producing literature. None of the Anglo-Americans beyond her immediate circle could imagine her reading and writing well enough to create poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , May 1998 , pp. 359 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

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References

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