“Some Damn Body”: Black Feminist Embodiment in the Spirit Writing of Lucille Clifton

Abstract:Despite her fame as a poet, Lucille Clifton’s practice of spirit writing remains little known and understudied. Clifton’s familial practice of automatic writing and spirit communication spanned decades and encompassed everything from past life regressions to conversations with departed spirits as diverse as Langston Hughes, Beethoven, Billie Holiday, and Jesus. This article uses Clifton’s unpublished spirit writing, recorded in the 1970s and ’80s, to shed light on themes of spirit and embodiment in her poetry. I argue that throughout Clifton’s published and archival work, she insists on the primacy and specificity of her Black woman’s body as a site of spiritual encounter, even as she complicates the notion of Black feminist embodiment by presenting the Black woman’s body as one transitory incarnation among many. By contextualizing Clifton’s spirit writing within a longer tradition of Black women’s vernacular mysticism, I outline the moral importance of Black women’s lived experiences on a cosmic timescale that seemingly eclipses race and gender.