MOVING TARGETS

The hunters are back
. . .
In the night after food they will seek
young girls for their amusement
Now the hunters are coming
and the unbaked girls
flee from their angers

--Audre Lorde, from "The Woman Thing"

In a majority of works authored by women of color on the subjects of trauma and violence, the cultural specificity of being targeted as females is painstakingly located and sorrowfully denounced. Shirley Geok-lin Lim's "Pantoun for Chinese Women,"(19) for example, opens with an epigraph taken from a Peking newspaper, The People's Daily, dated March 3, 1983: "At present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning, and leaving to die female infants have been very serious." The poem begins:

They say a child with two mouths is no good period.
In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
Smooth, gumming, echoing wide for food.
No wonder my man is not here at his place.

In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
A slit narrowly sheathed within its hood.
No wonder my man is not here at his place:
he is digging for the dragon jar of soot.

That slit narrowly sheathed within its hood!
His mother, squatting, coughs by the fire's blaze.
The child kicks against me mewing like a flute.
We had saved ashes for a hundred days,
Knowing, if the time came, that we would.

The child kicks against me crying like a flute
Through its two weak mouths. His mother prays
Knowing when the he time comes that we would,
For broken clay is never set in glaze.

Through her two wet mouths his mother prays.
She will not pluck the rooster nor serve its blood,
For broken clay is never set in glaze:
Women are made of river sand and wood.
. . .
My husband frowns, pretending in his haste.
Oh, clean the girl, dress her in ashy soot!
Milk soaks our bedding, I cannot bear the waste.
They say a child with two mouths is no good. (204-05)

The collusion of female against female, mother against child, brings a particular resonance to the repeated phrasing of the pantoum form, here, in the line "a child with two mouths is no good." The metaphor of two mouths is inverted, in the first line, with the suggestion of menstruation ("a child with two mouths is no good period"); in the second stanza, following yet embellishing the pantoum form, a similar metaphorical inversion obtains, where "the slippery wet hollow space" becomes the sinister coding of female genitalia as a "slit narrowly sheathed with its hood." Both "mouths," in the fourth stanza, are "crying." These images bring to mind the internalized oppression and self-loathing discussed earlier, as well as the premeditated, violent self-protection in the works of Frances Brown. The anger and distress of this poem at the murder of an infant female are turned inward, toward the self -- and, by implication, toward the mother-in-law -- speaking in part of the cultural acceptance of male privilege and domination, here resisted once more through the act of telling.

The cultural-specificity of the infanticide scene(20) in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls. . . (1975) is not ethnic, but political: Beau Willie Brown is a Vietnam veteran whose anger, back in the United States, can find no bounds:

there waznt nothin wrong with him/ there waznt nothin wrong
with him/ he kept tellin crystal/
any niggah wanna kill vietnamese children more n stay home
& raise his own is sicker than a rabid dog/
thats how their thing had been goin since he got back. . .

he came home crazy as hell/ he tried to get veterans benefits
to go to school & they kept right on puttin him in
remedial classes/ he cdnt read wortha damn/ so beau
cused the teachers of holdin him back & got himself
a gypsy cab to drive/ but his cab kept breakin
down/ & the cops was always messin wit him/ plus not
gettin much bread/

& crystal went & got pregnant again/ beau most beat
her to death when she tol him/ she still gotta scar
under her right tit where he cut her up/ still crystal
went right on & had the baby/ so now beau willie had
two children/ a little girl/ naomi kenya & a boy/ kwame beau
willie brown/ & there waz no air/ (55-56)

The breathless pacing of this work, along with the speaker's outright assertion that "there waz no air," contracts to smaller, more specific narrative scenes of Beau's angers in the world and his compulsions to bring them all home on the body of Crystal.

The violence finally wears Crystal down. She insists Beau Willie move out, and secures an order of protection from the court, barring his access to her and his children. Now, after many years of refusing her marriage, Beau Willie promises he'll make it legal, if she'll just let him come home. Crystal asserts her new independence, pronouncing she wouldn't have him, now:

hollerin whatchu wanna marry me for now/
so i can support yr
ass/ or come sit wit ya when they lock yr behind
up/ cause they gonna come for ya/ ya goddamn lunatic/
they gonna come/ & i'm not gonna have a thing to do
wit it/ o no i wdnt marry yr pitiful black ass
for nothin & she went on to bed/ (57)

The following day, "beau willie came in blasted & got to swingin chairs at crystal," beating her unmercifully -- finally going for the high chair, "& lil kwame waz in it/ and beau waz beatin crystal with the high chair & her son/ & some notion got in him to stop/ and he run out." Crystal barely survives this attack, and Beau's anger is fueled further by police actions to keep him away, along with his insidious belief that "she'd been tellin the kids their daddy tried to kill her & kwame/ & he just wanted to marry her"(ibid.). In behavior classic to a perpetrator of domestic violence,(21) Beau Willie anticipates the swing back to the "honeymoon phase" he'd come to expect, and when Crystal remains unresponsive, his rage is deadly.

Beau stands outside Crystal's apartment, hollering for entry. Crystal and the children huddle in a corner inside, hoping to wait out this new attack. Beau's anger escalates, however, until he breaks down the door. Though the children have been terrified by his pounding and threats, when Beau turns "humble & apologetic," the children are relieved, and when he calls to Naomi, the child breaks free from her mother and goes to him.

as soon as crystal let the baby outta her arms/ beau
jumped up a laughin & a gigglin/ a hootin & a hollerin/
awright bitch/ awright bitch/ you gonna marry me/
you gonna marry me. . .
. . .
he kicked the screen outta the window/ & held the kids
offa the sill/ you gonna marry me/ yeh, i'll marry ya/
anything/ but bring the children back in the house/
he looked from where the kids where hangin from the
fifth story/ at alla the people screamin at him/ &
he started sweatin again/ say to all the neighbors/
you gonna marry me/ (59-60)

The narrator here is part of the ensemble of seven women devised by Shange for her "choreopoem," each characterized by the color they wear. The "lady in red" has been narrating these events in the third person, bearing witness, up to this point. Here, however, she shifts dramatically to the first-person:

i stood by beau in the window/ with naomi reachin
for me/ & kwame screamin mommy mommy from the fifth
story/ but i cd only whisper/ & he dropped them (60)

That violence begets violence, and that insecurity breeds a fierce brand of rage, are prominent motifs in this canon. Similarly culturally-coded are Sandra Cisneros' "South Sangamon" and Pat Mora's "Perfume," both meditations on the relationship between the expectancy of machismo, the frustrations of men of color, and the surge of domestic violence.

In Cisneros' poem,(22) the speaker-as-witness and the wife under attack work together for safety and laughter, despite a husband's threats. Like the escalating violence of Ntozake Shange's scene of infanticide in For Colored Girls. . ., the poem ends on a somber note, when the threats become realized:

We wake up
and it's him
banging and banging
and the doorknob rattling open up.
His drunk cussing,
her name all over the hallway
and my name mixed in.
. . .
That day he punched her belly
the whole neighborhood watching
that was Tuesday.
So this time we lock it.
And just when we get those kids quiet,
and me, I shut my eyes again,
she laughing,
her cigarette lit,
just then
the big rock comes in. (6)

In Mora's "Perfume,"(23) the witness comes too late, when the blood of a friend has already been spilled. Here, the thematic tension is a struggle with what to do with the dead woman's surviving children:

How do we scrub away this blood,
how do we scrub away this hot smell
before the children run up the path
chasing one another-one, two
three, four voices, "Mamá
Mamá"
ready to hug her,
stomach sliced open
one, two, three, four times.

Maybe her perfume this morning
was too strong for the man
who once bee-laughed night after night,
lately thinner, tired, until she went
to work to buy groceries, medicines.

"Slut," he'd yell, "you only want
to laugh with other men."
"Whore," he'd mutter staring
at the ceiling above their bed,
day after day hearing her laugh
slip through the cracks onto his skin-
though she worked miles away.

Maybe her perfume this morning
was too strong, and he locked the doors,
chased her with that knife
slash/slash
slash/slash
never hearing her scream
even at the end when she held her
stomach with both hands trying to hold
her life as he stabbed himself,
though not well enough,
yelled "La maté: I've killed Gloria."

Gloria.
Lost inside her useless body.

What do we do with her four? (43-44)

In a like mode, Mora's "Emergency Room"(24) begins "he clothed me in bruises/ socked and slapped socked and slapped." The speaker here -- no longer a witness, but the victim herself -- reveals that, earlier in the day, she had gone looking for work in her "only nice dress." Her sense of exposure and humiliation are coded in the lines "hot line at the agency/ me saying sí sí/ over and over in my head/ skin on fire/ . . .my ugly/ writing telling them/ i want work/ our apartment shrinking/ in on me on me him." At the end of this grueling day, her husband sees the dress and launches into a jealous rage. Now in the hospital emergency room, the speaker allows one final, stark irony: "so i don't cover my breasts/ with my hands or a white sheet/ no/ you can look and touch/ i m blue neck to knee/ he clothed me in bruises." The significance of the dress and the repeated line "he clothed me in bruises" reinforces a central motif in this genre: in the world of "normative" gender roles, the consequences of female attractiveness are always understood to precipitate male impropriety, aggression, or violence.(25)

For Ntozake Shange, however, the fact of being female requires no embellishment. In her "With No Immediate Cause,"(26) the interplay between fact and fantasy is rendered as a searching, relentless, drive toward uncovering the unspeakable:

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
every five minutes a
woman is raped/every ten minutes
a lil girl is molested
yet i rode the subway today
. . .
i rode the subway today
& bought a paper from an
east indian man who might
have held his old lady onto
a hot pressing iron/ i dnt know
maybe he catches lil girls in the
park & rips open their behinds
with steel rods/ i cdnt decide
what he might have done i only
know every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes every 10 minutes
. . .
victims have not all been
identified today they are
naked & dead/ some refuse to
testify one girl out of 10's not
coherent/ i took the coffee
& spit it up i found an
announcement/ not the women's
bloated body in the river floating
not the child bleeding in the
59th street corridor/ not the baby
broken on the floor/
"there is some concern
that alleged battered women
might start to murder their
husbands & lovers with no
immediate cause"
i spit up i vomit i am screaming
we all have immediate cause
every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes
every 10 minutes
every day. . .

The exacting statistics are repeated almost as a chant in this poem, and the dream-state, or imagined landscape, of the speaker resembles most closely the terrain of nightmares. How foolish, she suggests, to trust, when this goes on happening all the time.