I Am a Black Woman

“Idiom is larger than geography; it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars."
--Mari Evans, poet

A native of Toledo, Ohio, Mari Evans was raised in a very traditional black family. She attended the University of Toledo.

Evans has lectured on literature, written, directed and produced a television program called “The Black Experience,” written a play (“River of My Song”), a musical based on Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and taught at Indiana University, the State University of New York at Albany, the University of Miami at Coral Gables and at Spellman College, Atlanta.

She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Indiana University Writers' Conference award, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters' first annual poetry award.

The poem “I Am a Black Woman” speaks to the pain of the black experience but also the resilience of black women:

I am a Black Woman

I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night

I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea
and I/with these hands/cupped the lifebreath
from my issue in the canebrake
I lost Nat's swinging body in a rain of tears
and heard my son scream all the way from Anzio
for Peace he never knew....I
learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill
in anguish
Now my nostrils know the gas
and these trigger tire/d fingers
seek the softness in my warrior's beard

I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed

Books of poetry by Mari Evans:

1. A Dark and Splendid Mass (Harlem River Press, 1992)
2. Nightstar: 1973-1978 (1981)
3. I Am a Black Woman (1970)
4. Where Is All the Music? (1968)