Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay’s memorable poem, “If We Must Die,” be-speaks the valor of men who, “hunted and penned in an inglorious spot” and “pressed to the wall, dying” must join their kinsmen, “meet the common foe” and fight back.
On the page facing that poem is a similarly memorable poem that works the metaphors of fire and heat to impressive ends. That poem, “Baptism,” states that despite entering the “weird depths of the hottest zone,” the protagonist, transformed “into a shape of flame,” must come out, back to a “world of tears,” emerging “a stronger soul within a finer frame.”
It is to the latter poem, so starkly contrasted to the profoundly male images of the former, that one must turn in order to capsulize the significance of Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s “Words of Fire.” It is that legacy of fire, transformation, and emergent victory that most describes its thesis and intent.
Who are these women, these bold yet often closeted “Black feminists”? As Guy-Sheftall notes, “They are academics, activists, artists, community organizers, mothers. They are race women, socialists, communists, Christians, atheists, lesbian and straight, traditional and radical. They share a collective history of oppression and a commitment to improving the lives of Black women, especially, and the world in which we live.” They are women who must alternately mask and assert “multiple identities, several voices, and different battles.” They are women addressing the converging issues, the “double jeopardy,” the “triple consciousness” of racism, sexism and classism that impact upon Black women’s lives at every turn.
