Creative Writing Assignment:“homage to my hips,”
The African American woman is a strong, self-sufficient, and independent curvy woman. This is the ideology that we, as a society, have of African women. The poem “homage to my hips “focuses on the positive physical attribute of an African American woman and the experience that this curvy beauty culturally experiences. The poem “homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton is a celebration of being an African American woman.
The speaker in this poem expresses herself in the first-person point of view when she talks about her hips, which is a rather personal topic. In the first line, “these hips are big hips,” the speaker proclaims that she is a curvy woman, and she wants to pay “homage” to this kind of beauty. The way she uses simple words to convey her emotional attachment to her physical attributes creates a celebratory theme throughout the poem. In society, the term beautiful is a social construct that can be used to judge women, most notably curvy women who are not considered beautiful. Curvy women still struggle to be comfortable in their skin, and the speaker in this poem exemplifies this notion. Her hips are magical, free, and very mighty. They have power, take up space, and have desires. These statements are not lyrical because the speaker wants them to have an impact so that there is no room for doubt.
At first, the speaker starts describing her hips with words that most consider as a form of critique and defiance against anyone who would not recognize her as beautiful enough because she is not as small as expected or she is not well behaved. She captures the insult of ‘big hips’ but then turns the term into a celebration of the curvy woman as a way of reclaiming and redefining what being beautiful means. The speaker is convinced that the battle of self-actualization is won, and there is no room for misconceptions or doubts. She embraces all the parts that are considered negative in the society when it comes to the peak of the poem, “these hips are mighty hips, these hips are magic hips.”
Unfortunately, society determines the worth of a woman based on how they look and their level of attractiveness based on what men deem as attractive. The patriarchal society often includes characteristics such as fair skin, slim bodies, and small delicate features as the standard of beauty. The speaker in the poem dispenses with this stereotypical ideology that is very difficult to attain. She shows us what big and beautiful entails being, “They move, they want, they go places, they act, and they cast spells.” Her hips are not dependent on how they look. The speaker shows us that whatever she wants is defined by the worth she puts on herself and not the society.
In the poem, it seems that the speaker is passing time from the time shwas a young girl to the time she is much older. When the mirror is praising the woman’s body, it gives a chronological order of how the woman is evolving from being an anonymous girl to becoming a city woman. Moreover, the speaker tends to connect to a time frame, from the past to the future. In the poem, the speaker says, ” “these hips have never been enslaved” to show the continuity in her life. It also helps us see that her growth is not only personal, but the entire black community supports it. Women should embrace their freedom of expression in any way or any form. The speaker in “homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton shows us the best way to celebrate our femininity is to embrace it without any prejudice. When we use the power of acceptance from within, the forces around us will not have the ability to contradict that truth.