Barbara Benjamin
Essay on "Hanging Fire" by Audre
Lorde
The speaker of this poem is a 14
year old girl. She appears to be
in her bedroom. I
visualize her scrutinizing herself in a mirror, poking at her face, making
faces as she looks at her braces. The tone is self-critical, worrisome,
insecure, and complaining. But, it is also light in that the subject matter of the
speaker's thoughts is all rather trivial.
There's no heavy, gloomy language. The only punctuation used, is a period at the
end of each stanza. There's
no rhyming scheme and no particular continuity.
However, I think the structure is appropriate
for the subject. The girl's thoughts are
random and without a connection to each other.
The structure, then, of no punctuation reflects the stream-of-thought
process when one thinks to oneself. And that the lines run on into the next with a different
concern, shows her insecurity. She's not focused on anything, except a general anxiety
about herself.
The girl appears to be talking to herself as she
reflects upon her image and body. She's just becoming aware of her sexuality and
mortality. This is
seen in the three references to death and the three references to her
mother in the bedroom with the door closed.
While having a typical teenage identity crises
of worrying about something not worth worrying about, her attention is diverted
to her mother, who's in the bedroom with her door closed. I think this clearly
indicates a first awareness of the sexual self.
There's an obvious curiosity about momma in
that room and what she's doing in there.
She shows a little bit of rebelliousness: "There is nothing I want to do/and too
much that has to be done". I think she feels somewhat overwhelmed about the new
realizations of maturity and its responsibilities, and is resisting it.
I think the poem is a
delightful piece about a teenage girl experiencing the awkwardness and the
pangs of adolescence. She's
embarrassed about the boy "she can't live without", then worries
about her knees, then thinks about death, feels the urgency to learn how to
dance, notices that her room is too small, and so on. Her thoughts jump all over, but they reflect
insecurity and concern about how other see her (especially seen by the comment
in lines 15-18).
When I opened my book
tonight, it was randomly to the page this poem is on and for some reason caught
my attention. I hadn't
read it before, and I had planned to write on one of several other poems. But I glanced at
this one and the first two lines had me hooked.
As I read on, I was taken back to my own
adolescence. I saw myself
and my best friend, Marsha, in her bedroom worrying about all the trivial
little things that this girl is worrying about. I remembered how
everything felt like such a crises then.
We had the same identity crises' and curiosity about sexuality. We poked and prodded at ourselves,
criticizing this and that "flaw" we saw in ourselves. And what if we died
before the prom! Oh,
horrors! And
the first boy I couldn't live without would let his tongue hang out like he was
mentally retarded---which embarrassed me.
But the important thing was to be in
love---with anyone, even if he sucked his thumb in private.
As you can see, my identity with this poem couldn't be much stronger.
I think Lorde has a
perfect grasp on the frailties of adolescence.
She's able to show how insignificant little
matters are so monumental to a teenager; and how closely related are the
feelings of insecurity, the realization of mortality, and the curiosity of
sexuality. The poem was very effective
in taking me back to my adolescence and evoking again
the emotions of that time.