Literary Techniques In Honoree Jeffer's The Gospel Of Barbecue

I am an upper class white female attending Vanderbilt University without any financial aid. I do not remember a time where I have ever desperately wanted for anything, except maybe that purple hula-hoop at the toy store when I was five. I am the perfect product of white privilege, and the perfect contrast to Honoree Jeffers’s collection of poetry The Gospel of Barbecue. This book challenged me; opening me up to a world in which being a black women was almost a crime. Jeffers highlights the topics of racism and feminism through her personal memories and through her creative use of literary techniques. The diction used by Jeffers in this book is heavily influenced by her Southern and African roots. “Somebody got to die/With something at some/

However, there are many instances where she gives us reason to believe that she is not the speaker. In the poem “Ellen Craft,” the speaker has a husband, and as an audience we know that Jeffers is not married. She seems to be taking on the persona of an African American woman before her time traveling to the North for a better life. Also, in the next poem that starts off with “Master:” Jeffers has taken a part of an old letter. This is an interesting example of a found poem. These examples gives us reason to believe that maybe the narrative voice can possibly an alter ego of hers. We know the narrator is a woman because there are many instances in which the narrator relates to being a woman and going through “rape” from different

The Glory Gets and The Gospel of Barbecue are books preoccupied with, among other things, human communication. The ways in which we converse with members of our own race, with members of other races, with family, with dead people we never knew, with women, with men, with other writers, and—perhaps most importantly—with ourselves. People are always complaining that poetry is dead and disconnected from the real world. The Glory Gets is a book that navigates the very real tensions and dangers pulsing under the surface of our everyday lives. In contrast, I thought The Gospel of Barbecue focused more on her memories of her family and the folklore and stories of racism they shared with her. In addition, Jeffers added some more personal connections in The Gospel of Barbecue, especially when she admitted being raped. Many of Jeffers’s poems in The Glory Gets have multiple speakers present at the same time in the poem. In the “blues” section of the book, Jeffers achieves this polyvocality by means of persona, writing from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. I believe the goal of both books was to highlight the issues of racism and the treatment of women. While The Gospel of Barbeque focused more on past racism and how it still affects African American culture today, I thought that The Glory Gets presented more modern examples of racism in today’s society, This was reflected in