Notes for Saundra on Sweet Honey in the Rock Woman

Sweet Honey in the Rock Woman is the poem about what a Black woman of western civilization used to believe. She used to believe in “the explorer”—any romantic or flattering words you may have for Christopher Columbus—this woman was a true believer in him and his conquering manhood.

Most of the details in this poem deal with the structure of this belief system. By attempting to invoke images of maps with sea monsters and woodcut drawings, what we are supposed to see is how crude and ignorant this “traditional” belief system is—especially when it is juxtaposed with modern words hidden in phrases like ‘ply mouth voyager’ and ‘dodge caravan.’ These are of course machines designed for suburban “living”—but these modern names invoke images of our crude Columbian past.

The Black woman’s “liberation” from these crude constructions leads (according to my opinion) to places not much better—like veering into a Queen role through a dominator-submitter Lesbian relationship. My assertion that my Black woman is now ‘severed’ from Eden (‘where she spoke freely’) intends to lead the reader to the moment when Eve presented the “forbidden fruit” to Adam. This presentation (according to my interpretation) came with a question from Eve to Adam, ‘Is not all this world yours?’ Clearly Adam was incapable of grasping the truth so he took what was forbidden.

So now, of course, I am unable to explain everything in any poem—even the ones written by me—I will offer some moments from Sweet Honey in Rock Woman as a list of points of interest:

• Joel P. Bowman: “Although we all live in the same objective world (territory, external reality), each of us has a different subjective view (mental map) of the world. Because of this difference, our experiences of the same external environment differ. The map is not the territory. The mental maps we create, our subjective experiences, are different from the external reality on which they are based.”
• strangescience.net: “Contrary to popular belief, the sailors of Columbus’s day did not think they would sail right off the edge of the earth. They were, however, apprehensive about what they would find in their travels. Mistakes about marine life have ranged from inaccurate assumptions about the behavior of known species to fanciful depictions of animals that ‘might’ exist.”
• A high-resolution Carta Marina map is worth looking at…
• According to Jone Johnson Lewis, “As far as any serious scholar has been able to determine, NO EARLY FEMINIST DEMONSTRATION BURNED BRAS! … The infamous demonstration that gave birth to this rumor was the 1968 protest of the Miss America contest. Bras, girdles, nylons and other articles of constricting clothing were tossed in a trash can.”
• Here in the rasx() context it does not matter whether Queen Cleopatra was a woman in a full-blood African body or not. What matters was that she capable of having a relationship with fascist (by the definition of the Roman-based word) like Mark Antony. This capability makes her a white woman without regard of what she looks like. It is important to get beyond color of skin and look at content of character. Like what Ayn Rand says, you can tell a lot about a man (or a woman) by the people they are aesthetically capable of sleeping with… I do not “believe” that Cleopatra sacrificed herself by submitting to a man for the sake of her “nation”…
• The role for Eve was to be Adam’s “help meet” this term appears twice in Gen 2:18 and Gen 2:20. I can be quite easy to not know what a “help meet” is. As a child I have heard entire sermons about the “help meet.” My later preference for what this term means comes from George M. Lamsa’s translation of the Aramaic Peshitta: “a helper who is like him” and “a helper who was equal to him.” Now I understand that a female is not “equal” to a male. These two are meant to be perfect compliments where there is no master and no servant.

rasx()