The Storytelling Power of Figurative Language
“Ghazal” is a poem that tells a very definite story, but it is not typical narrative poetry. The story is quite literally conveyed exclusively through figurative language. Connecting metaphors like “History is a ship forever setting sail” with imagery like “On either shore: mountains of men” the speaker creates a narrative as a rich tapestry of literary devices covering the entire history of civilization. The problem facing many readers, of course, is that this is a much more difficult way of telling a story, requiring closer scrutiny of the text and a higher level of critical thinking skills to interpret meaning.
All History is White Male History
The opening line of the poem is “The sky is a dry pitiless white.” It is not a poem about the sky. The whiteness of the sky sets the stage of how figurative language tells the story. The sky is always above us, omnipresent, and impossible to escape—just like the inescapable power of the white patriarchy. These aspects are put to use through metaphor to situate the sky as history written by white men. This is history written by white men who did not care if the thirst for accuracy was slaked.
The Silencing of Black Women
The bulk of figurative language in the poem is designed to situate the role of black women subjugated beneath this dry, white sky. The men who created the written account of the truth we call history literally elevated in those “mountains of men” while the women from whom they took credit sink into the abyss of lost history as “Oceans of bone” bones discarded after the all the flesh and blood—both literally and figuratively speaking—of their bodies have been stripped away, used up, and cast aside.
Immortality
History is far less a factual accounting of the facts of any event than it is an attempt to attain immortality. Everybody dies, of course, so there is no real possibility of immortality for humans. The next best thing to actually living forever is to have one’s name remembered long after one dies. This desperate is encapsulated in the rhetorical question asking “what sound” will one day be produced “When we find ourselves alone with all we’ve ever sought: our name?” The white writers stole not just the credit of accomplishments actually by black women, but by leaving them out the written history, they also stole their afterlife. This afterlife is presented as the names of women that white men tried to erase from history being passed along one person at a time through rediscovery and as the collective voices growing louder with each new recognition of their names.
