Speaker
The writer of this poem, Lucille Clifton, is a notable woman in the history of African-American poetry and so the immediate tendency is assume the speaker of this poem is purely autobiographical. The poem is not about a specific woman discussing the abundant size of her hips, however; it is an indictment of idealized concepts of feminine beauty. The only specific implication that the speaker is black is the allusion made in the line “these hips have never been enslaved.” Despite this limitation, the conventional interpretation is that the speaker of the poem is, indeed, a black woman whose hips do not meet the standardized white societal stereotype of the ideal female figure.
