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/

Time or another (13).” This is a perfect example of the kind of language and slang used throughout her poems. “Somebody got to” is a very Southern term that uses the verb “got” instead of “has to.” Most of the racial tension occurred in the South, where the majority of African Americans worked as slaves. Jeffers was born during the time of the Civil Rights movement and grew up in North Carolina and Georgia. She was well aware and experienced the treatment that was being done to African Americans.
I would say in The Gospel of Barbecue Jeffers herself is the main narrator.

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

“men.”
In addition, I believe the narrator is speaking to a universal audience here, and is using some methods like situational irony to show her point about relationships between the races and the culture of food and family throughout her poetry collection. I think Jeffers wants to make a statement to all people in general that racism was very real and had a major effect on the lives and culture of African Americans. To get her point across, Jeffers uses short verse as her poetic form in the book. The lines and the poems themselves are very short, dripping of visual imagery and metaphorical references. The poems are more narrative than rhyme oriented. A common theme or occurrence throughout the collection is family. The poems in The Gospel of Barbecue not only use immediate history, but they also incorporate the history of the larger family or tribe. Jeffers is drawing our attentions to how important African American folklore is in her culture. Oral traditions were passes on to her by her grandmother and her mother, and they would die with them if not for Jeffers. Her community not only nurtured her but also taught her lessons in which she continues to pass on through her poems. She is making a statement that her family, ordinary black folks, are in fact part of black history as well. In this way, I think she is trying to keep the African American culture alive. I read in an interview that she still considers the blues to be very much the center of the culture of African Americans, even though hip- hop is growing larger and larger as an expression of African Americans. In The Gospel of Barbecue, Jeffers at times incorporates the blues into her poetry in an effort to highlight the importance of the art form during the times of struggle. She is making a statement that her family, ordinary black folks, are in fact part of black history as well.
Throughout the collection, the poems were enriched with countless instances of imagery, metaphors, and allusions. The specific poem in the book called “The Gospel of Barbecue” stood out to me as portraying these elements of poetry. The imagery Jeffers uses in this poem is very much related to the processing and cooking of pork for barbecue. “The head ears/ snout tail fatback/ chitlins feet ribs balls” (15). This gives us a clear image of the pieces of the pig, as they’re prepared, and is very visual; you can see each piece, even the balls, being prepped by the grandpa. Also, the metaphors between meat and the human experience of slavery and persecution are clear and ??. “Screams and blood/ freeze over before/ they hit the air” (14). Screams and blood do not actually freeze over, but the metaphor gives us a strong mental image of the suffering experienced. She also draws on the symbol of the scraps of food or “leavings off the hog.” Even though the times have changed and the necessity of eating the “leavings” is long past, Uncle Vess still chooses to enjoy them, even though they bring high blood pressure and poor health. Rather than symbolizing the cross- racial healing power of food, Jeffers suggests that the ritual of eating reinscribes racial memory.
After rereading Jeffers latter book The Glory Gets, I found it interesting to compare her two collections.

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

the overall organization of The Gospel of Barbeque. The collection seemed to flow into a sort of chronological progression as Jeffers reflects on her own experience and the experience of women and other family members that came before her.
Overall, I would call Jeffers’s work a success as a collection of poetry. She is not only honest in her poems, but she is also courageous for bringing the reality around us to the surface. Jeffers reminds us of the parts of our past that most of us purposely forget. She beautifully strikes the chord in all of us through her use of intricate imagery and clever metaphors. This collection emphasizes that racism is still a very real thing present in today’s society, and despite large strives towards improvement, we still have a very long way to go. The Gospel of Barbecue gives us an important gift: the silenced voice, singing despite its silencing—singing loudly.