Coal As Diamonds: An Analysis Of Unclear Language In Audre Lorde's Coal
Coal as Diamonds: Empowerment through Language in Audre Lorde’s “Coal”
While a reader may not expect science, art, and social justice to intersect through poetry, “Coal” by Audre Lorde does so artfully. By using figurative language to describe the narrator’s relationship to spoken words, Lorde relates the formation of coal to the process of one identifying with their blackness. Audre Lorde was a queer black women who wrote many poems about her identity—consider “New York Head Shop and Museum” (1974) and “Black Unicorn” (1978)—and employs nominative pronouns in “Coal” such as “To explode through my lips” and “I am black…” that make it clear that the author and narrator of “Coal” are synonymous. Therefore, when commenting on this poem, it is
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But the ambiguous diction and syntax in “Coal” make it difficult for the reader to understand her poem. Therefore, it is essential for readers to understand this question: why does unclear language affect a reader’s understanding of Audre Lorde’s “Coal”?
Lorde’s confusing use of parts of speech in “Coal” is both convoluted and revelatory in nature. Lorde begins the poem with the line, “I / is the total black being spoken / from the earth’s inside.” (1-3), in which “I” is a noun and a word being spoken, rather than a pronoun of which a reader might expect due to the syntax of the sentence. That is, the reader may automatically revise “I is…” to say “I am…” because the word “I” can function as both an unattached word and a nominative pronoun in which the narrator refers to themselves. However, this assumption is revised upon reading the rest of the line, “is the total black being spoken” (2), because a person cannot “be spoken.” The transition in framing the part of speech occurs between “black” and “being”; a transition in the middle of a line rather than the line break is sudden, and therefore disconcerting to the reader. The lines are also complicated by the last line of the sentence because the speaker is ambiguous in form and function. It is unclear who is speaking from the Earth’s inside, and what “the Earth’s inside” is in reference to, both physically and figuratively. The trouble spots through the first lines in the poem confuse the reader, and do not prepare them to understand the poem’s context or
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