maxine tynes

Don't Give Me Looks

Biography

•Born in 1949 in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, where she continued to work and live.

•She became the first African-Canadian woman to sit on Dalhousie’s Board of Governors; a position she held from 1986 to 1994.

•Published her first novel, Borrowed Beauty (1987) which received the 1988 Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award (thus making Tynes the first African-Canadian writer to win a national award); her other works include The Door of My Heart (1993), Woman talking Woman (1990) and Save the World for Me (1993) - an insightful book of poetry for young adults and adolescents.

Influences

Personal Influences

Cultural Influences

Africville

• A community consisting of African-Canadians from a wide variety of backgrounds. It was located along the southern shore of Bedford Basin in the city of Halifax.

• In the late 1960’s the government ordered this community to be destroyed, and the citizens to be evicted in order for the construction of the A. Murray McKay Bridge to begin.

• Years after the eviction, the government of Nova Scotia created the Seaview Memorial Park (1980) and restricted urban development in the area. Many former Africville residents use this park as a location to protest the injustice they had fallen victim to.

Reoccurring Motifs in Work

•Racism is a regularly discussed topic in almost all of Tynes’ poetry, owing to the fact that she is of African-Canadian descent and feels strongly about her racial identity.

•Another key topic that Tynes’ addresses are the role and identity of women. Many of her works explore the subjugation of women’s desires, hopes and dreams, and how women must play second fiddle to a world chiefly governed by men.

•Tynes’ work is very counter-cultural, as she questions societal values and criticizes the judgment of the authorities.

Style of Writing

•She began writing poetry in her teenage years, with some if her work being classified as being “rebellious” and “counter-cultural”.

•Her overarching style is Romantic, but transmuted through the “everything-is-holy” mysticism of the American poets Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: Tynes celebrates nature, music, art, the self, and love (and lovers), but, like Whitman, Ginsberg, and their British High Romantic forebears (Byron, Blake, and Shelley), she also denounces everything impolitic. Thus, apart from her unique cast as an African-Nova Scotian woman, Tynes was one more Late Romantic, “Baby Boomer” Beat.

•Most of her poems are lyrical, as they demand questioning of the self and are done with a reflective tone.

Racism

Racism:

the alphabet of that word

a metallic absudity on the tongue

the cell of its imprisonment

slamming down all of your days

on all of your life.

The cage of racism

allowing no life-to-life cross-over

to the other side

no people to people

mind to mind

heart to heart.

The bite of racism

is deep and deep

and relentless in its pursuit

incising Black and Native and language and

gender cultures

excising the heart of all that we are.

We bleed generations of pain.

We heal to hope.

We rise to challenge.

We shout the imperative.

We stride the future.

The language of the Black and Native future

has no alphabet for racism,

has no agenda for it

no taste

no time

no reality.

And in some future Black and Native time

the rain of racism falls

and finds no waiting hearts,

finds no ground wanting.

The Woman I am in My Dreams

The woman I am in my dreams

is taller than I am

and sees the world as she walks

unlike me with eyes on every step

with eyes ever and always on the ground

that woman walks only when

she feels like not running

not jogging

the woman I am in my dreams

lifts one leg effortlessly over the other

crosses them

high up on the knee

the hip

the thigh

not just at the ankle like I do.

The woman I am in my dreams

breaks all the rules about shoes

wears them high and red

with killer spike heels

moves from Nikes to spikes

and the kind of pumps

that go with a dress

and having your hair done.

The woman I am in my dreams

her legs are straight and sure

they don't fly out from under her

they don't hide under long skirts

her legs and feet are well

they speak for her in footsteps on the road

they laugh at hills and

at rolling, unforgiving gravel

they dialogue with ice and snow

and they always win that argument

the woman I am in my dreams

I wake up and carry part of her

with me everywhere.

"Like all writers and all artists, there’s something in me that drives this thing to be done – this writing, this poetry, this literary voice– that is subconscious, but there is also a conscious drive and that is the sense of self as black woman in the world who wants to speak this womanist, feminist vision and philosophy and dialectic, who needs to speak from black culture, to look behind me and where I find blank trails to turn to myself to create some, to lay down a path of my own with the story and the poem.”

Questions

•Some personal influences are growing up with polio, her race, being a feminist, her family, politics and gender relations.

•Africville: Like many other African-Canadians of Nova Scotia, this historic event greatly angered Maxine Tynes and was a major inspiration for almost all of her work.

What does the poem mean in your own words?

What is the tone? is there a shift in tone?

What effect does the repetition of the phrase "don't give me looks" create?

Maxine Tynes

Don't give me looks that put me in my place

that open my mail

that smell me coming and going, and see me everywhere.

Don't give me looks made of plastic smiles

reserved for co-workers who rush past

on a wave of caffeine and nicotine,

letting "How are you?" drift and hang in the air.

You say, "Fine!" neither hearing nor meaning it.

Don't give me those looks.

Don't give me looks full of hell and damn

and who cares? who cares?

that flap on the line like clothes in the wind

that ring and ring like a telephone in an empty room

that flicker white and snowy, like the telly at midnight

that are snowblind in August

that are full of all the rest of the world

and not me.

Questions

How does your knowledge of Maxine Tynes influence how you interpret the poem?

Maxine Tynes' Poems

Where does the shift in tone occur? What kind of tone does the poem end in?

In stanza four who does Maxine Tynes refer to when she says "we"?