Abstract
Harlem Renaissance poet Warren Cuney’s poem, “No Images,” captures for our imagination’s eye and our ears the cross-like dilemma of women of color in this century. Wounded by the double-barrelled shotgun of racism and sexism, our women operate under a burden of enormous proportion. The poem has been translated into numerous foreign tongues; it has been set to music. It is popular because the pain of black women in North America resonates intensely with the pain felt by sisters throughout the world and especially in places where Euro-American standards have been raised up as normative for what it means to be female. Let the poem speak for itself:
She does not know
Her beauty.
She thinks that her brown body
Has no glory.
If she could dance
Naked ‘neath palm trees,
And see her image in the river,
Then she would know.
But there are no palm trees
On the street.
And dishwater gives back
No images.