Hanging Fire: Historical & Literary Context

Black Feminism

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s broadly aimed to end many forms of institutionalized discrimination against Black people. In the wake of that movement, Black women intellectuals and activists developed a philosophical paradigm now known as “Black feminism.” This paradigm theorized the unique forms of discrimination experienced by Black women in U.S. society. It also emphasized the inherent value of Black women and the urgent need for specifically Black female liberation.

Perhaps the first formal statement of Black feminism appeared in 1977, when a group known as the Combahee River Collective published a statement about their work. In that statement, the Collective emphasized the difficulty of separating “race from class from sex oppression.” These three aspects of oppression—race, class, and sex—must be considered together, “because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.” Lorde first published “Hanging Fire” in 1978, which places the poem in conversation with the Collective’s landmark statement. Although the poem initially seems like it could be about any girl struggling with teenage insecurity, “Hanging Fire” must also be understood as a specific exploration of Black girlhood and the particular challenges that attend it.

Stream-of-Consciousness Technique

In “Hanging Fire,” Lorde pushes lyric poetry to a near breaking point. A typical lyric poem showcases how its first-person speaker thinks and feels in real time. The significance of such a poem lies as much in the flow of thoughts as in the thoughts themselves. In Lorde’s poem, however, the rapid movement from one thought to the next is more extreme than the typical lyric. Instead, it more closely approximates a technique known as stream-of-consciousness. The term “stream-of-consciousness” was first intimated by William James, who wrote in his 1893 book The Principles of Psychology that we should understand consciousness “as an uninterrupted ‘flow.’” Writers and critics quickly adopted James’s term to describe literary techniques that aimed to represent just such an uninterrupted flow in a character’s experience.

Important examples of stream-of-consciousness technique in the early twentieth century include Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence (1915–1967), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). In these and other works, stream-of-consciousness style is often characterized by lack of punctuation and a rapid-fire series of seemingly unrelated thoughts and impressions. “Hanging Fire” demonstrates both techniques as it follows the speaker’s nonlinear flow of thoughts, perceptions, and associations.