Hanging Fire: Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major.

Thoughts of Death

Twice in the poem the speaker expresses a concern about her own premature death. Her first thought of death appears in the first stanza, where she asks, “what if I die / before morning[?]” (lines 8–9). These lines seem to come out of nowhere. The previous lines expressed fairly mundane concerns about the condition of her skin and the boy she has a crush on. Here, however, she entertains the much more extreme thought that she could die before morning. It’s difficult to tell how to interpret this thought. Is it just one concern among many? Or does the speaker have a more specific anxiety around death? We can’t really know. However, the speaker circles back to thoughts of premature death near the poem’s end, when she again asks, “will I live long enough / to grow up[?]” (lines 32–33). The simple fact that the speaker repeats her concern signals that it preoccupies her to an unusual degree. After all, teenagers don’t normally have such an acute sense of their own mortality. Even so, the speaker fixates on the possibility that she could die at any moment, which may reflect a deeper sense of the future being closed off to her.

“And momma’s in the bedroom”

Each stanza in “Hanging Fire” ends with a refrain in which the speaker references her mother, who’s withdrawn into her room. The refrain—which repeats in lines 10–11; 22–23; and 34–35—reads as follows:

and momma’s in the bedroom
with the door closed.

The speaker circles back to this observation three times. This repetition suggests that the speaker may be physically returning to the hallway, checking again and again to see if the door has opened. The fact that it never does open affirms that the channel of communication and support between mother and daughter is closed off. The closure of this channel keeps the mother withdrawn in her bedroom, while the daughter waits outside, left alone to sort through her many anxieties and insecurities. The separation of mother and daughter in this poem also suggests a deeper crisis in Black womanhood. Although we readers don’t have any concrete information about why the speaker’s mother has withdrawn, we can infer that her own challenges, like her daughter’s, are informed by her experiences as a Black woman.

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