The Fat Black Woman's Poems

Beauty

is a fat black woman

walking the fields

pressing a breezed

hibiscus

to her cheek

while the sun lights up

her feet



Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, to a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'.