Driftwood (1914) is a poetry collection written by Olivia Ward-Bush Banks, a Black Montaukett woman born in 1869. Driftwood is told in nine parts: Driftwood, Bits, The Tide Surges, Lights Along-Shore, The Moaning Tide, The Brightening of the Hearth Side, The Burning Logs of Memory, Dreams by the Driftwood Fire, and A Floating Spar. As a poetry collection, Driftwood focuses on quotidian Black experiences such as being lost in one’s identity and personhood and the impacts of United States imperialism and expansion on Black Americans and Indigenous peoples. Bush-Banks’ narrative voice intertwines her personal experience as a Black Montaukett woman with the socio-political and economic landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in other words, then, I argue that Bush-Banks crafts a poetic world that easily maps onto racial struggles, racialized and gendered violence against Black women, etc., that exist in post-Reconstruction era America – a world plagued with Jim Crow laws, segregation, horrendous violence against Black Americans, systematic and legal barriers that limit mobility, etc.
A valuable question to ask here is: why is her literature and work hidden in archives and analysis of pre-Harlem Renaissance writers? Bush-Banks was active in literary circles of the time period, exchanging letters with Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Carter G. Woodson, among others. How can I recover such a little-known but rich, expansive, deeply affective, and pedagogical text (I argue that such a text, as well as Bush-Banks' unpublished works, is in conversation with the empirical, personal, and political struggles of Black and Indigenous woman/people today)? Bush-Banks writes that “bits of driftwood are, but the poor misshapen remnants of some bark wrecked on its homeward course…” and her readers are “discouraged travellers” who can use the driftwood in life (Bush-Banks 49). What changes to concepts of space and temporality when we view ourselves – her audience and readers from the present – as discouraged travellers? What can we learn from under-researched and undervalued Black women writers of the past? How does Bush-Banks negotiate boundaries of identity, personhood, and self in her poetry?
I want to situate and position my research within the African American literary tradition, as theorized by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. It is imperative, too, that I include lenses, scholarship, and theoretical frameworks from Black feminist thinkers and scholars on Black women’s writing. Here, I am particularly thinking about engaging with the works of Hazel Carby (Reconstructing Womanhood), Frances Smith Foster (Written by Herself), Bernice Guillaume & Zoe Pollak (the only scholars who have published work on Olivia Ward Bush-Banks), and Christina Sharpe (In the Wake: On Blackness and Being).