17 pages • 34 minutes read
Hanging Fire
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Themes
Experiences of Adolescence
“Hanging Fire” explores moments that are experienced by most American teenagers, stressing aspects of the speaker’s naivety and innocence. These experiences include infatuation and heartbreak, suggesting that the speaker is generally still inexperienced and confronting rapid changes in her mental and physical development. The speaker says, “the boy I cannot live without / still sucks his thumb / in secret” (Lines 4-6). She has intense feelings of needing to be with her crush, claiming she “cannot live without” him (Line 4); however, she realizes he has some childlike qualities, including “suck[ing] his thumb” (Line 5). The speaker is unable to indulge in such childish habits, but her feelings for the boy remain strong. The contrast between her crush’s immaturity and seeming obliviousness to her and her own sense of intense desire for him suggests that she is maturing more rapidly than this male peer.
The gap between The more mature and self-aware young speaker and her less-accomplished male peers is referenced later in the poem as well, when the speaker asserts that she should have been chosen for the math team, as “[her] marks were better than his” (Line 26, emphasis added). The experience of having better grades and yet being denied appropriate academic recognition (e.g., acceptance onto the math team) while a male peer receives preferential treatment reflects the speaker’s experiences of sexism as a young woman. The speaker strongly suggests that her exclusion from the math team was not due to lack of merit, but the prejudiced stereotypes that claim boys and men are more naturally gifted in math and science than girls and women. The speaker’s sense of gender-based exclusion and discrimination mirror the race-based discrimination she faces due to Racism in America.
The speaker also describes difficult feelings centered upon her changing body. These include needing to “learn how to dance” (Line 12) and having “nothing to wear tomorrow” (Line 31). Dancing and clothing are means of self-expression that often assume particular importance for adolescents during high school, and the speaker mentions both in the context of social recognition and potential judgement —i.e., the party she will dance at, and the school she must wear her outfit to. She is thus becoming more conscious of how others perceive her, which makes her more self-aware and inspires some apparent anxiety within her. The speaker also feels singled out by “wearing braces” (Line 30), as if worrying that this could be perceived as another flaw. The speaker’s experiences and emotions thus reflect her adolescent state of being, with her more mundane concerns forming an important contrast to the more serious concerns of racially based violence that also prey upon her mind repeatedly throughout the poem.
Racism in America
The speaker of the poem, a young Audre Lorde, is a Black girl. This means that she not only has to grapple with the common and generally harmless Experiences of Adolescence she speaks about elsewhere in the poem, such as crushes and learning to dance, but also has to navigate racism in America.
Both of these themes can be seen in the line, “my skin has betrayed me” (Line 2). Her skin’s “betrayal” can be read as a struggle with acne—a common mark of adolescence—or as a struggle with having dark skin. The speaker’s skin makes her feel self-conscious and vulnerable, suggesting that the “betrayal” could allude to her worries that others will treat her differently—or worse, with violence—simply because she is Black. The speaker’s Blackness is further alluded to in her complaint that her knees are “ashy,” referencing a dry skin condition to which darker-skinned people are sometimes prone. In the 1970s, when “Hanging Fire” was published, people with dark skin were often victims of hate crimes. In an autobiographical sense, Lorde would have been “fourteen” (Line 1) around 1949—years before the civil rights movement and during an era in which segregation often went hand in hand with violent crimes against Black Americans. The poem’s speaker asks, “what if I die / before morning” (Lines 8-9), suggesting that she fears becoming the victim of a racially motivated crime.
Furthermore, the stated fear of dying is repeated in all three stanzas, highlighting how prevalent this fear can be in the lives of the speaker and other Black teenagers. Her thoughts flit between more harmless adolescent concerns and back to the more serious and frightening possibility of a premature death. The speaker worries she might “die before graduation” (Line 15), and wonders, “will I live long enough / to grow up” (Lines 32-33). The speaker’s morbid fears form a significant contrast to her musings about dances and crushes, stressing the ways in which she, as a young Black woman, has to juggle both common adolescent struggles with a precocious awareness of how vulnerable she is in a hostile and racist society.
Maternal Colorism and Neglect
Lorde’s mother, Linda, could pass for white and discriminated against people— including her own family members—who had darker skin than hers. She favored her lighter-skinned children over Audre, who had very dark skin (See: Background). Audre discusses her mother’s unequal treatment of her and her sisters in essays like “Eye to Eye.” In “Hanging Fire,” the colorism in her family home is indicated by the symbol of her mother’s closed bedroom door, which is repeated at the end of each stanza (See: Symbols & Motifs).
The speaker uses the refrain, “momma’s in the bedroom / with the door closed” (Lines 10-11, 22-23, 34-35) to allude to the sense of estrangement she feels in her relationship with her mother. The closed door represents a physical barrier between mother and daughter, a familial segregation that mirrors the societal segregation based on skin color that the speaker is already aware of. The speaker fears how she will be perceived by others throughout the poem, while this refrain about her “momma” suggests she also grapples with maternal judgement in the home, further heightening her self-consciousness. The significance of the speaker’s experience with maternal colorism is emphasized by the repetition of these lines at the end of each stanza, including the poem’s third and final one—this renders the closed door the poem’s final image, suggesting that the barrier remains static and insurmountable.
The closed door is not just a physical barrier but an emotional one. Beyond internalizing problematic hierarchies based on her mother’s colorism, the speaker feels isolated and even more vulnerable without her mother’s support. Her mother is not available for discussions about the difficult Experiences of Adolescence, let alone the more dangerous issue of Racism in America. The mother could potentially help the speaker with choosing clothes or with learning “how to dance” (Line 12) in a shared space of the house, but instead the speaker is limited to practicing in her own room, which is “too small” (Line 14), and fretting alone. There is thus an important contrast between the known, tiny space of the speaker’s room and the unknown and unknowable space of her mother’s bedroom, which reflects the gulf of experiences and emotions that divide them and that go unshared. The speaker’s sense of loneliness and difference is therefore twofold: She feels unwanted and judged within her home space, and she feels unheard and discriminated against for both her gender and skin color out in the wider world.
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By Audre Lorde
