Magic and the Body

In “homage to my hips,” Clifton assigns magical qualities to the Black female body by celebrating the speaker’s full figure and connecting her size to beauty, desirability, and power. Like in other poems in the collection Two-Headed Woman, the speaker in “homage to my hips” praises a certain part of her body both as a representation of her whole self and as an empowered phenomena in its own right. This can be seen in “homage to my hips” when the speaker switches from the possessive determiner “my” in the title to “these” in the poem’s text. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker introduces an anecdote about her hips with the phrase “i have known them to” (13). This gives the speaker’s body a mythical or larger-than-life quality. The hips are both a synecdoche for the speaker’s whole body...