The poem “forgiving my father,” written by Lucille Clifton in 1969, is a poem of gradual forgiveness of both a monetary and emotional debt that the speaker feels she is owed from her financially irresponsible and emotionally abusive father. The poem addresses the speaker’s relationships with both of her parents. She is angry with both her father for abusing her mother and her mother for exposing herself – and the rest of the family – to the abuse. However, an obvious turning point in the middle of the poem shows the speaker’s slight tenderness toward her father and ends with the speaker “forgiving” both parents by washing her hands clean of the entire situation.
The first stanza begins with the speaker confronting her father. She has come to collect money for bills that have gone unpaid. Her father has “stood in [her] dreams like a ghost” (lines 3-4). The use of the word “ghost” here implies that the father is both literally, and also figuratively, dead to the speaker at this point in the poem. The speaker, then, tells the father that although he has been “asking for more time” (line 4), “it is payday” (line 5). Payday” is the first example of monetary language used in the poem; however, there are several other references to money, debt and collection woven throughout the poem. These references indicate that actual monetary loss, not just emotional loss, occurred within the family. Then, the speaker calls her father “old man” (line 5) , which is an emotionless phrase that could be used to describe a complete stranger, and the way it is used showcases the idea that the speaker has emotionally detached herself from her father. He is not “dad” or even “father” here, but simply “old man.”
However, the father is not the speaker’s only concern. She references her mother appears in line 6, as the speaker states that her mother’s hand “opens in her early grave” (line 5). This line suggests that the speaker’s mother has also left the mortal world, albeit earlier than expected, and that her father, and his monetary and emotional irresponsibility, has somehow contributed to the mother’s early demise. Even in her death, the mother can not rest peacefully in her grave, but rather her hand has burst through the dirty ground and she is still desperately grasping for the money – and emotional reparations – she believes she is owed. However, the mother does not do the actual reaching, but rather the speaker “hold[s] [her mother’s hand] out like a good daughter” (lines 6-7). The phrase “like a good daughter” reveals several complexities about the speaker’s relationship with her mother. The speaker has to do the dirty work for her mother; she is the one who has to come collect what her mother is owed. Her mother and father are both long gone from the physical world, but is it the speaker who is left to deal with the mess they have collectively left behind. All her life, the speaker has had to act as the mother’s confidant, behaving “like a good daughter,” and now, even after the mother’s death, she must continue to show loyalty to her. The role the speaker has assumed as her mother’s caretaker includes the speaker harboring resentment in her heart because of what the father has done to her family and also to her mother specifically. However, the speaker also harbors a slight hatred for her mother, whom she has had to mindlessly obey “like a good daughter” her whole life. The speaker might have hated her father for her own reasons, but she was also expected to by her mother, although her mother was the one who had made the family vulnerable to her father’s deviant ways. So, although it was the father who financially, and emotionally, abused the mother and caused damage to the family, the speaker does not completely pardon the mother of all blame.
The damage caused by the father is so immense, in fact, that at the beginning of stanza two, the speaker states “there is no more time for [him]” (line 8) and realistically, “there will never be time enough” (line 9) for him to repay all the monetary – and emotional debt – he owes the family. However, it is in the second stanza that an inkling of forgiveness appears. Here, the speaker calls her father “daddy daddy” (line 9), a term of endearment and affection that is often used in childhood. This phrase indicates that at some point the speaker and her father did have a healthy relationship – and that somewhere in her, she still remembers this part of their past .However, the speaker follows “daddy daddy” with the phrase “old lecher” (line 9), which suggests the father was somehow immoral. It can be assumed that the immoral behaviors he engaged in involved monetary loss, but could have also involved other unscrupulous acts. The speaker also calls him an “old liar” (line 10). The use of the word “old” in front of both insults suggests that the father may have once been emotionally and financially stable when he was young, but as he aged, his morals weakened and he started to indulge himself. These indulgences, then, eventually led to the lack of financial and emotional security in the family. By the end of the second stanza, the speaker has expressed anger with both her mother and her father.
In line twelve, however, the poem reaches it’s pivotal turning point. The speaker acknowledges the fact that “you [the father] were the son of a needy father” (line 12) and are also now “the father of a needy son” (line 13). Here, the speaker attributes some blame to the father’s own childhood. The father was raised in a household quite similar to the one he created for his adult family, where his “needy father” engaged in the same hazardous and abusive activities that he would pursue later in his own life. The word “needy” here connotes both monetary need in the household and the need to engage in other deviant acts, whether that be immoral sexual ventures or abusive tendencies. The speaker realizes here that her own father simply continued a long history of abuse that was present in the previous generation and will continue through her father’s own “needy son,” the speaker’s brother. There are no other references to her brother throughout the poem. If the speaker’s brother had sided with the mother and the speaker against the father, we can assume he would have been mentioned in a less derogatory way. Therefore, him being described as “needy” as well indicates that the speaker feels that her brother will – or perhaps already has – fall prey to the same mistakes as her father and grandfather.
Forgiveness continues to infiltrate the second stanza when the speaker states “you [father] gave her [mother] all you had which was nothing” (lines 13-14). It becomes obvious to the speaker that the father was destined to turn out the way he did. She realizes that essentially the father had “nothing” but his own experiences and perceptions of family life to work with when creating his own family. It was inevitable then that he would pass on nothing of value to his own family because his past experiences with his own unstable and needy father permeated his entire concept of family life. All the father knew was need and poverty. He had had “nothing” growing up – no money, no food and essentially, no concept of the way a family should run. This striking revelation affects the speaker’s attitude toward both her father and mother in the final stanza.
Finally, in stanza three, blame for the family’s problems is spread evenly between both parents. The speaker recognizes that “you [both mother and father] were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (line 19). A “bargain” is something that one person makes, a chance that he or she takes, all the while knowing that the outcome may not be favorable. The mother in the poem bargained her family’s financial and emotional security, and the father bargained by entering into a relationship and starting a family that he knew he might one day corrupt. The speaker, however, did not bargain or have any part in the negotiation; she was simply born into it. This is where the speaker starts to see that the family’s problems are not really the family’s problems, but that they belong to the mother and father. At the end of the nineteenth line, she declares the “bad bargain” was “not [hers]” (line 19).
After she has realized that she really does not need to be involved in this situation any longer, after she has realized it does not belong to her, she continues to forgive her family – or rather, wash her hands clean of the situation. In line twenty, the speaker addresses her father again, calling him an “old pauper” (line 20), which indicates once again that the family was in monetary trouble because a pauper is a term used to describe the poorest of the poor. Paupers are also given charity, and this idea that her father is somehow a person deserving of charity indicates that now, at the end of the poem, she views her father as someone at least worthy of help from others. The speaker also calls him an “old prisoner.” Generally speaking, a prisoner can be a negative term used to indicate someone who is behind bars for a crime. However, here it connotes someone who has been taken hostage or has suffered due to circumstances beyond their control, like a prisoner of war. Therefore, using the term “prisoner” here also shows that the speaker has “forgiven” her father as much as she possibly can. She realizes that her father was a prisoner of his lineage, which was full of “nothing” but irresponsibility and immorality.
Then the speaker finally decides – or perhaps just fully realizes – that it is time for the whole ordeal to come to an end. “what am I doing here collecting?” (line 21) she asks herself. She realizes that her father has “nothing” to give her, and that both of her parent’s are now deceased, lying “side by side in debtor’s boxes” because they could not even afford coffins. Her attitude about the situation has come full circle. She knows that her efforts to collect for her mother are in vain; there is no money left to repay the monetary debt, and there is even a smaller chance that the emotional wounds can ever really be healed. She is not angry at her parent’s any longer, but rather has decided to walk away from the situation because she knows that those coffins are never going to open up and magically restore her family or pardon their debt.
“forgiving my father” is a whirlwind of ups and downs, an emotional journey that follows the speaker from anger to forgiveness to apathy. Within this short poem, the speaker travels from a place of absolute hatred for her father to a place of utter emotional indifference.
