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Brenda Marie Osbey Biography: about 6 pages (1,896 words)

Name: Brenda Marie Osbey

Birth Date: December 12, 1957

Nationality: American

Gender: Female

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Brenda Marie Osbey

Interviewer Violet Harrington-Bryan asked Brenda Marie Osbey about the chief subject of her poetry, the women of New Orleans and the bayou country. Osbey responded candidly: "See, the women in my poems are women who 'take no shit.' When you're living in a constant state of oppression, you can snap at any time." Osbey's poems detail the strength and resilience, as well as the psychic disorientation, of the colorful characters who inhabit this district. She describes her creative and historical study of Louisiana folklore as "a kind of cultural biography, a cultural geography." Her poems capture the essence of Afro-Louisianan culture and language.

Born on 12 December 1957 to Lawrence C. Osbey (a boxer) and his wife, Lois Emelda Hamilton, Osbey grew up in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. An honor student, she skipped her senior year in high school (1973-1974) to participate in the Early Admissions Program at Dillard University. Following her graduation from high school in 1974, she continued her education at Dillard. Her studies in French included a year abroad as a Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) scholar. During 1976 and 1977 she attended the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France, where she took classes in French literature and language. She received a B.A. in French and English from Dillard University in 1978.

Along with her interest in languages, Osbey had also been developing her talent as a poet, continuing the family tradition of writing begun by her maternal grandfather and her mother. In 1980 Osbey was awarded the International Communications Agency Research Award at Dillard and the Academy of American Poets Loring-Williams Prize. That year Osbey also embarked on her teaching career, as an instructor of French and English at her alma mater. During 1982 and 1983 she was the assistant director of the Foreign Language Division of the New Orleans Public Library. In 1984 she received the Associated Writing Programs Poetry Award and, as the Bernadine Scherman fellow, attended the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

During 1985 Osbey was the director of public and community relations for the Arts Council of New Orleans and gave several poetry readings in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as in Lexington, Kentucky. She was selected as a Bunting fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute for 1985-1986, with a concurrent appointment as Resident Scholar in Creative Writing at Currier House, both at Radcliffe College of Harvard University. She was also a resident fellow in 1986 at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Osbey earned an M.A. in English and Afro-American literature from the University of Kentucky in 1986. A fellowship that same year from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and a stint as writer in residence for Marion County, Kentucky (1986-1987), gave her the opportunity to read for audiences in Kentucky, Virginia, and Massachusetts. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, selected her as a fellow for 1987-1988.

She returned to Dillard University in the summer of 1988 as an assistant professor before accepting a position as a visiting assistant professor of African-American Literature at UCLA from 1988 to 1990. Since 1990 she has been an assistant professor in the Department of English at Loyola University. Her works in progress include several articles regarding Afro-Louisianian history, culture, and language; and translations of Afro-Brazilian, Francophone-African, and Caribbean poets. She is also a reader for the Callaloo Poetry Series and the Wesleyan Poets and Wesleyan New Poets series.

A collection of narrative poems about the people of New Orleans and the bayous, Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983), Osbey's first book, is divided into three sections: "My Name Is Felicity," "My Voice Is an Okono Drum," and "They Will Witness the History." In each section individuals relate stories about lives thwarted by the malevolent behavior of lovers or loved ones. The various narrators do not give full details about themselves or the ceremonies that shape their lives. They force the reader to put together clues in much the same way a historian pieces together information about past events. Thus the historicity and verisimilitude of the characters is firmly established.

When Harrington-Bryan asked Osbey about the background of her women characters, she responded that these women were real Louisiana folk, "a group of black women who believe they are called upon by the Spirit to search out evil wherever it may be hiding .... They symbolize all that is dark and protected and sheltered about the culture, about women, about life in New Orleans."

In the title poem, "Ceremony for Minneconjoux," three generations of women are adversely affected by one man, a Native American of the Choctaw nation. The various narrators piece together the family history of Minneconjoux, a woman so named by her mother to establish the daughter's Choctaw heritage. The word Minneconjoux is the name of the Native American nation that once lived in Louisiana and Arkansas. An unidentified narrator begins the tale with Mama Lou Philemon's hiring of a Choctaw to do chores around her property.

Her daughter Lenazette details her own growing attraction to the older man and his seduction of her following the combing of her long hair. She later bears a daughter she names Minneconjoux. Lenazette kills the Choctaw after being forced to submit to him while Minneconjoux can observe their sexual activity, and Lenazette is incarcerated for the murder. Minneconjoux becomes mentally unbalanced. Living in the city with her grandmother Mama Lou, she picks up the narration of the story, relating how her grandmother exhibits seemingly erratic behavior when she cuts off the girl's hair after a young boy is attracted to the girl's braids. Later Minneconjoux understands that the grandmother perceived the boy's attraction as a prelude to another disastrous seduction. As an adult, Minneconjoux visits the bayou shack where her parents lived before the murder. There she finds a crone who talks about "child-having and other ceremonies." The old hag is Minneconjoux's mother, debilitated as a result of her incarceration.

In the second section the poems "Living in a Tan House," "Eileen," and "Ramona Veagis" feature protagonists who are all New Orleans women who cannot live prescribed existences. Lavinia Thierfield, who chafes at marital life in her tan house, seeks solace in singing with a voice like "an okono drum." Eileen on Onzaga Street wakes up one morning feeling like she "could kill someone" and proceeds to murder several family members. Ramona Veagis suffers a nervous breakdown after "she had fallen off the world / and could not climb back on." The portraiture of these women is deliberately incomplete, so the reader must conjecture about the rest of each story.

The third section addresses how other women handle their lives, which verge on "madness," and how the legacy of strength and endurance is transmitted among the womenfolk. In "Chifalta" a mother and daughter converse. The mother is able somewhat to control her mania. However, she tells her daughter, "go ... / i can not bear your madness / and my own as well." A poet/narrator in "Writing the Words" vows to record "the history of migrations" of Sally and others; another persona acknowledges the fefe women whose feet are telling of "all the lives."

Osbey's second book, In These Houses (1988), continues the themes of the first by focusing on the "swift easy women," the conjure women, their female neighbors and clients who live on Onzaga Street. Again Osbey divides the book into three sections, which correspond to three principal categories: the women, the place, and the legacy. In part 1, "In These Houses of Swift Easy Women," Thelma V. Picou is a woman who "was so loose / she couldn't even hold onto herself" until, as her husband, Henry, says, "thelma came unstopped one day":

i saw her heading out the front door

naked as she come into the world

and before i could say a word

thelma was out in the middle of the neutral ground

dancing and screaming

eating the black dirt

calling freedom

freedom.

Although Henry appears rational, he does not understand the sexual oppression that Thelma sheds by seeking "freedom" through her madness. Other men who court and marry these women are equally baffled by their nonconformist behavior. Another woman, Eugenia, is murdered in "Little Eugenia's Lover" when her Hispanic lover bludgeons her to death one morning, apparently unable to accept her brown skin.

Parts 2 and 3 of In These Houses center respectively on the location of the characters and the historicity of the location. The houses, such as in "The House" and "Portrait," hold evidence of the tragic lives of past residents. Conjurer or hoodoo women who can give solace to the demented are the repositories of the events in the community. In "Consuela" they appear suddenly and break up a seemingly innocent girl's ring game. They know that the child who plays the game best can become a victim of her own vanity. These women also give succor to "collapsible women."

Osbey suggests in "Geography" that the legacy of a community can be deciphered:

the geography i am learning

has me place myself

at simultaneous points

of celebration ....

this place no one chooses

is the land i tarry in.

this ritual i go through

is as old as its name

and the prophet-women who dance it ....

Family histories, "the scraps of living," reside within the soul of every citizen, Osbey concludes in the last poem of the book, "House of Bones."

In Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (1991) the reader is aided in understanding Afro-Louisianan culture by a detailed glossary of Louisiana and New Orleans ethnic expressions and place names, more extensive than the list offered in In These Houses. Many of the character types familiar in Osbey's first two collections reappear in the twelve sections of the 1991 book, a long narrative poem that tells of an illicit love affair between a young woman, Marie Crying Eagle, and her married lover, Percy. Percy and his wife seek the aid of Ms. Regina, a conjurer to break the spell of his mistress. Yet Ms. Regina is powerless to help. In a candid revelation, the secular priestess tells him,

i'm old

and i'm black

but i'm an honest woman.

and that's why i have to tell you

there is nothing i can do for you son.

it's as you say.

she's in your blood.

All sectors of the Afro-Louisianan community in the New Orleans district are affected by the mysterious blood ties that bind the inhabitants to their ancestral families, their communities, and their lovers. Percy returns to Marie once again at the poem's end.

Critic Calvin Hernton gave a description of the women of Osbey's Ceremony for Minneconjoux that is appropriate for characters in all three of her published books: "All of Osbey's women are 'crazy,' salt-of-the-earth women whose personas and voices are flavored by the 'quaint' heritage of the cultural melting pot of New Orleans. In addition to influences from the American Indian and French and Spanish cultures, the styles of speech and the general aura of the women reflect a certain African mystique ('primitive' ways and 'superstitions') carried over into the New World and blended with the indigenously developed folkness of southern black women" ( Parnassus, 1985). In Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, the men claim the same heritage.

Osbey presents the ceremonies of living, albeit dangerously, among the black folk. While she assumes that her readers do have some knowledge of Louisiana culture, her interlacing of fact, fiction, mystery, and folklore entices her audiences to learn more.

This is the complete article, containing 1,896 words (approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page).

Copyrights: Jacqueline Brice-Finch, James Madison University. Brenda Marie Osbey from Dictionary of Literary Biography. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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