George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”(Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense). It is within everyone’s manifest destiny that the history of the past will catch up to them, only for them to then repeat it. Poet Lucille Clifton grew up with parents who were barely educated. Clifton’s parents strived for her to not be like them, and worked hard for her to have a good education. Clifton went on to Howard College only for her to drop out two years in. The past caught up to Clifton and she repeated her parent’s mistake, but she also learned from it. She went back to school and ended up becoming a famous poet with two Pulitzer Prize nominations. In one of Clifton’s most popular poems, “forgiving my father,” she writes about the inevitability of repeating history and warns people to avoid this. Throughout the poem, the daughter is bitter at her father for giving her nothing, leading her to think he owes her some kind of payment. By seeking the payment the daughter thinks she deserves, she will become as selfish as her father and in turn will repeat the past, showing that she is no better than her father.

No matter how much the daughter might resent her father for giving her nothing, she cannot blame him entirely and she does not. Lucille makes this clear by writing, “but you were the only son of a needy father, / the father of a needy son” (12-13). The history of the father is given here that he was just like his daughter and dealt with his own problems of the past by having a father who was needy just like him. He had nothing and still has nothing to give to his daughter because of this. His daughter confirms this by saying, “you gave her all you had/ which was nothing.” (14-15). The father was not able to overcome his own father’s empty life; history repeated itself for the father. This creates a parallel structure between the grandpa and dad and again with the dad and daughter. The structure is the predetermined destiny of being left with nothing that she cannot escape. That is why she is looking for payment, whether it is payment of a bill her father should have paid, or food that was not given to her because his pockets were empty. By the father not having anything, the daughter is left in the same position the father was once in, making it more likely for her life to be a parallel to her fathers life.

Aside from tempting destiny through parallel structure, payment is a recurring theme that expresses the daughter’s need for completion. The father was said to be “needy,” and there are already signs that his daughter is also “needy” like her father. This neediness comes from the daughter’s wanting of some sort of payment she expected from her father but never got. The beginning of the poem starts out with, “it is friday. we have come/ to the paying of the bills.” (1-2). The daughter suggests here that she has no money in order to pay the bills, which makes her bitter. That is why all she cares about is her problem with payment, specifically with money in this instance. Payment comes in many forms to the daughter besides money. The poem ends with the daughter wanting a payment of growing up with a father who could not help her, saying, “what am i doing here collecting?/ you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes/ and no accounting will open them up.” (21-23). The daughter has to ask herself why she still wants something more from her father. This is because she had an empty childhood because throughout the poem, there is no capitalization, which suggests that she feels as low as lower case letters and that is why she does not capitalize any words. So she seeks to collect a payment, which has made her selfish from her father. This makes history repeat itself intergenerationally.

The daughter is destined for the same future as her father. Even though some people might say that no destiny is predetermined, the daughter is too far down the path of neediness that at some point there is no turning back. The daughter holding on to the hatred of her father is what will continue dragging her down this path. The daughter claims, “and i hold it out like a good daughter.” (7) The daughter thinks she is a good daughter. Yet she cannot get past her father’s mistake of doing nothing for her. She does this by counteracting that last statement with, “i wish you were rich so i could take it all” (10). This confirms that the daughter would take it all from her father if she could demonstrating that she is not the good daughter she thinks she it. The repetition of words like “daddy, daddy” (9), might lead some people to believe that she is a good daughter that can get over her father’s mistakes, but that is not the case. She repeats daddy only to mock him because after repetitions like that, she follows it with lines like “old lecherold liar.” (9-10). This hatred has caused her to be selfish because she can only criticize him like he did with his own father, making her destiny predetermined that she is going to repeat the past.

The daughter is on the same path as her father by being needy of a payment that she will never get. It is only making her selfish. Even though a destiny can be predetermined, a destiny can be altered, because nothing is set in stone. Lucille Clifton learned from her mistake of not doing well in school and she tried again and was able to overcome that obstacle to becoming an award-winning poet. That is the solution to avoid condemning oneself to their past and why she warns people to begin with. The daughter in the poem, which represents Clifton, needs to actually forgive her father and move on. Her father was never able to do that with his own father and that is why he would always have nothing, because he became too obsessed with a good life he always wanted but never got. He was needy of his father when he was alive and needy when his father died, which made him repeat history. If his daughter is going to do the same exact thing as her father, then her life is condemned to be a repeat of her father’s life. Instead, she can forgive him, and stop looking for payment that is never going to come. Her father never gave her anything to begin with and he still cannot provide for her now that he is in the grave. His past is done, but it does not mean the daughter has to follow in his footsteps, if she could only break the chain and move on. However, the path that she is on now of trying to “collect” is just a circular path of repeated mistakes that will keep her father’s past clinging on to her, thus making it all the more harder to escape her family history. As with the quote from Santayana, she is only condemning herself to repeat the past.

