
Whenever there is an argument, the person in the middle feels obligated to take a side. Sometimes doing this makes the person realize how detrimental their other relationships may be. Similarly, in Lucille Clifton’s “forgiving my father,” the protagonist is a girl who is speaking of her parents’ divorce. After taking her mother’s side for so long, she finally realizes that doing this is never going to fix her relationship with her dad. In her piece, Lucille Clifton uses diction and imagery to show a negative relationship and its effect years later in order to argue taking one’s side will not fix the damage that is done within a relationship. 

In the beginning of this poem the daughter makes it evident that feels she is in the middle of the divorce between her parents. She brings up her mother and says, “my mother’s hand opens in her early grave and i hold it out like a good daughter” (6-7). This puts her directly in the middle of the two while also taking her mother’s side. In doing so, she is calling herself a “good daughter.” Her mother had clearly died still waiting to receive money as well as other things from her ex-husband. As her daughter, she decided that in order to be considered a good daughter she needed to step up and take charge. More specifically, the daughter is put in between her parents’ financial troubles when she says, “all week you have stood in my dreams/ like a ghost, asking for more time/ but today is payday, pay day old man” (3-5). She uses these words to describe her father with a negative connotation saying that he is standing there pale-faced, short of his money. However, this use of the word ghost has a dual meaning here. It also shows that her father too has passed. By calling him old man it shows that after all of this time she is tired of hearing his excuse over and over again.  

Towards the middle of the poem the daughter continues to take her mother’s side of the divorce. She says, “i wish you were rich so i could take it all/ and give the lady what she was due” (9-10). This is her telling her father she wishes she could take all of his money that he owes her mother and that he has in general so that she could give her mother absolutely everything. By doing it herself, she is directly within the divorce but also on her mother’s side. She is tired of her father not giving her mother what she is supposed to get. She continues with “you gave her all you had/ which was nothing. you have already given her/ all you had” (14-16). Now she is showing how she is angry with her father for everything that he did not give her mother. It is clear that he did not give her mother what he was supposed to because he simply did not have the money. However, what he did end up giving her was not enough. The protagonist in this poem is angry because of what her father had done to her mother. Through taking her mother’s side, she continued to grow more and more unhappy with him.

The protagonists’ anger towards her father can been seen throughout Lucille Clifton’s piece, “forgiving my father.” For example, she is constantly calling him names. She says, “there will/ never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher/ old liar” (8-10). She begins by calling him “daddy” which shows that originally they had a good father-daughter relationship. However, she then switches over to this particular word “lecher” which refers to sexual desires, and “liar” which is someone who is dishonest. This brings up a mistrust and shows that the father had cheated on the mother. Since the daughter is uneasy about this she calls him these names. When she does refer to him as “daddy” it is simply because she is showing that at one point they did not have issues in their relationship and she looked up to him as her daddy. When the mistrust happened she no longer saw him as that, but instead saw him as these negative words that she now refers to him as. As the poem continues she calls him names like “old pauper,” “old prisoner,” and “old dead man” (20). None of these words have positive nuances, showing the damage that has been done to ruin the relationship between the father and daughter.  

In the end of the poem she begins to stop taking her mother’s side. At first, it was evident that she had been against her father when she said, “i wish you were rich so i could take it all/ and give the lady what she was due” (10-11). It is clear that she is not on her father’s side since she wants to take his stuff herself and directly give it to her mother. Later, she begins to stop taking sides when she says, “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (19). Here she is finally taking herself out of the situation and explaining that her parents brought out the bad in each other. She questions why she is in the middle of their divorce after all this time when she asks, “what am I doing here collecting?” (21). This is her realizing that her parents’ issues are irrelevant to her and that it is not her place to get involved. No matter how much she took her mother’s side in the past, she now knows that her bitterness towards her father is not going to change. 

Throughout this piece Lucille Clifton uses imagery to show exactly what the daughter went through. When she calls her father a “ghost” it gives a vivid image of a pale, dead man who is begging for more time. This is also evident when she says that “my mother’s hand opens in her early grave and i hold it out like a good daughter” (7-8). This image of her dead mother in her grave still awaiting everything her ex-husband owes her is extremely intense. It shows how at points throughout the divorce she was on her mother’s side. She wanted to be a good daughter and do everything for her mother, proving how she was against her father. At the very end she is referring to her father and she says, “you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes/ and no accounting will open them up” (22-23). This is her final thought where she comes to the conclusion that her father is in his coffin in the ground and there is no amount of money now that is going to change what happened. No matter how much time has gone by, she has now realized that even taking her mother’s side is not going to change how much she resents her father. 

Lucille Clifton was able to show that the protagonist in her piece, “forgiving my father” came to a realization that no matter how much she took her mother’s side in her parents’ divorce, her relationship with her father was ever going to be mended. She did this by using imagery and diction to create a piece which followed the daughter’s thoughts. In the end, it was evident through the protagonist’s anger that taking sides within a divorce will not fix the damage done to the relationships within. 
