The Poem About My Rights is a tragic monologue that reveals the thoughts and feelings of a person belonging to a marginalized group. The whole work is permeated with disturbing thoughts about Jordan’s rejection by society and attempts to find a place for herself in the world of her reasoning.
“The wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong skin” is a refrain for every minority group taught by the culture to percept their race and gender as unacceptable or undesirable. The author painfully leads the reader around the thought of feeling wrong in the oppressive culture.
Jordan tries to transfer the experience of being a black woman through the graphic descriptions of rape. This rape occurs on an identity level, “will the evidence look like the proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland” asks Jordan.
She compares the domination that the rapist establishes over the victim’s body to the cultural narrative of dominance over black women’s bodies. The memory of humiliation is a constant trauma that the victim carries through their life story.