Go Down, Moses.
The pieces that I read for this essay is from the Vernacular Tradition “Go Down, Moses”. I grew up listening and singing to the song Go down Moses without knowing the deep meaning that was associated with it. I now understand that this poem is very significant to African Americans tradition because it represents the struggles they faced to get freedom when they were captured as slaves. “Go Down, Moses,” a spirituals of the vernacular tradition which also represents the history of slavery of black people in United States. The story of Go down Moses was used to express the undeniable desire for freedom felt by the African Americans slaves. The desire to be free could be heard from the audio as the voice in the song stresses the word “go”.
This reading is about slavery in the bible, when the people of Israel were held in Egypt by pharaoh. In the Old Testament, God chooses Moses to lead his people out of slavery. He sent Moses to Egypt to warn pharaoh to release his people or he will smite his first born dead. In the bible when pharaoh refused to listen, God reacted by killing every first born in Egypt. As a result, pharaoh decided to release his slaves and “Let my people go” as the last line suggested. As we know, black slavery ended when people started fighting back for their freedom. Even though some people died in the process, the fight for freedom was accomplished.
However, after reading the book version and listening to the audios I noticed a significant difference on how the spirits of the word are transmitted through different version, and the tone of the each pieces.
In the book version, the opening lines tell Moses—the leader of the people of Israel who were held captive as slaves by the Egyptian ...
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...n be compared to the hardship felt by the people of Israel in the phrase, “Oppressed so hard they could not stand.”
In contrast, the tone of the poem was very different for both book and audio version. Reading Go Down, Moses from the book was boring, less meaningful and less heartfelt because it just felt like I was reading a newspaper. It was hard to comprehend real meaning and emotion to it. On the other hand, listening to this story on the audio was very heartfelt, and full of emotions. Paul Robeson’s voice was deep and intense in the audio and it sounds like I was hearing the message directly from God. One could easily feel the pain and hurt from Robeson’s voice that he was calling for help. Like mention before, he sounds like he’s weak and in pain from the abuse. Overall, both versions have the same meaning which is the call for freedom for the slaves.
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Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later I believe there were things overshadowing Charles’ attention. While the man does give credit to a supreme being, his relation to the Christian culture comes from his encounters to which he documents in great detail with fellow slaves. As previously stated, I believe the significance of the slave’s ability to maintain reverence for the religion they practiced provided insight into what gave them hope. The story of Exodus is linked to many slave narratives and it was no different for these three Slave-owners looked upon the African Americans as lesser people who were in desperate need of support.
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Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.