What makes people or certain things Icons? A Icon is a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something. During the Black Arts Movement one of the questions brought up was if Black people should change their views as to who and what our Icons and Symbols were. In the book JuJu Magic Songs for the Black Nation which written by and but together by Askia Muhammad Abu Bakr El-Toure, he points out many different Black people that can be called Icons and Symbols for us. He follows the Black aesthetics of Larry Neal who points out that we as a community need Icons and Symbolism to help find ourselves. A poet named Don L. Lee wrote “ We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil. It’s time for Du Bois, Nat Turner, and Kwame Nkrumah” this excerpt right here explains how Black writers were starting to step away from western aesthetics and looked more towards Black Icons. As a people we need …show more content…
The tone of the poem itself seems to be one pointing out and acknowledging the things that make him Black. It’s us looking out to the east and saying thank you for making us great. He talks about the way we look and how evil the west really is. He gives thanks to the African gods which the west took from us and gave them different names. This whole poem is a thank you for being Black. The fact that we as a people have survived so much turmoil yet we can still stand up and say we are a beautiful people is powerful. He makes a reference when he says “Praise Be To: the Old Ones: Magi in pyramidal silence who made the JuJu in our blood outlast the Frankenstein of the west.”. In that line alone he calls the people of the west monsters that want to act like god yet when they see the mess they make they try to turn away from it or try to destroy it. While we are the geniuses that built the pyramids and helped Europe get out of their dark
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011) is a 1 hour and 40 minute documentary that observes the black power movement in American history. This film is directed by Swedish director Goran Hugo Olson and has detailed footage that was shot during the 1960s and 1970s by Swedish journalists. The footage largely focuses on the black power movements. The film allows viewers to not only grasp a better understanding of this movement but allows us to understand why this movement appealed to Swedish journalists. The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 includes vintage interviews with Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, and other prominent leaders during the Black Power Movement. The documentary also contains contemporary audio interviews and commentaries from various entertainers, artists, activists, and scholars, including but not limited to: Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli, Melvin Van Peebles, Erykah Badu, Abiodun Oyewele, and Questlove from The Roots.
The point of view of being the oppressed African American is clearly evident in Langston Hughes’s writing. The author states, “I am the darker brother” (2.2) Here Hughes is clearly speaking on behalf of the African American race because during the early and mid 1900’s African American were oppressed because of their darker skin color. No where in the writing does Hughes mention the word racism, segregation, discrimination. No where in the poem are words like Civil Rights Movement or Harlem Renaissance read. Yet, the reader knows exactly what Langston Hughes is referring to. This is because the writing talks about a darker brother being told to eat somewhere else. This leads the reader to put the point of view of the poem into play. Because it talks of such a brother and because Hughes’s was a revolutionary poet who constantly wrote on the struggles of the black man, then the reader is able to easily interpret the poem as a cry for the African-American man. Langston Hughes’s writing as an African American then makes the narration very probable and realistic.
It is true that old days were really hard to live in, especially if the person was dark skin. This poet’s main idea of this poem “ I, too” was that, he wanted to let people know what he, and most of the African American people were going through. He wanted to let people know that color should not define your personality, and people should accept the fact that people with dark skin were humans just like others. People should have accept them and treat them equally and respectfully. Also one of the things I liked in the poem was that, he was using word sing as a expression of a word of talk, he was not really singing but he was saying it
...is presented in a way that “blacks or whites can draw admonition from the subject” (1) . Another perspective from Revell is that the poem presents itself in terms of passionate personal regret. Revell believes that Dunbar felt guilty because he allowed himself to be bound to the “ plantation lifestyle” (1). The plantation life style internal anguish and agony the blacks went through as slaves. Some blacks have moved on from it, but some continue to use slavery as an excuse to not progress in life. It should be noted that Revell draws the most attention to the middle of the poem. The poem itself is masked because it never specifically says who its linked too, even though most would infer that it is linked to the black race. Revell concludes that Dunbar left aside the preconceived image of what it meant to be black in America, and spoke “only from his heart” (1) .
African American literature has evolved a tremendous amount over the centuries. The core themes have continued to grow with the African Americans and their fight for equality. A core theme throughout the works of African Americans has been freedom, and I believe this theme has evolved from wanting freedom, to getting freedom (yet still being segregated), to fighting for their freedom, to finally acting free and coming into their own. This progression would also be used to describe the evolution of the theme of equality as well. The African Americans wanted their equality, they fought for it, and soon began to write of themselves as true equals. These themes of freedom and equality, whether it be of African Americans in general, or even African
"For the first time since the plantation days artists began to touch new material, to understand new tools and to accept eagerly the challenge of Black poetry, Black song and Black scholarship."1
...be a black person in his time. He used his Poetry in sense to speak out against racism. African American Voices.Conneticutt:The Millbrook Press, 1995
Overall, this poem is used to compare an African American to a cypress tree in a positive manner, which is evergreen and always pointing upwards. The time frame in which Angelina Weld Grimke wrote this in was a difficult time to live in. Only recently had African Americans received their rights, and even then, other races, more prominently, caucasians were hateful towards them. Although not lengthy, this poem manages to successfully capture the enduring strength that African Americans held during this difficult time period by simply comparing them to a strong cypress
The theme throughout the two poems "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" and "From the Dark Tower" is the idea that African American live in an unjust
In the poem, he mentions black people that were treated unfairly and how many of those people are not recognized as much. He powerfully wrote: “Names lost. Know too many Trayvon Martins / Oscar Grants / and Abner Louimas, know too many / Sean Bells, and Amadou Diallos / Know too well that we are the hard-boiled sons of Emmett Till” (Lines 53-60). This quote shows how many of our black people are discriminated by their skin color are mistreated. Abner Louimas, Sean Bells and Amadou Diallos were men that were victims of police brutality and were shot several times by police officers. Specifically, Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin’s deaths were great examples as to how people were and still are racist. To take a case in point, Emmett Till who was African-American was tortured and killed because he flirted with a white woman. Trayvon Martin was a teenager who was shot and killed just because he went to grab a bag of skittles from his pocket, which the person who shot him thought he was reaching for a weapon. The many examples that Johnson makes help show how racism and stereotypes play a major role in our society because many people are still victims of discrimination. They are automatically stereotyped into a criminal who is about to do something that is illegal. In the society that we live in, blacks do not have any power, they do not get the benefit of the doubt whether or not
Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote this poem to illustrate the station in life for so many African Americans. It is clear that African Americans were "caged" in society at the turn of the century and wanted desperately to be seen as equal to whites. However, at the time this poem was written, black people had little hope of achieving that goal. That was a hypocrisy in the "Land of the Free."
To begin with, the poem emphasizes white supremacy by the differences in labeling the territories. As mentioned in the poem, there is no name of where the blacks live, as the poet writes in the second stanza, “District Six. No board says it is” (Afrika). It illustrates that the area that the blacks live do not have a name marked, so there is nothing indicating the presence of the
The poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” symbolically connects the fate of the speaker of the poem and his African American community to the indestructible and powerful force on Earth- the river. The river embodies both power and dominance but also a sense of comfort. The poem is a prime example of the message of hope and perseverance to anyone who has suffered or is currently suffering oppression and inequality in their lives and in society. The speaker in the poem pledges to the reader that with hard-work, determination, and willpower to succeed, he will get where he is going regardless of the obstacles and challenges he may face on his path of reaching his goals in life.
An iconography is a symbolic representation that carries hidden meaning of a term, image, and item. Both Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart fully describe many symbolisms of specific items and all of them are attached to different kinds of meaning behind. Although Heart of Darkness is a famous literature that was criticized by Chinua Achebe and each of their work represents different point of views during similar time of history, both literatures have a similarity that they operate iconography in relation to race, class and identity with their own interpretations of symbols and icons.
...f the “Black Logos.” While not necessarily being religious, he makes reference to God, Heaven, and the Star of Bethlehem. In addition to this characteristic, McKay also expresses the complexity of being Black in a White world by using intense imagery such as, “eyes of steely blue” (in reference to eyes of a white women), and “little lads, lynchers that were to be.” He refers to the White people as Fate for the Black people and yet, contradicts God as both White people and Black people. He says that while White people think they are a high and mighty God, Blacks truly are God because just as Jesus was persecuted as a minority, so are the African-American people. This poem, in addition to many other poems by Claude McKay, truly gives voice to the emotions and difficulties of an African-American poet during the times of slavery up to the end of the Harlem Renaissance.