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
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
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
...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
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.
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
This poem is written from the perspective of an African-American from a foreign country, who has come to America for the promise of equality, only to find out that at this time equality for blacks does not exist. It is written for fellow black men, in an effort to make them understand that the American dream is not something to abandon hope in, but something to fight for. The struggle of putting up with the racist mistreatment is evident even in the first four lines:
...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) .
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
"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
Analyzing the poem’s title sets a somber, yet prideful tone for this poem. The fact that the title does not say “I Speak of Rivers,” but instead, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1) shows that he is not only a Negro, but that he is not one specific Negro, but in his first person commentary, he is speaking for all Negroes. However, he is not just speaking for any Negroes. Considering the allusions to “Mississippi” (9) and “Abe Lincoln” (9) are not only to Negroes but also to America, confirms that Hughes is talking for all African Americans. This poem is a proclamation on the whole of African American history as it has grown and flourished along the rivers which gave life to these people.
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
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."
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.
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.
...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.