Analysis Of The Poem America By Natasha Trethewey

334 Words1 Page

Natasha Trethewey’s America Natasha Trethewey, a poet from Mississippi, has a complex understanding of America, that were informed by her experiences in the South as a biracial woman. She primarily writes about experiences she had and also those of her parents and others before her that are connected to specific locations that have profound meaning to her. Within her writing she not only expresses her connection with and love for Mississippi, but also her contradicting disdain for its history. Trethewey demonstrates that how race is viewed culturally is impacted by history and it’s telling of it. The history of America for the black American is dark and painful and she recognizes its ongoing effects. “White Lies,” a poem by

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Suffering Mirrored By Nikky Finny

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    African-Americans’/ Affrilachians’ Suffering Mirrored: How do Nikky Finney’s “Red Velvet” and “Left” Capture events from the Past in order to Reshape the Present? Abstract Nikky Finney (1957- ) has always been involved in the struggle of southern black people interweaving the personal and the public in her depiction of social issues such as family, birth, death, sex, violence and relationships. Her poems cover a wide range of examples: a terrified woman on a roof, Rosa Parks, a Civil Rights symbol, and Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, to name just a few. The dialogue is basic to this volume, where historical allusions to prominent figures touch upon important sociopolitical issues. I argue that “Red Velvet” and “Left”, from Head off & Split, crystallize African-Americans’ /African-Americans’ suffering and struggle against slavery, by capturing events and recalling historical figures from the past.

    Read More

  • Figurative Language And Diction In Queens, 1963, By Julia Alvarez

    703 Words  | 2 Pages

    The female, adolescent speaker helps the audience realize the prejudice that is present in a “melting-pot” neighborhood in Queens during the year 1983. With the setting placed in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, the poem allows the audience to examine the experience of a young immigrant girl, and the inequality that is present during this time. Julia Alvarez in “Queens, 1963” employs poetic tools such as diction, figurative language, and irony to teach the reader that even though America is a place founded upon people who were strangers to the land, it is now home to immigrants to claim intolerance for other foreigners, despite the roots of America’s founding.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Anne Moody's Coming Of Age In Mississippi

    1178 Words  | 3 Pages

    Anne Moody’s memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, is an influential insight into the existence of a young girl growing up in the South during the Civil-Rights Movement. Moody’s book records her coming of age as a woman, and possibly more significantly, it chronicles her coming of age as a politically active Negro woman. She is faced with countless problems dealing with the racism and threat of the South as a poor African American female. Her childhood and early years in school set up groundwork for her racial consciousness. Moody assembled that foundation as she went to college and scatter the seeds of political activism. During her later years in college, Moody became active in numerous organizations devoted to creating changes to the civil rights of her people. These actions ultimately led to her disillusionment with the success of the movement, despite her constant action. These factors have contributed in shaping her attitude towards race and her skepticism about fundamental change in society.

    Read More

  • Slavery In The Souls Of Black Folk By Harriet Jacobs

    841 Words  | 2 Pages

    Analyzing the narrative of Harriet Jacobs through the lens of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du bois provides an insight into two periods of 19th century American history--the peak of slavery in the South and Reconstruction--and how the former influenced the attitudes present in the latter. The Reconstruction period features Negro men and women desperately trying to distance themselves from a past of brutal hardships that tainted their souls and livelihoods. W.E.B. Du bois addresses the black man 's hesitating, powerless, and self-deprecating nature and the narrative of Harriet Jacobs demonstrates that the institution of slavery was instrumental in fostering this attitude.

    Read More

  • America And I By Anzia Yezierska Analysis

    426 Words  | 1 Pages

    The tone of the short story “America and I” changed dramatically over the course of the narrative. The author, Anzia Yezierska, started the story with a hopeful and anxious tone. She was so enthusiastic about arriving in America and finding her dream. Yezierska felt her “heart and soul pregnant with the unlived lives of generations clamouring for expression.” Her dream was to be free from the monotonous work for living that she experienced back in her homeland. As a first step, she started to work for an “Americanized” family. She was well welcomed by the family she was working for. They provided the shelter Yezierska need. She has her own bed and provided her with three meals a day, but after a month of working, she didn’t receive the wage she was so

    Read More

  • Natasha Trethewey: The Cathartic Use Of Visual Art

    1075 Words  | 3 Pages

    Through the photograph, Trethewey is able to look back to this time of complex feelings and try to pinpoint the reason why she felt excluded and isolated, as well as the effect of her racial identity on her childhood. Additionally, she uses the photograph to try to gain a sense of control over her identity now, as a grown woman. Trethewey uses the visual art of photography to try comprehend not only her personal life but Southern history as well. In her poem, “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi,” she describes a photograph of a parade in Vicksburg celebrating cotton, the crop that made white Southerns rich, but left African Americans poor. By reviewing this photograph, Trethewey attempts to understand the truth of Southern history’s double-sided nature, giving her control in the form of knowledge. In an interview with Joan Wylie Hall, Trethewey explains that much of her poetry involves photography because she is interested in “what might be behind an image,” such as the moments before and after the photograph was taken as well as “what the subjects of the photograph could

    Read More

  • What Is Evidence By Natasha Trethewey

    1016 Words  | 3 Pages

    A person cannot change their body; therefore, they cannot change the color of their skin. Trethewey uses phrases like “cold lips stitched shut”, “expression of grief”, “language of blood”, and “muck of ancestry” in order to describe the constant verbal abuse and ignorant insults she received due to the nature of her genetics. The words of the body, which describe her physical features, are paired with the negatively connotated words to compare racism in the 70s and 80s with current racism in America. In comparison, Trethewey dissects the issue of racism by describing the lack of monuments for black soldiers as disrespect. In the poem “Pilgrimage”, Trethewey describes the lack of memorials for the Native Guard in Mississippi as a clear sign of Southern racism. Mississippi is “a graveyard for skeletons of sunken riverboats”, “hollowed by a web of caves . . . like catacombs.” The city floods with the soldiers from the Civil War, but the bodies are “stone, white marble, on Confederate Avenue.” The soldiers honored in Mississippi are Confederate generals and colonels. Mississippi distinctly decided against recognizing and celebrating one of the first all-Black regiments for the Union, the Native

    Read More

  • The Damnation Of Women Analysis

    1282 Words  | 3 Pages

    Anna Julia Cooper’s, Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress, an excerpt from A Voice from the South, discusses the state of race and gender in America with an emphasis on African American women of the south. She contributes a number of things to the destitute state African American woman became accustom to and believe education and elevation of the black woman would change not only the state of the African American community but the nation as well. Cooper’s analysis is based around three concepts, the merging of the Barbaric with Christianity, the Feudal system, and the regeneration of the black woman.

    Read More

  • Ma Rainey and the Blues: Blacks and Blues

    953 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...elief in bleak futures, isolation, and reluctance to leave their own doors in the morning to confront the allegorical road of life. It is apparent that Rainey’s song resonates with the audience members when they “bow dey heavy heads, set dey moufs up tight an’ cried” (49). This line is repeated once more, reaffirming that the audience is bowing in reverence for words that ring true to them, speak to them, and move them to acknowledge the common pains of their personal microhistories. “Backwater Blues” describes situations that African Americans endure every day; Brown illustrates this poignantly when he notes that there is nothing more to say but that Ma Rainey catches hold of her listeners and their problems (40, 52). It is interesting to note the parallel between the poem’s focus on unifying different people and the unification of poetry and song within the poem.

    Read More

  • Natasha Tretheway's Poem 'Incident'

    709 Words  | 2 Pages

    Natasha Tretheway’s Native Guard was published in 2006 and contains many poems about her childhood in the Deep South during the Civil War era. Her poem “Incident” tells a story that has seemingly been passed down in her family for generation. The poem can be interpreted to tell the story of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in the speaker’s yard. The variations in repetition that Tretheway uses throughout the poem shows that although the details of a story can change, the idea of racial intolerance prevails regardless of what version of the story is told.

    Read More

  • Margaret Walker

    1309 Words  | 3 Pages

    Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama to Reverend Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker (Gates and McKay 1619). Her father, a scholarly Methodist minister, passed onto her his passion for literature. Her mother, a music teacher, gifted her with an innate sense of rhythm through music and storytelling. Her parents not only provided a supportive environment throughout her childhood but also emphasized the values of education, religion, and black culture. Much of Walker’s ability to realistically write about African American life can be traced back to her early exposure to her black heritage. Born in Alabama, she was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and received personal encouragement from Langston Hughes. During the Depression, she worked for the WPA Federal Writers Project and assists Richard Wright, becoming his close friend and later, biographer. In 1942, she was the first African American to win the Yale Younger Poets award for her poem For My People (Gates and McKay 1619). Her publishing career halted for...

    Read More

  • Literary Techniques In Honoree Jeffer's The Gospel Of Barbecue

    1317 Words  | 3 Pages

    I am an upper class white female attending Vanderbilt University without any financial aid. I do not remember a time where I have ever desperately wanted for anything, except maybe that purple hula-hoop at the toy store when I was five. I am the perfect product of white privilege, and the perfect contrast to Honoree Jeffers’s collection of poetry The Gospel of Barbecue. This book challenged me; opening me up to a world in which being a black women was almost a crime. Jeffers highlights the topics of racism and feminism through her personal memories and through her creative use of literary techniques.

    Read More

  • White Lies Natasha Trethewey Meaning

    1229 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout history, literature has been used as an excellent form of communication across society. More specifically, however, poetry serves as a well respected medium used to convey messages, as its messages are often displayed in a less obvious manner, which means that they can be enjoyed when interpreted both narrowly and broadly. Poems about racial and social inequality, political issues, and intraracial discrimination have had a lasting impact on the world of literature as well as sectors of society beyond literature. For instance, the autobiographical poem "White Lies" by Natasha Trethewey tells the story of a young African American girl in the south battling the negative connotations of her very fair complexion. This poem addresses the

    Read More

  • Black Poetry

    2173 Words  | 5 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Issues Facing Blacks in Alice Walker's In Search of our Mother's Gardens

    972 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Alice Walker's book, In Search Of Our Mother's Gardens, she addresses many issues facing blacks in today's society. The two essays examined here, "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience" and "The Unglamorous But Worthwhile Duties Of the Black Revolutionary Artist Or Of the Black Writer Who Simply Works and Writes," concern themselves with the truth and beauty of being a black Southern writer and the role of the revolutionary black artist, respectively.

    Read More

More about Analysis Of The Poem America By Natasha Trethewey

Open Document