As a Black female writer in the 21st century, having the opportunity to read works by poet/novelist Margaret Walker and now afforded a space to discuss her literary influence passed on to me in my own quest for truth in telling Black stories- our language, our creativity, our avant-garde is one in the same. Our wordplay and visual descriptions of Black life in America is a shared partnership, by conceptualizing the truth about what it means to be aware of one’s history through poetry, fiction, and essays. Reading and studying the literary stylistics of Margaret Walker, true writers go against the status quo of traditionalism as it pertains to language and the written word. It is okay to be experimental and radical, never apologizing for how a sentence is formed. Through poetry and fiction, Margaret Walker was a consummate linguist, mastering the literary art-form of writing dialect as she heard it in African American culture. Margaret Walker’s poetry, fiction, and essays will be examined by using literary explication as a tool, bringing clarity and understanding to her work about African American life in the south, and puts the …show more content…
writer's endeavors in a literary canon of powerful Black women of letters. Margaret Walker was that good. African American poetry by Black women writers has always been descriptive, emotional, up close and personal.
Margaret Walker’s poetry in my eyes was the quintessential edification of life about a people that were born into a systematic psychosis of slavery and religion. Using dialect as a form of political redemption is a personal connection that has led me to want to read as much by the poet/novelist. In reading her work today, being a poet I respect the writer for not wavering or over-shadowing the experiences that she visualized with her own eyes - the language in her work takes you into the exact moment that she is in and leaves you speechless. There are only three writers that do this in my opinion with style and grace: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Margaret Walker is now in their company; she was that
good. Examining the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker they all wrote or presently write in different genres of writing. Margaret Walker is now a member of this group of writers that have influenced me in journalism, essays, poetry, and fiction. Each one of these writers has written an important body of historical fiction that documents the lives of African American people in the United States. As a librarian and a reader of Black fiction, Margaret Walker’s first novel, Jubilee should be inducted into the American Literary Canon. Not only did the author research the subjects, eras, places and culture in which she would write - the author created a guide about the work that she started in college for teachers and students. Though the body of work was published later in her life, it still embodies the necessary elements of writing a historical account of a time period in American history that harbored slavery and how African American people still made it through. Margaret Walker was that good. There are only a few writers that have impacted my life as a writer. Margaret Walker’s words as a poet and novelist breathe life, history, culture, questions, experiences, and creativity into the nexus of Black history. Knowing the fundamental rules of writing is the precursor to greatness; only then can you break them. Margaret Walker never wavered from her style of writing. The writer never apologized for her gift, nor compromised the tone of her voice, and she had control and poise in her descriptive accounts about Black life in the South. As a writer, poet, and librarian studying the life and times of Margaret Walker have compelled me to examine her works in poetry and fiction with a vengeance. Margaret Walker’s influence in my life as a woman of dignity and letters is that good.
No matter where one is from or where one finds themselves today, we carry with us in some way or another a specific heritage. Certain events and circumstances can lead to someone trying to forget their heritage or doing everything in their power to preserve that heritage. Alice Walker’s “EveryDay Use” was published in 1973, not long after the civil rights movement, and reflects the struggles of dealing with a heritage that one might not want to remember (Shmoop). Alice Walker is well known as a civil rights and women’s rights activist. Like many of her other works she uses “Everyday Use” to express her feelings on a subject; in this case African American heritage. Through “Everyday Use” it can be seen that Alice Walker has negative feelings about how many African Americans were trying to remove themselves from parts of their African American culture during the time of the short story’s publishment. This idea that Walker was opposed to this “deracinating” of African Americans coming out of the civil rights
In his poems, Langston Hughes treats racism not just a historical fact but a “fact” that is both personal and real. Hughes often wrote poems that reflect the aspirations of black poets, their desire to free themselves from the shackles of street life, poverty, and hopelessness. He also deliberately pushes for artistic independence and race pride that embody the values and aspirations of the common man. Racism is real, and the fact that many African-Americans are suffering from a feeling of extreme rejection and loneliness demonstrate this claim. The tone is optimistic but irritated. The same case can be said about Wright’s short stories. Wright’s tone is overtly irritated and miserable. But this is on the literary level. In his short stories, he portrays the African-American as a suffering individual, devoid of hope and optimism. He equates racism to oppression, arguing that the African-American experience was and is characterized by oppression, prejudice, and injustice. To a certain degree, both authors are keen to presenting the African-American experience as a painful and excruciating experience – an experience that is historically, culturally, and politically rooted. The desire to be free again, the call for redemption, and the path toward true racial justice are some of the themes in their
This piece of autobiographical works is one of the greatest pieces of literature and will continue to inspire young and old black Americans to this day be cause of her hard and racially tense background is what produced an eloquent piece of work that feels at times more fiction than non fiction
It is a way to crucially engage oneself in setting the stage for new interventions and connections. She also emphasized that she personally viewed poetry as the embodiment of one’s personal experiences, and she challenged what the white, European males have imbued in society, as she declared, “I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were great writers but their attitudes towards their personal experience as an African American differed in many ways. These differences can be attributed to various reasons that range from gender to life experience but even though they had different perceptions regarding the African American experience, they both shared one common goal, racial equality through art. To accurately delve into the minds of the writers’ one must first consider authors background such as their childhood experience, education, as well their early adulthood to truly understand how it affected their writing in terms the similarities and differences of the voice and themes used with the works “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Hurston and Hughes’ “The Negro Mother”. The importance of these factors directly correlate to how each author came to find their literary inspiration and voice that attributed to their works.
Walker and Marshall write about an identity that they have found with African-American women of the past. They both refer to great writers such as Zora Neale Hurston or Phillis Wheatley. But more importantly, they connect themselves to their ancestors. The see that their writings can be identified with what the unknown African-American women of the past longed to say but they did not have the freedom to do so. They both admire many literary greats such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen, but they appreciate these authors' works more than they can identify with them.
For the purpose of this chapter, these words by Stephen Vincent Benet in his foreword to Margaret Walker’s first volume of poetry, For My People (1942) are really important. They give an idea about the richness of the literary heritage from which Walker started to write and to which she later added. This chapter is up to explore those “anonymous voices” in Walker’s poetry, the cultural and literary heritages that influenced her writings. Margaret Walker’s cultural heritage, like her biological inheritance, extends back to her ancestors in Africa and the Caribbean. It is quite genetic, something she got by birth; which is quite there just by being African American. Echoes of ancient myths, lost history, mixed bloods, and complex identities are brought about along with the skin colour and the racial origins.
Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black community, particularly in the community’s vision of itself. The first African American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize; she was considered one of America’s most distinguished poets well before the age of fifty. Known for her technical artistry, she has succeeded in forms as disparate as Italian terza rima and the blues. She has been praised for her wisdom and insight into the African Experience in America. Her works reflect both the paradises and the hells of the black people of the world. Her writing is objective, but her characters speak for themselves. Although the idiom is local, the message is universal. Brooks uses ordinary speech, only words that will strengthen, and richness of sound to create effective poetry.
In 1942, Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her poem For My People. This accomplishment heralded the beginning of Margaret Walker’s literary career which spanned from the brink of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s to the cusp of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (Gates and McKay 1619). Through her fiction and poetry, Walker became a prominent voice in the African-American community. Her writing, especially her signature novel, Jubilee, exposes her readers to the plight of her race by accounting the struggles of African Americans from the pre-Civil War period to the present and ultimately keeps this awareness relevant to contemporary American society.
Leonard, K. D. (2009). African American women poets and the power of the word. The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature, 168-187.
"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
Even as a child, Thelma Lucille Sayles, or Lucille Clifton, realized how notable African Americans were. However, throughout her lifetime, Clifton has encountered discrimination against her race on multiple occasions, but her poetry, for both adults and children, show resilience against any racist remarks made. With a heavy influence from growing up in an African-American household and experiencing the Civil Rights Movement, Lucille Clifton’s writings focus on the importance of African Americans, especially women, in communities (Hine 1-3).
Thesis Statement: Alice Walker, a twentieth and twenty- first century novelist is known for her politically and emotionally charged works, which exposes the black culture through various narrative techniques.
The author was born in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1901. Later, he received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College where he studied traditional literature and explored music like Jazz and the Blues; then had gotten his masters at Harvard. The author is a professor of African American English at Harvard University. The author’s writing
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.