Also frustrated with her suggested place in American society, Georgia Douglass Johnson, over-shadowed by her male counterparts, published several poems during the Harlem renaissance, which exposed the struggles faced by women of color, in what is often categorized as aa golden age for African Americans. Her works are a testament to her own struggle, as a female African American writer in the first half of the century. Although Johnson graduated in 1896, from Atlanta University, she did not publish her first poem until 1916, at the age of 36. This is partially due the gender expectations, that kept her geographically removed from the major literary circles of her day, which were in Harlem. Due to her marriage to Washington lawyer Henry …show more content…
Lincoln Johnson, who expected her to look after the home and assume primary responsibility for the upbringing of two sons. After his death in 1925, Georgia Douglas Johnson was a single, forty-five-year-old woman, with two teenagers to support. In order to survive, and provide for her children, Johnson held a series of temporary jobs between 1924 and 1934, before she accepted a position with the Commissioner of Immigration for the Department of Labor. Hours were long and pay low, but the position helped her care for her two children and eventually send them to the prestigious Howard University. It is in Johnson’s work, that she is finally free to express her pain and the difficulty of her plight as an African American woman in America. For instance, “Armageddon” a beautiful poem revealing the deep, complicated emotions of loneliness and desolation, which liken her experiences to the fictionalized characters presented through the novels of Wilson and Hurston. Johnson begins, “In the silence and the dark/I fought with dragons”, alluding to her personal struggle to gain recognition as a poet during the Harlem Renaissance, and on a larger scale, where African American women struggle to gain equal rights within the United States (Johnson, 62). Johnson continues, “I was battered beaten sore” suggesting the dragon’s superior strength in comparison to her own. In the next stanza, Johnson shifts her tone to promote an undefeatable spirit, “But rose again. /On my knees I fought, still rising, /Dull with pain!”. Although she speaks openly about her pain, Johnson notes a refusal to quit. Perhaps, she is referring to her difficulty to be recognized as a poet, or on a larger scale the fight for social justice, at any rate one notes the authors strength and determination to reach her goal at all means. In the final stanza, Johnson repeats the first line of the poem, “In the dark I fought with dragons--” emphasizing the size and power of her enemies, as she smaller, weaker, and without the power of sight in this battle. Before commanding, “Foolish tears! Cease your flowing!”, a line that illuminates that the African American woman is not all powerful and unfeeling as some like to suggest, yet hold a command over one’s own emotions. The last line “can’t you see the dawn appears?” In doing so Jenness promotes the strength that African American women have made a reputable quality, and identifies a renewal of hope at the approach of the dawn, similar to Janie’s belief in the horizon. Suggesting to readers that both Johnson and Hurston equate God with nature, and view the acts of nature as God’s presence. Powerful and deeply emotional in tone, the poem chooses to end on a note of positive optimism, suggesting that all difficult times must come to an end. Another artist offering her voice to expose the injustices African American women face is Mary Jenness.
Though her life is a mystery to many academics, her only recovered works “Secret and “The Negro Laughs Back”, like Wilson’s, Hurston’s and Johnson’s explore the deep seated feelings of frustration with the ongoing fight for equality. However, unlike them, she explores ideas of spirituality which suggest that God lives within her. Mary Jenness’s work “Secret” is the exemplification of these ideas, she speaks directly to the heart of the African American struggle for equality within the United States. More assertive than her counterparts who proceed her, Jenness speaks directly to her oppressor, “Oh you that strike will never flinch/from hearts you cannot feel”, a line that suggests a lack of empathy from her oppressor. Using terms of aggression, such as strike and flinch to provoke an image of uncaring hatred (Jenness 82). She compares her plight, and the plight of all African American women to the same difficulties faced by Jesus Christ. Jenness creates this juxtaposition, by alluding to the Bible, best evidenced in the third line of the poem, “Though I that turn the cheek may hide/a wound that does not heal”, an allusion to Bible scripture Mathew 5:39, when Jesus instructs his followers to turn the other cheek. Yet, unlike Jesus, her wounds, and the wounds of African American women are often without healing. Jenness continues the work stating, “Yet something in you has to die/And something in me live” the “something Jenness refers to is humanity, noting that the cruelty exercised by her oppressors is hurting them more than her, as they are relinquishing their own souls and connection with mankind. The thought of this allows Jenness to end the work with a renewed sense of hope and thanks her enemies “for the gift of hate/ that keeps me sensitive” (Jenness 82). Throughout the poem, there is the familiar tone of anger and pain found in much of the writings of
these authors, and also a connection with God suggesting a relationship of equals. Furthering her alignment with the attitudes portrayed in the proceeding novels and poems, Jenness publication, “The Negro Laughs Back” also explores the emotional frustration that accompanies the African American woman’s struggle for equality. Jenness begins “You laugh, and I must hide the wound/Your laughter cuts in me”, choosing words such as wound and cut in combination with the laughter, of the undefined you, suggest feelings of torturous cruelty at the hands of her enemy. She continues, stating “You strike, and I must turn the cheek/ Like One of Galilee”, alluding to Jesus’s advice given at the Sermon on the Mount where he advised the Galesians in their expected behavior, regardless of the actions of the ruling class. Johnson moves on from her biblical allusions to note, “And have you never envied me” which leaves the reader wondering what her enemies might dare to be envious of in midst of such cruelty, which is, as she states in the next line, “The joy that turns their rod”. The reader is left sickened and confused by Jenness suggestion of envy, suggesting there is some power she still possesses. Which she does, she finds a silver lining in a small oversight made at the expense of her oppressors. As a consequence of their ongoing hatred, where she and other African American women have been victims of abuse, similar to the abuse and intolerance faced by Jesus Christ, she has been transformed to a higher level of consciousness, “You that have made me what I am/ Condemned to be like God” (Johnson 81). From Jenness work, one notes the transformation of religious beliefs, God is no longer nature, but the strength she calls upon to maintain tolerance, understanding, and hope for the future. The perspectives these African American female authors create through their respective novels illustrates a relationship with God that is most descriptive of an agnostic ideology, which asserts that the existence, actions, and motives of God are unknown and unknowable. Where Frado, asserts a new vision of heaven, and Hurston along with Johnson equate God to nature and natural phenomenon, Jenness asserts that she, as an African American woman is a direct descendant of God. In reading these two texts as clarifying companions, readers can note similarities between the characters presented through the novels, and the speakers of the poems, as they struggle to assert their respective identities. Readers are privileged to witness African American women forced into roles of subservience, due to societal expectations, who carve out an ideology of God that is inclusive of all peoples. Each of these women deny the standardized racially charged Protestant Christianity that remains complicit with slavery and racial discrimination. Their rejection of pseudo-science, philosophical, and political theories used to promote a discriminatory agenda casts them as heroines to ethnic minority groups, who will have to follow along the same paths to freedom and social equality. This essay demonstrates that although African American women have held a long history with abuse in America, which extends itself into all areas of social traumas, including the kidnapping of women and children during the middle passage, the rape and consequential impregnation during slavery, the denial of property, voting rights, and equal salary, and numerous other instances, practices and events that seek to diminish the spirit of African American peoples and women and further support the power structures that function within the United States, they continue to thrive and flourish. Having created a connection with spirituality that extends beyond traditionally practiced Christianity, African American women have found the strength to persevere when all hope seemed to be lost. Furthermore, the essay also exposes the unique position African American women are confined to in society is illustrated, as one notes the various accomplishments of each of these amazing authors, and the difficult, often poverty stricken life they were forced to accept. For instance, Harriet E. Wilson, America’s first published author is denied mother hood and dies poverty stricken; Zora Neale Hurston, a scholar, anthropologist and novelist is black balled and denied access to publication, before eventually dyeing in a welfare home; Georgia Douglas Johnson, accomplished poet, whose life was constrained and limited due to the confines of marriage, and later due to the difficulties of single motherhood; Mary Jenness, whose life scholars have yet to uncover, each act as evidence for the lack of respect society holds for African American women.
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.
Reading through the very beginning of Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret” felt like reading Shakespeare for the first time as a sticky fingered, toothless, second grader. It just did not make sense...my mind couldn’t quite comprehend it yet. Nothing in the essay seemed to be going in any clear direction, and the different themes in each of the paragraphs did not make sense to me. There was no flow – as soon as you began to comprehend and get used to one subject, she would switch it up on you and start talking about something else that seemed unrelated. As I pushed forward, it seriously was beginning to feel like she was drawing topics out of a hat as she went. That was until I hit around halfway through the second page. This is where Griffin introduces her third paragraph about cell biology: “Through the pores of the nuclear membrane a steady stream of ribonucleic acid, RNA, the basic material from which the cell is made, flows out (234).” She was talking about the basic unit of
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
Beale, Frances. "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female." An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New, 1995. 146. Print.
“Inventions whereby they lynch men”. (Hill, Line 57) Lynching was very popular in the climax period of racial equality against African Americans. This was considered a corporal type of discipline, slaves didn’t have to get in trouble to receive this most of the time whites would be bored and band together and go find and lynch and African American regardless of sex or age. Whites would tie an African American male or female to a wooden cross or pole and burn them alive and just sit back and watch. This type of behavior is demonic and shows how strong racial equality against black people can be. Hill uses her voice to shine light this topic, especially the people who were ignorant to the fact these atrocities took place. “Our communities are being destroyed by racial tension - and we're too polite to talk about it. “(Randall L. Stephenson) this is a very accurate statement applying directly this country. Race has forever been a very sensitive subject in this country so most people develop their thought and stereotypes towards a certain group of people and socialize to a certain extent with other groups of people according to their stereotypes. These people never actually talk about how they really feel about a certain group of people because they don’t want to be judged. Hill uses her poem “Mystery of Iniquity” to bring memories back on race inequality against
The speaker of “On Being Brought from Africa to America” conveys her point through irony when referencing her so-called savior. The author of the poem, slave-girl Phillis Wheatley, is thought to be embodied by the speaker. This girl, the voice of the poem, states “Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land… there 's a God...there’s a Saviour too” (1-3). The use of the rhetorical distinction between god and saviour to indicates that the owners of the speaker are supposed to be her saviors since they bought her as their slave, raised her in Western culture, and taught her how to read and write. While these special circumstances indeed did elevate her above other slaves, the speaker’s subversive disdain shows us that this “mercy” has cost her too. She was robbed of her family, her heritage, and ultimately a life of freedom and equality.
She shows how these fictions are woven into the fabric of everyday life in Jackson, from the laws to ordinary conversations, and how these beliefs get passed from generation to generation. It shows a deep mistrust of whites on the part of the black community, who have been betrayed by them again and again. It also shows how powerful and how dangerous it can be to challenge the stereotypes and dissolve the lines that are meant to separate people from each other on the basis of skin
Although the institutionalization of the fields of Black and Women’s Studies were still years away, the aforementioned black women, along with many others, were essential to the development of the epistemological and theoretical concepts that would later become the foundation. We can clearly see gaps in the literature in the area of Black Women’s Studies, as the writers discuss these women from the standpoint of either the Africana or Feminist Tradition. Some make mention of the intersection of racial and gendered oppression, but only in passing
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.
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” is a lyric poem in which the point of attraction, the mask, represents the oppression and sadness held by African Americans in the late 19th century, around the time of slavery. As the poem progresses, Dunbar reveals the façade of the mask, portrayed in the third stanza where the speaker states, “But let the dream otherwise” (13). The unreal character of the mask has played a significant role over the life of African Americans, whom pretend to put on a smile when they feel sad internally. This ocassion, according to Dunbar, is the “debt we pay to human guile," meaning that their sadness is related to them deceiving others. Unlike his other poems, with its prevalent use of black dialect, Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” acts as “an apologia (or justification) for the minstrel quality of some of his dialect poems” (Desmet, Hart and Miller 466). Through the utilization of iambic tetrameter, end rhyme, sound devices and figurative language, the speaker expresses the hidden pain and suffering African Americans possessed, as they were “tortured souls” behind their masks (10).
The author Karen Stein portrays the quantity of irony and numerous knowledge and realization that include insight and understanding to her analysis of contemporary black women. As I visualize Nel Wright and
The story of the five-year-old boy is reminiscent of Emmett Till, the teenager lynched in 1955, his body was sunk in the river. Both of their bodies were found “ravaged” (209) and left in the water for days. Tommy Odds shared a story with Lynne of the nine-year-old black girl raped by a white man, “they pulled her out of the river, dead, with a stick shoved up her” (179). There is a habitual pattern of mourning, the tears building up, waiting for the next black person to die unjustly. The women at Saxon college act similarly, by retelling the stories of Wile Chile, Louvinie and Fast Mary they are “ritualizing their suffering, the Saxon women recognize that their own lives are part of a continuum. Their circle includes those women that have suffered before them.” (43 Downey) Although, the black community is always looking for something to stop this cycle, they protest violently and non-violently, attempting to vote, sharing stories or praying. Meridian, when the activist Medgar Evers was assassinated, planted a wild sweet shrub bush in the gardens at Saxon College and when she carried the body of the five-year-old boy “it was as if she carried a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses” (209). As if she was taking flowers to a grave of a
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.
In her blog posting “ ‘Noting to Say’: ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ and Gender,” Emma Jeremie Mould discusses the double bind women of color find themselves in. First, they are overdetermined by the racist discourse of the Whites. Second, black women find themselves codified within the discourse of native men. In addition, she contends that some Western feminists analyze the plight of black women from the top down, through an approach that reinforces a racialized hierarchy among women.