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Cults and their effects on society
Cults and their effects on society
Cults and their effects on society
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Sonia Sanchez, a woman known for her unimaginable talents in the art of writing poetry and her involvement in the Black Arts Movement. She has won a numerous amount of awards which celebrate black excellence. Throughout her career she has been notably mentioned with a multitudinous amount of other extraordinary African American poets. She has traveled the world sharing her purpose for literature with thousands of people. A majority of the literature that she has written adhered to the life of black Americans. Although she has achieved many accomplishments one question may remain in the minds of enthusiasts of African American Literature. Does Sonia Sanchez’s voluminous amount of literature encourage African American advancement? Sonia Sanchez …show more content…
She used words such as Cadillacs, brothers and sisters, chitterlings, and u dig (Sanchez 713). The words that she used were common among the culture. Not only did she write in a relatable fashion, but she also opened there eyes to changes that should occur within the culture. In the poem she stated, “like. man. who’s gonna give our young blk / people new heroes….” (Sanchez 713).She may have felt as if the culture held a form of responsibility for the way they were being portrayed. Many people may have seen her as a pioneer for the amazing achievements made by African American …show more content…
She has traveled the world sharing her point of view from an African American female’s perspective. Not only did she fight for the equality of African Americans, but she has also fought for the betterment of women. Her involvement with associations such as the Nation of Islam shows that she feels strongly about equality and justice. Being comparatively mentioned among the elite of African American poets proves her literary excellence. Her poem “TCB”, exemplifies her intention in regards to all Americans uniting as one. The poem “blk/ rhetoric” encourages the black culture by providing them with guidelines on becoming better people. The criticism that she has received may have been harsh, but she has received numerous awards for her activism and poetic abilities. If one were to sum up Sonia Sanchez’s career in one word it would be,
Sonia Sanchez is an African-American writer regularly connected with the Black Arts Movement. She has composed over twelve books of poems, and in addition short stories, essays, plays, and kids' books. She was a beneficiary of 1993 Pew Fellowships in the Arts. In 2001, Sanchez was the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal for her poem and has been compelling to other African-American female artists, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 9, 1934. Her mom died when Sanchez was just two years old, so she stayed with different family members for a while. One of those was her grandma, who passed when Sanchez was six. In 1943, she moved to Harlem to live with her dad, her sister, and her stepmother, who was
One of his most famous poems was "Lift Every Voice and Sing." His brother later added music to the poem. It is considered to be the unofficial "Negro National Anthem". It was a bold piece of work that spoke of the struggle of the African American in America and his optimistic hope for a better future.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print.
She was direct and possessed strength during a time when this was unheard of by a woman especially a black woman. A reformer of her time, she believed Negroes had to
...nspired to make a change that she knew that nothing could stop her, not even her family. In a way, she seemed to want to prove that she could rise above the rest. She refused to let fear eat at her and inflict in her the weakness that poisoned her family. As a child she was a witness to too much violence and pain and much too often she could feel the hopelessness that many African Americans felt. She was set in her beliefs to make choices freely and help others like herself do so as well.
This piece of auto biographical 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
She makes you think about the wrong doings that were going on in this time period. It was very brave of her to talk about the things that she talked about especially while being a slave. During this time period she probably faced a lot of criticism of her works and many believed that someone was writing her poems for her because they were so good and it was uncommon for a black lady to write a poem as well as she did. As a young black lady who has to go through slavery and other adversities this was a very hard time period for them but Wheatley stood strong and followed in what she believed in. She fought for equality and freedom for African American men and women.
This literary critique was found on the Bryant Library database. It talks about how well Maya conveys her message to her readers as well as portraying vivid scenes in her reader’s minds’. Maya’s sense of story and her passionate desire to overcome obstacles and strive for greatness and self-appreciation is what makes Maya an outlier. Living in America, Angelou believed that African American as a whole must find emotional, intellectual, and spiritual sustenance through reverting back to their “home” of Africa. According to Maya, “Home” was the best place to capture a sense of family, past, and tradition. When it comes to Maya’s works of literature, her novels seems to be more critically acclaimed then her poetry. With that being said, Angelou pursues harsh social and political issues involving African American in her poems. Some of these themes are the struggle for civil rights in America and Africa, the feminist movement, Maya’s relationship with her son, and her awareness of the difficulties of living in America's struggling classes. Nevertheless, in all of Maya’s works of literature she is able to “harness the power of the word” through an extraordinary understanding of the language and events she uses and went through. Reading this critique made me have a better understanding of the process Maya went through in order to illustrate her life to her readers. It was not just sitting down with a pen and paper and just writing thoughts down. It was really, Maya being able to perfect something that she c...
That’s when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artist, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers”(Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). African Americans writers during this time was capturing the beauty of black lives. Blacks were discovering many reasons to have pride in their race. Racial pride was helping them achieve equality in society. People were starting to write the way they wanted, instead of the ways whites wanted. Creating their
“She did not write to “up lift her race,” either; because in her view it was already uplifted, she (like Claude McKay) was not embarrassed to present her characters as mixtures of good and bad, strong and weak. Some of the other Harlem writers thought
...nly country to force the race into slavery, they were just the last to free the slaves, and also had the worst treatment for the blacks. For years races were discriminated in the country of America, and it still this way today. Poets such as Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Colleen McElroy were evolutionary poets who wrote about their desire for freedom and equal treatment. Langston Hughes poems were more about the building up of the tension that existed in all of his people who were ready to start fighting for their freedom. Colleen McElroy wrote about how the blacks in America still were apart of there past because of the color of their skin and simply just because of where they were from. Lucille Clifton wrote about the desire for the recognition her race and all of the other races of America, besides the Whites, would finally be appreciated for their work.
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...
• AW calls herself “a womanist “, her term for a black feminist. She is one of the female Afro-American writers founding the concept “New Black Renaissance” .
Smith, David Lionel. “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics.” American Literary History. 3.1 (Spring 1991): 94-109.
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.