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Patricia smith, what it's like to be a black girl
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Patricia Smith is famous America Black poet, playwright and teacher. Her verse “What It’s Like to Be A Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t)” is a painful piece of writing, which reveals the target audience the difficulties, which experience Blacks within the American Society. Her poem is deprived of embellishments and presents the truth the way it is, author straightforwardly depicts all the hurdles and discrimination, which she as a girl has encountered. Patricia Smith uses tone in her poem " What It’s Like to Be A Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t)" in two different ways. Smith changes it from angry to acceptance. Smith starts her poem with "first of all" which is not welcoming. She talking to the reader but she doesn't say hello. She talks about " Not Finished" which reveals that she is angry and blaming someone else, about how she look. Than Smith changes the tone to acceptance. She uses " Finally". Which is commonly uses when someone finished something difficult. Here she is done struggling with herself to be someone that she is not. …show more content…
The author seems to be the protagonist of this verse.
There is a feeling that she reveals the audience the story of her childhood and youth. Moreover, the first lines which start with the words “first of all”. These words confirm that the story is finished, and the author’s words are just depiction of the past experience. The plot of this verse discusses the discrimination and rape. Moreover, the author reminds the time of her puberty. She was not a little girl, but was not a teenager. Her body started changing, and she felt herself “Not finished”. and not comfortable with her image which reflects in the mirror, like there is something more to add in
herself. The topic of rape and sufferings is seen, when the readers start reading between the lines. “It’s dropping food coloring in your eyes to make them blue and suffering their burn in silence”. The ending of this statement reveals that the girl has experienced pain and burn in silence. After that she must have experienced great depression, because even the mirrors have denied her reflection. The mirror here might be perceived as a metaphor. The mirrored not only shows girl’s appearance but also her inner state. It played the role of her should, which denied reflections and did not want to accept the reality. The verbal images like “smelling blood in the breakfast”, “sweat, Vaseline, and bullets” also express the connotations of sadness and pain. The last line produces the groundbreaking effect “It’s finally having a man reach out of you”. It proves that the author has depicted the sufferings, felt by the young girl during the rape. The verse contains the atmosphere of pain and lack of confidence. “What it’s Like to Be A Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t)” is the poem, where the author manages to render the fear, pain and sufferings of a young 9 years old girl and her drastic experiences in 19 lines only. She manages to reveal the audience the feelings of this girl and make them consider the fate of African-Americans within the country.
The black women’s interaction with her oppressive environment during Revolutionary period or the antebellum America was the only way of her survival. Playing her role, and being part of her community that is not always pleasant takes a lot of courage, and optimism for better tomorrow. The autonomy of a slave women still existed even if most of her natural rights were taken. As opposed to her counterparts
In the last stanza it is explained how, even when she was a child, she
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
lines two and three, the author makes an allusion to the Virgin Mary for visual imagery and
The Author of this book (On our own terms: race, class, and gender in the lives of African American Women) Leith Mullings seeks to explore the modern and historical lives of African American women on the issues of race, class and gender. Mullings does this in a very analytical way using a collection of essays written and collected over a twenty five year period. The author’s systematic format best explains her point of view. The book explores issues such as family, work and health comparing and contrasting between white and black women as well as between men and women of both races.
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.”
In ‘How it feels to be colored me’ Neale Hurston opens up to her pride and identity as an African-American. Hurston uses a wide variety of imagery, diction using figurative language freely with metaphors. Her tone is bordering controversial using local lingo.
Marita Bonner starts her short essay by describing the joys and innocence of youth. She depicts the carefree fancies of a cheerful and intelligent child. She compares the feelings of such abandonment and gaiety to that of a kitten in a field of catnip. Where the future is opened to endless opportunities and filled with all the dream and promises that only a youth can know. There are so many things in the world to see, learn, and experience that your mind in split into many directions of interest. This is a memorable time in life filled with bliss and lack of hardships.
One of the most destructive forces that is destroying young black people in America today is the common cultures wicked image of what an realistic black person is supposed to look like and how that person is supposed to act. African Americans have been struggling for equality since the birth of this land, and the war is very strong. Have you ever been in a situation where you were stereotyped against?
What exactly is an ideal lifestyle? The answer is different for every person because some people desire more and some desire less. In the short story “Black Girl” by Sembene Ousmane, the reader learns about Diouana’s determination to climb the social hierarchy ladder. As the protagonist, she indulgences in the thought of moving away from her hometown in Africa where she has been working as a maid for the last few years for a rich white family. Her vision of the perfect lifestyle is living in France, where she imagines herself making millions and bathing in fortune. Unfortunately, things don’t always appear as they seem. The story illustrates that when one thinks of their ideal lifestyle they mainly rely on their personal experience which often results in deception. The author effectively conveys this theme through his use of setting, symbolism and iconic foreshadowing.
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston breaks from the tradition of her time by rejecting the idea that the African American people should be ashamed or saddened by the color of their skin. She tells other African Americans that they should embrace their color and be proud of who they are. She writes, “[A socialite]…has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges,” and “I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (942-943). Whether she feels “colored” or not, she knows she is beautiful and of value. But Hurston writes about a time when she did not always know that she was considered colored.
Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, tells a story of Lorde’s childhood in Harlem through herself discovery and her acceptance of her dark skin color, a lesbian and most importantly, her being a woman in the 1950’s. As with her other works, Audre’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name was artistically produced which could be read as a poetic song. Audre introduces her early life experience of prejudice and self discovery to her audience to locate her position and status in her world. While growing up, Lorde could not describe what it meant to be different; she did not have the word to express her indifference she felt in the world. Lorde’s parents, especially her mother chose to ignore racism and protected their children from the shadow of racism by ne...
In the perspective as an African American woman, Maya Angelou speaks of the issue of sexism in her poem. In this quote, “You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies…”, Angelou sheds light on the problems women faced during her time. Many had to also face the discrimination from men as men control them and put words in women’s mouths. This indicates the doubled amount of burden that African American women had to go through and it was important for Maya Angelou to speak of this issue through literature and give a voice to women who were struggling with the same conflicting situations. In contrast, Hughes’s, “I, Too,” poem states the African American inequality more generally than Angelou’s
After watching that clip, I felt like they all were right. They all have different perspective, and they were saying that with that perspective. I felt like that clip has to do nothing with race. It was all about religion and culture. And the question the will rise again depends on who said that and in what situations. This phrase means different things to different people. As we saw in video both girls were telling what they feel like based on their perspective, and there perspective was very different. It basically mean that south will not remain a defeated, rejected realm of misery and despair, instead it will become a significant influence on the culture and economy of the entire nation. People are taking this phrase way too loosely without understanding the meaning behind it. They think that it is some sort of way of saying that where
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.