[Course Title] African American Poetry In her poem, tellingly titled A Southern Road the relatively idyllic portrait of the southern folk is disrupted by Helene Johnson with the representation of lynch violence, a representation obviously lacking in the popular film of the late 1920s and the 1930s: A blue-fruited black gum Like a tall predella Bears a dangling figure (Wagner 197) The poem is an ironic pastoral variation on the “Black Christ” lynching poem that was a significant subgenre of African-American poetry and art in the 1920S and 1930s. The poem appeared in the journal Fire in 1926. Helene Johnson had been more or less unique, and sometimes reviled, for her vernacular “low-rate” representations of African Americans in the late 1920s. Johnson’s poem though modernist in its elliptical and compressed imagery, settles in its final lines on the figure of a lynched man. One may note the nihilistic vision with which the poem closes, a lynching-as-anti-Cruxifixion: A hidden nest for beauty Idly flung by God In one lonely lingering hour Before the Sabbath. A blue-fruited black gum, Like a tall predella, Bears a dangling figure,– Sacrificial dower to the raff, Swinging alone, A solemn, tortured shadow in the air.
(Wagner 197) Johnson’s most overtly “serious” utterances, even when representing the African-American subject, are formally “high,” while her vernacular pieces, though far more “topical” than her “dialect” poems, are humorous in a way that her “high” ones are not. popular the poem reflects Harlem Renaissance ideals: a new black aesthetic, the nostalgic longing for an African past, and a reconfiguration of nature as erotic metaphor of black femininity. She was not afraid to experiment with injecting into her work a bold new black attitude that strutted to a new beat and spoke in new black language. The inhabitants of her poetic world longed unambivalendy for Africa. The “black” theme she explored engaged the vernacular and primitivism. Johnson’s preference for night in her poem was a characteristic theme in the poems of women during the Renaissance because it asserted the primacy of Blackness in a world that favored white things.
The Essay on African American Vernacular
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the definition of vernacular is “of, relating to, or being a nonstandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country. ” In terms of African American history, the evolution of vernacular is very important and a very unique part of the culture. The African American vernacular has aided the development of a distinct culture in terms of what ...
Night was considered a necessary time for contemplation in that it brought serenity to a restless, discontented spirit. With “The Lynching,” a sonnet later published in Harlem Shadows, Claude McKay rose to the heights and stormed heaven like Milton in his “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.” McKay, as an African, had to accomplish things for both himself and his race–to write literature that came from his guts to express the sublime human cry of anguish and hate against man’s inhumanity to man. Mckay is, in essence. The vitality of his verse is based on something more than bitterness; it depends on a stubborn resistance to articulating the Negro suffering as a mere racial suffering. Mckay is moved by the resilience of the Negro race and believes that it devolves upon the Negro race to restore the dignity of the human race through its suffering. Sometimes, too, there is a certain poignancy as Mckay] attempts to reconcile his reaction as a Negro with his larger reaction as a human being.
To see his verse in terms of mere racialism is to miss this quality. Fully conscious of the Negro plight and sensitive to the pain and misery of the black, he nevertheless strives to maintain his equilibrium. He loses neither his sense of balance nor breadth of vision; he is at once protesting as a Negro and at the same time uttering a cry for humankind as a member of that race. Race is a dominant theme in McKay’s poem. His anger burns in the highly disciplined sonnets. “The Lynching” is among the most eloquent and chilling portrayals of the alienated, who through “superhuman power” must contain his hate. (Wagner 257) Work Cited Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes.
The Essay on Human Suffering
Human suffering happens every day, everywhere, in many types and ways all around us. We do not always see it, but that does not mean it does not exist. When we do see it exist we commonly ask ourselves, "Does human suffering have meaning?" I can answer this question easily. Yes, it does have meaning. I can answer this because of the four readings we read. However, as I examine this question deeper ...
Trans. Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. pp. 197-257..
