Critical Analysis Outline Introduction For My People Conclusion Introduction The poem For my People can be called neither a cry for African-American generations nor a primitive story of formation of the Black conscience in unfavorable conditions. Margaret Walker managed to bring her work at a higher level of literature, making it both a brilliant literary work and the historical summary of African-American experience. For My People Margaret Walker describes everyday life of African Americans. Their life is full of sufferings where there is no place to joy or happiness. Margaret Walker appeals to the people, who everywhere sing their slave songs. These songs are not the songs of joy, but dirges, ditties, and blues. They pray to the God they never know, to the God they unable to understand.
She addresses her poem to people, who lend their strength to the years, to the past, present and the future years they spent doing dirty and hard jobs, washing, cooking, ironing, scrubbing, sewing never gaining never reaping, never knowing and never understanding. These words express all uselessness and inefficacy of their jobs, all hardiness and weight of cares, the whole burden of which falls on African Americans, who understand that all their choices are not free but rather the illusions of freedom. All their autonomy is a fiction, and all their life is a shadow of a real life. African Americans work hardly but gain nothing. All people are subjects to severe oppression, both psychological and physical. The author describes her people as playmates in the clay and sand backyards.
The Essay on Civil Rights and African American Life
So how did African-Americans get looked down on? Well it was in 1619 when Africans were brought to America as slaves for the white settlement. While slavery was eradicated after the Civil war the racism and segregation side of it still occurred. During the 20th century the fight for equality for African-Americans led to massive civil rights campaigns.While many of you may have heard of Martin ...
She speaks about the nation, which for the cramped bewildered years went to schools to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when but all the knowledge was useless, and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood. Yet, despite the injustice; despite the awful treatment and attitude to the African Americans, they grew spite of these things to be Man and Woman, to have good lives, to be happy and to be loved, they then died of consumption and anemia and lynching. The author compares African Americans, who were thronging the Black districts in Chicago, New York, New Orleans and other cities, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy white people enjoying their lives, eating in restaurants, living in luxury, going to cabarets and taverns. The whites had a good time when African Americans had no money to buy bread and to feed their families. Margaret Walker justifies the African Americans and their way of life. As many people blame African Americans for being lazy and purposeless, she tells that they walked blindly spreading joy; they spelt when were hungry, were drinking because they saw no hope and were in despair.
The author writes that African Americans were blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools; they were deceived by the whites, devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches and betrayed. She appeals to the people, trying to find a better life, a way out from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, and trying to achieve a new world where there is no place to injustice and inequity. The poem touches to the innermost of the heart, when you read the concluding words. The author desperately adjures to make the African-Americans dreams and hopes true. She prays for a new earth rise, where the people loving freedom come to growth, where a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirit and our blood and the dirges disappear, giving place to the martial songs. The poem explains that mutual respect, tolerance with respect to people, who are different, are not given by birth; they become a part of human relationships under the influence of different intrinsic and extrinsic circumstances. The problem of difference between black and white people, the problem of tolerance has always been a delicate question.
The Dissertation on Native American Indian People One
LC: In The Third Woman, you have written, 'It is my greatest but probably futile hope that someday those of us who are ethnic minorities will not be segregated in the literature of America." Will you elaborate on that ROSE: Well, anywhere in America, if you take a university-level course on American history or American literature, particularly in literature and the arts, it only has the literature ...
Social phobias turned this problem into a painful hitch nobody able to untie. The poem reminds us the history of African American and sufferings they had to bear. Hardly can we tell that this theme is new for the American literature. Many poets and writers were trying to explore different aspects of this problem. Many of them were successful in their attempts to describe the conflicts, prejudices and biases. Margaret Walker managed to create an unforgettable literary work, reflecting the times, when white was synonymous to standard and white system of values was equal to the system of values of our society. She disagrees with the existing system of cultural oppression of African Americans.
To counterbalance the negative attitude to the African Americans she places emphasis on the necessity of search for integrity. The poem explores the problems of African Americans, personality, personal experience, interpersonal relations and relations between the people and the outside world. The author dwells on necessity to overcome racial and ethnical barriers. Denying the psychology of racial ghetto African Americans have to find the way to rebirth and self-determination through overcoming the existing stereotypes. Conclusion Although the very poem is written in dark and gloomy tones, it leaves no feeling of a hopeless situation, an inconsolable grief of Margaret Walker for her people, but rather reminds us the old proverb, – if it were not for hope, the heart would break. The main idea is mixed with bright descriptions and passages; yet, the very poem creates a special atmosphere that allows reading the poem without a pause, making it both a brilliant literary work and the historical summary of African-American experience.
The Essay on Native American Europeans Americans Africans
The New cHaOtiC World Three completely different cultures clashed together and triggered the confusions all three worlds had against each other. All their misunderstandings then turned into a whole New World that still remains. Today, this New World is one of the main confinements for crimes. Religiously, the complexity of the unfamiliar Gods they believe existed had caused the big misconception. ...
