“I who am poisoned with the blood of both Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” (27-28) Derek Walcott’s poem “A Far Cry from Africa” deals with the poet’s inability to resolve his hybrid inheritance causing conflict between his loyalties to Britain and native Africa. Derek Walcott (1930- ) born in St. Lucia, spent most of his life in Trinidad and was also a recipient of Noble prize in literature in 1992. Belonging to both Anglo-European and Afro-Caribbean heritage, his duality in origin gave birth to a sort of identity crisis within himself. Most of his writing is a painful and jarring depiction of ethnic conflict and divided loyalties which earned him international fame in regard to his works in relationship of human. The intricate relationship between the colonized and the colonizer and the ways in which the Caribbean self-embraces and split between different places loyalties are central theme of Walcott’s writings. Walcott has studied the conflict between the heritage of European and West Indian culture, the long way from slavery to independence, and his own role as a nomad between these two cultures. It is all about the settlers arriving in the region forcing people of Kikuyu from their tribal units. Walcott depicts the scenario of Europeans taking control over the farmland and the government and letting native people to serve the white race of Europeans in their own native land. "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962) forces a question to speakers on cultural identity against a background of historical events. Exposing the intersection of cultures within the poet, this poem also highlights the “turbulent journey of a man trying to relate to his immediate schizophrenic Post-Colonial world reality and his state of hybridity” (Thou... ... middle of paper ... ...de between cultures as ‘high-low’; ‘white-black’; ‘civilized-uncivilized; and so on, therefore to anticipate more positive constructions of ‘Hybridity’” (Thounaojam, 2012). To conclude, in most of Walcott’s writing, he portrays the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer and the ways in which the African self-hood and divide between different places and loyalties. Walcott is in quest in search of history and identity; he faces the cultural clashes of two nations, Africa and Europe. The poem moves to the battlefield within the poet as he owns dual cultural heritage and finds difficult to identify his actual identity where he belongs to. Walcott breathes two different traditions; he highlighted the dilemma between races in his poem who wants to adopt the "civilized" culture of the British, but also cannot excuse their immoral treatment of the Africans.
This week’s articles carry a couple related, if not common, themes of imagined, if not artificial, constructs of race and identity. Martha Hodes’ article, “The mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” offers a narrative based examination of the malleable terms on which race was defined. To accomplish this she examines the story of Eunice Connolly and her family and social life as a window into understanding the changing dimensions of race in nineteenth-century America and the Caribbean, specifically New England and Grand Cayman. While Hodes’ article examines the construction of race in the Americas, Ali A. Mazrui’s piece, “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Sai, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,” looks at the construction of African identity. Although different in geographic loci, the two articles similarly examine the shaping influences of race and identity and the power held in ‘the Other’ to those ends.
In Brent Hayes Edwards essay, “ The Use of Diaspora”, the term “African Diaspora” is critically explored for its intellectual history of the word. Edward’s reason for investigating the “intellectual history of the term” rather than a general history is because the term “is taken up at a particular conjecture in black scholarly discourse to do a particular kind of epistemological work” (Edwards 9). At the beginning of his essay Edwards mentions the problem with the term, in terms of how it is loosely it is being used which he brings confusion to many scholars. As an intellectual Edwards understands “the confusing multiplicity” the term has been associated with by the works of other intellectuals who either used the coined or used the term African diaspora. As an articulate scholar, Edwards hopes to “excavate a historicized and politicized sense of diaspora” through his own work in which he focuses “on a black cultural politics in the interwar, particularly in the transnational circuits of exchange between the Harlem Renaissance and pre-Negritude Fran cophone activity in the France and West Africa”(8). Throughout his essay Edwards logically attacks the problem giving an informative insight of the works that other scholars have contributed to the term Edwards traces back to the intellectual history of the African diaspora in an eloquent manner.
In fact, it is clear to the reader that Huggins makes a concerted effort to bring light to both ethnicities’ perspectives. Huggins even argues that their culture is one and the same, “such a seamless web that it is impossible to calibrate the Negro within it or to ravel him from it” (Huggins, 309). Huggins argument is really brought to life through his use of historical evidence found in influential poetry from the time period. When analyzing why African Americans were having an identity crisis he looked to a common place that African American looked to. Africa was a common identifier among the black community for obvious reasons and was where Authors and Artists looked for inspiration. African American artists adopted the simple black silhouette and angular art found in original African pieces. Authors looked to Africa in their poetry. In The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, the names of rivers in Africa such as the Euphrates, the Congo and the Nile were all used and then the scene switches to the Mississippi river found in America showing that blacks have “seen”, or experienced both. Huggins looks deeply into Countee Cullen’s Heritage discussing “what is Africa to me?” a common identifier that united black artistry in the Harlem Renaissance, “Africa? A book one thumbs listlessly, till slumber comes” (Countee). The black community craved to be a separate society from white Americans so they were forced to go back to the past to find their heritage, before America and white oppression. Huggins finds an amazing variety of evidence within literature of this time period, exposing the raw feelings and emotion behind this intellectual movement. The connections he makes within these pieces of poetry are accurate and strong, supporting his initial thesis
LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999. Print.
Afrocentricity, as defined by Asante, is a “consciousness, quality of thought, mode of analysis, and actionable perspective where Africans seek, from agency, to assert subject place within the context of African history” (Asante 16). In essence, all roads converge and diverge with the African continent, with its rich history of pioneering triumphs and profound tribulations; Africa and all of her descendants are the end all, be all of one’s focus. There are five criteria to Afrocentricity: “(1) An interest in psychological location; (2) a commitment to finding the African subject place; (3) the defense of African cultural elements; (4) a commitment to lexical refinement; (5) a commitment to correct the dislocations in the ...
In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will discuss the major themes of the book and why the author wrote it, it will describe Native American society, its values and its beliefs and how they changed and it will show how Native Americans views other non-Natives.
...inferior cultures are always able to adapt and learn things from larger groups, in contact zone environments the larger groups are finally able to draw things from the smaller cultures as well, and thus transculturation becomes a two-way street. Only when people are made aware of the marginal diversity that surrounds them in everyday life are they able to gain a wider understanding and deeper knowledge of the world around them. They are then able to apply that knowledge to shape and benefit the way they interact with others and operate as a part of a society that is more open, leaving behind the mistake of imagined communities and applying inaccurate definitions to groups of people.
Gabriel, Deborah. Layers of Blackness: Colourism in the African Diaspora. London: Imani Media, 2007. Print.
In Cry, the beloved country, Alan Paton tells the story of his journey across Africa, his experiences with the colonized Africa, and the destruction of the beautiful, pre-colonialism native land of Africa. Heart of Darkness also tells the story of a man and his experiences with colonialism, but a man who comes from a different time period and a very different background than Alan Paton’s Stephen Kumalo. Although, both Joseph Conrad and Alan Paton portray the colonized areas as very negative, death filled, and sinful places, it is when one analyzes the descriptions of the native lands of Africa that the authors reasons for their disapproval of colonialism are truly revealed. When comparing the writing styles of Alan Paton and Joseph Conrad, their descriptions of the land and the people in both works reveal their different attitudes and views towards colonialism. While Paton and Conrad ultimately oppose colonialism, Paton is concerned with the disappearance of African tribal tradition, whereas Conrad is concerned with the perceived corruption of the white colonists.
The clash between racial reality and idea is what is artistically shown in “on being brought from Africa to America”. Wheatley is a subtle rebel. At the beginning of her poem she shows thanks for being enslaved because it brought happiness to her life in finding Christianity, but as time goes by we start to see the true tone of Wheatley, which clearly show in the last two lines of the poem, now Wheatley begins to take a big position of power as if she already has the attention of the reader. Wheatley continues by saying that Africans may not be perfect but the Christians who enslave human beings aren’t
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.
Experiencing a society of multi-cultures is beneficial through a variety of concepts to epitomize each individual identity. A person may vary in the degree to which he or she identifies with, morals, or...
In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attempts to use history in order to gain leverage on the present, to subvert the single story stereotypes that dominate many contemporary discourses on Africa. Written in the genre of historical fiction, Adichie’s novel transcends beyond mere historical narration and recreates the polyphonic experiences of varying groups of people in Nigeria before and after the Civil War. She employs temporal distortion in her narrative, distorting time in order to illustrate the intertwining effects of the past and present, immersing deep into the impact of western domination that not only catalyzed the war, but continues to affect contemporary Africa. In this paper, I will analyze her portrayal of the multifaceted culture produced by colonialism – one that coalesces elements from traditional African culture with notions of western modernity to varying degrees. I will argue that Adichie uses a range of characters, including Odenigbo’s mother, Ugwu, Olanna and Kainene, to each represent a point in a spectrum between tradition and modernity. Through her juxtaposition, she undermines the stereotypes that continue to characterize Africa as backwards and traditional, proving instead that colonialism has produced a cross culture where the two are intertwined.
The initial stanza introduces Africa from its very creation. Tagore describes the sea ‘[snatching]’ Africa ‘from the breast of Mother Asia’. The aggressive undertone of the verb, ‘snatched’ portrays the turmoil of the birthing process and it conjures an image of a child being seized from his or her nursing mother. The image, which cites one of the most primal human injustices, instantly discomforts readers. The line characterises Africa as an innocent child who is forced to be separated from her mother and whose nurturing has been stilted. This intensifies the effect of 'civilisation's barbarous greed' and exploitation by making it appear as a rape, thereby instigating a sense of outrage in readers. The personification of both the ‘angry sea’ who ‘snatched’ Africa and of ‘Mother Asia’, enlivens these elements of ...
Schipper, Mineke. "Mother Africa on a Pedestal: The Male Heritage in African Literature and Criticism." Women in African Literature Today. Ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1987. 35-53.