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The choices a parent makes before and during their child’s life strongly influences the future of the child and the choices they make as they grow older. William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and Natasha Trethewey's “Native Guard” both present characters whose lives are the way they are because of the decisions their parents made before they were born. Addie deceives her husband and truly only loves one of her kids and this affects the two youngest of the five kids the most. Trethewey’s parents get married illegally and she has to spend the rest of her life defending and justifying their decision. The root of Anse and Addie’s problem with their marriage is that they never truly loved or trusted each other. A marriage based on lies and deceit …show more content…
It is obvious throughout the novel that Addie favors Jewel and neglects her other children. After she cheated on Anse she felt great amounts of guilt and because of this she states, “I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman the child I had robbed him of” (174). Dewey Dell and Vardaman were her way of making up for her infidelity and this is reflective of who Vardaman and Dewey Dell are and how they behave. Vardaman is often times confused and always trying to make sense of things and this is mostly because neither of his parents cared enough to explain the world to him so he comes with his own logical way of processing what is happening around him.Vardaman has had to make sense of everything by coming …show more content…
Growing up during her time as a mixed race child brought along a lot of questions for Trethewey. Her mother grew up during a time when racism was at its worst and after all of it decided to marry a white man. The moment her parents decided to wed they put themselves and her in danger way before she was even born.At this time civil rights were expanding and changing and “already the words were changing. She is changing from colored to negro,black still years ahead.This is 1966-she is married to a white man- and there are more names for what grows inside her” (37). The decision Trethewey’s parents made affected her life and how society viewed her from the moment she was born into a country that was just learning to accept her mother. Trethewey spent her entire life in this “middle” where she didn’t know whether she should identify as black or as white. Her identity and her race determined how people looked at her and how they treated her. As a child she was very curious about the derogatory terms that followed her home everyday but “my mother cannot answer, her mouth closed, a gesture toward her future: cold lips stitched out” (40). Trethewey’s poetry shows her analyzing history and answering the questions she had that her mother could not answer for herself. For Trethewey, understanding and accepting history is the only
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
This brings us to the Toni Morrison short story “Recitatif”. This short story encourages an African American or ethnically minded style of understanding. The driving force for the thoughts and actions of both Twyla, Roberta, and the other characters is race and race relations. Those two events may seem like nothing, but it shows how even at the early age of 8, children are taught to spot the differences in race instead of judging people by their character.
Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black community, particularly in the community’s vision of itself. The first African American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize; she was considered one of America’s most distinguished poets well before the age of fifty. Known for her technical artistry, she has succeeded in forms as disparate as Italian terza rima and the blues. She has been praised for her wisdom and insight into the African Experience in America. Her works reflect both the paradises and the hells of the black people of the world. Her writing is objective, but her characters speak for themselves. Although the idiom is local, the message is universal. Brooks uses ordinary speech, only words that will strengthen, and richness of sound to create effective poetry.
Addie and her husband, Anse, never had a very loving relationship. Addie cheated on Anse with a local priest, and had a child with him. However, Anse never knew about this affair. After Addie died, Anse found a new wife while he was at a store picking out a shovel to bury Addie with.
African-Americans’/ Affrilachians’ Suffering Mirrored: How do Nikky Finney’s “Red Velvet” and “Left” Capture events from the Past in order to Reshape the Present? Abstract Nikky Finney (1957- ) has always been involved in the struggle of southern black people interweaving the personal and the public in her depiction of social issues such as family, birth, death, sex, violence and relationships. Her poems cover a wide range of examples: a terrified woman on a roof, Rosa Parks, a Civil Rights symbol, and Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, to name just a few. The dialogue is basic to this volume, where historical allusions to prominent figures touch upon important sociopolitical issues. I argue that “Red Velvet” and “Left”, from Head off & Split, crystallize African-Americans’ /African-Americans’ suffering and struggle against slavery, by capturing events and recalling historical figures from the past.
Throughout history, literature has been used as an excellent form of communication across society. More specifically, however, poetry serves as a well respected medium used to convey messages, as its messages are often displayed in a less obvious manner, which means that they can be enjoyed when interpreted both narrowly and broadly. Poems about racial and social inequality, political issues, and intraracial discrimination have had a lasting impact on the world of literature as well as sectors of society beyond literature. For instance, the autobiographical poem "White Lies" by Natasha Trethewey tells the story of a young African American girl in the south battling the negative connotations of her very fair complexion. This poem addresses the
However, she enjoyed beating them with a paddle. She later realized that her “aloneness had to be violated over and over each day,” when she finally had her own children. This is where the theme of depression comes in when she said that her first born child caused her to become depressed, and is no longer alone and independent. Addie first had two children with Anse, named Darl and Cash. She then had an affair with Reverend Whitfield, causing her to become pregnant with her son, Jewel. Jewel then grows up to become Addie’s favorite child out of all of them. Considering his name is Jewel, which is a precious gem, it is clear to see that he is the favorite. It is also ironic that her favorite child is a bastard child, with whom she had with a priest. Her greatest joy is a child created from sin. It would be expected that her favorite child would be one that she had with her husband, however that is not the case. Addie committed a major sin of adultery, resulting in the bastard child, Jewel. She felt bad for having the affair, so she got pregnant with Dewey Darl and Vardaman in order to repay Anse for her sin. On page 176, Addie says, “I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he had three children that are his and not mine. And then I could get ready to die.” Addie gave birth to kids in order to
Charity had to move towns and switch jobs multiple times to escape rumors about her love life and Sylvia spent a good portion of her adult life having a tense relationship with her mother, who did not approve of her choice to spend her life with Charity. Although Charity and Sylvia faced these hardships throughout their life, their struggles could not even compare to the pain Addie and Rebecca felt. Addie and Rebecca were forced to hide their intense love for each other because of the time period and the social pressures surrounding them that Charity and Sylvia did not have to fight against.
The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset, and Wallace Brown.
When describing how she came to be with her husband, she apathetically states, “And so I took Anse,” later saying, “I saw him pass the school house three or four times before I learned that he was driving four miles out of his way to do it.” These statements show that it seems as if she believed she had no other choice, destined to marry Anse, knowing it would have to happen at some time in her life. Addie lets things happen to her without second thought, and this behavior defines all of her decisions including the birth of her children, where she insisted, “I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them.” Her father’s words also echoe in her actions and personality; her father “used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” The truth rings in these words for Addie after the birth of her first child, Cash, when she thinks, “ I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it.” After this realization, she lives on assuring herself that words were empty and meaningless, recluding to a life of melancholy and routine actions in which she awaits death and regrets ever being “planted” by her
Natasha Trethewey is an accomplished poet who is currently serving as United States Poet Laureate appointed by the Library of Congress and won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poems, Native Guard in 2007. She grew up mixed race, black and white, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and when her parent’s divorced she moved with her mother to Atlanta. Her mother, Gwen, remarried and at a young age Natasha was a eyewitness in the physical and psychological abuse that her new stepfather hurled upon her mother. After graduating from high school, Natasha set off to go to school in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia. During Trethewey’s freshman year, her mother was murdered by her stepfather and she works through her grief by writing poetry
Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were great writers but their attitudes towards their personal experience as an African American differed in many ways. These differences can be attributed to various reasons that range from gender to life experience but even though they had different perceptions regarding the African American experience, they both shared one common goal, racial equality through art. To accurately delve into the minds of the writers’ one must first consider authors background such as their childhood experience, education, as well their early adulthood to truly understand how it affected their writing in terms the similarities and differences of the voice and themes used with the works “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Hurston and Hughes’ “The Negro Mother”. The importance of these factors directly correlate to how each author came to find their literary inspiration and voice that attributed to their works.
Addie viewed things a lot differently than how people today would even look at things. Addie was the wife of Anse and the mother to Cash, Jewel, Dewey, and Vardaman. Before she had gotten sick, she wanted to make sure that she would be buried in Jefferson with her real blood family rather than her close family which she did not exactly have a real connection with. Addie did not view life as something great, she rather viewed it as something that was just in the way of her being dead. In the beginning, Addie was a schoolteacher and almost enjoyed punishing her students. It made her feel a connection with them. From the beginning of life Addie was very lonely person and just wanted to feel a connection with something. When she finally started having kids, she became angry because her alone time had been taken away from her. She ends up wanting to have “revenge” against Anse and has an affair with Whitfield, and from that affair she had Jewel. She likes Jewel more than any of the others because he was not made by Anse. She thinks of him as one of her own. Addie viewed life in a more negative way than anyone else, and by that, she causes her family to go through a lot of negative
...ites a short 33-line poem that simply shows the barriers between races in the time period when racism was still openly practiced through segregation and discrimination. The poem captures the African American tenant’s frustrations towards the landlord as well as the racism shown by the landlord. The poem is a great illustration of the time period, and it shows how relevant discrimination was in everyday life in the nineteen-forties. It is important for the author to use the selected literary devices to help better illustrate his point. Each literary device in the poem helps exemplify the author’s intent: to increase awareness of the racism in the society in the time period.
It is not until Celie is an adult that she finally feels content with her life and understands her capacity to be a completely autonomous woman. The concept of racial and gender equality has expanded greatly throughout the twentieth century, both in society and in literature. These changes influence Walker's writing, allowing her to create a novel that chronicles the development of a discriminated black woman. Her main character, Celie, progresses from oppression to self-sufficiency, thereby symbolizing the racial and gender advancements our country has achieved.