The White Boy Shuffle

While I was researching poems for my poetry presentation, one that I came across and liked very much is “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay.  Unfortunately, someone already did it and apparently I was gone that day, which is sad because it would have been an interesting discussion.  To refresh people’s memory, here it is:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Now that we’ve finished White Boy Shuffle, I’m curious how the speaker in this poem would get along with the Gunnar at the end of the book.  Both are similar in the way that they both think about death. Also sidenote, I feel like in the end, there are two versions of Gunnar: one version is his thoughts and the other is the way the public sees him as a messiah of some sort.  So Messiah Gunnar is pretty similar to the speaker. He is speaking to a crowd and talking about his own suicide, but the crowd takes it to mean that he believes that people should commit suicide to protest society. The speaker is also accepting death by fighting back and saying that if we have to die, it should be for a good reason and fighting an enemy.  Messiah Gunnar’s believers are in a way doing the same thing, but their enemy is not physically in front of them, which changes the whole situation, because they have a choice, whereas the speaker is saying if we have no other choice. But these people do have a choice. There’s also Gunnar’s thoughts that he keeps to himself. With these he just wants out of this life and he is thinking why bother to fight if it won’t change anything.  The speaker in the poem does not agree, and because of that, even though he is talking about death, it gives the poem a more hopeful outlook, which is a much better way to look at things.

Nexus

For Friday, we read “Nexus” by Rita Dove, which Olivia did a great job of reading.  At first glance, I had no clue what this poem was about, but found it vaguely sinister with the “giant praying mantis” that was “begging vacantly” with “his ragged jaws opening onto formlessness.”  As someone who is not a huge fan of bugs, this seemed very nightmarish. But in class we discussed the title and how it fit into the poem and for me, that made the poem lose its ominous feeling.

According to the OED, one definition is “A central point or point of convergence; a focus; a meeting-place.”  We discussed how in the poem the window mentioned in the second line could be a nexus for the speaker, who is a poet or a writer of some sort.  Itcan be seen as a point of convergence between the real world and the world that is being written about. From the second line on in the poem, the things being described are surreal and fantastical.  To me, it seems like in the first and second stanzas, the speaker is separated from the world she is writing about; she is inside writing “stubbornly” while the world of writing is trying to draw her in.  Unfortunately, she is separated by the glass, but in the third stanza, she is fully drawn into the work and is immersed when she finally walks outside into the “lapping darkness,” where she is met with an “absurdly green brontosaurus.”  

I wish writing was like this for me, where I can be drawn in and lose track of all time and reality, but unfortunately I still see it as something I am forced to do.  Luckily, reading is not the same, and that is when I can experience what the speaker is describing and be immersed into this incredible world.

The Four Horsemen

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she starts off a chapter with “the four horsemen came-schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff” (174).  Immediately the imagery that comes to mind is the Four Horsemen from the Bible, who come to Earth as part of the Apocalypse.  And in the book, the events following the four horsemen’s arrival can definitely be seen as apocalyptic and world changing. As the mother of four children, Sethe has to make a horrible, split-second decision: does she want her children to experience the horrors that she went through in slaver, or is there another option?  Readers judge her decision one way or another, but I’m not sure we have the right. We can read about Sethe’s experience and try to imagine it, but most readers have never experienced anything like what she went through and most likely we never will.

Back to the four horsemen, why did Morrison choose to have the reader’s initial impression of this scene from the outsider’s perspective?  One factor was probably timing. You can include these perspectives now and then go back to Sethe’s and other’s later in order to get as much out of the scene as possible.  Another point that was brought up in class is because of emotions. The four outsiders are cruel people who are doing their job and only care about retrieving what they see as property and bringing them back so that they can be paid.  They don’t have emotions and they can look at this scene in a way and describe it and only give us the facts. Other characters that are involved would look at it and be biased by their emotions. The four horsemen can look at the scene, ignore the tragedy, and give us the cold, hard facts.  Seeing this lack of compassion just gives us more reasons to sympathize with Sethe and try to understand her decision.

Janie, Hurston and Angelou

Last week we read “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou and while discussing it, I started thinking about how it applied to Their Eyes Were Watching God.  In her poem, Angelou’s narrator is a woman who is speaking out strongly against everyone who “wants to see [her] broken.”  We asked the question in class about does this apply to Janie. Overall, it seems she doesn't really. She spends most of the book finding love, or what she thinks it is, and then losing it.  But then after going through all of this we see her how we are introduced to her in the prologue, a woman who walks into town with her hair down and wearing overalls, not caring what all the others sitting on the porch are saying about her.  Although she is not quite at the level of the speaker in “Still I Rise,” she is on her way. Zora Neale Hurston on the other hand is very similar to the speaker. From what we learned about her in the documentary we watched, she is confident and also not afraid to pursue her career.  One of my favorite quotes from her is “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.”

Thinking about Janie and Hurston as strong characters reminds me of Richard Wright’s criticism.  He writes that “Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction” and that her books willingly continue the minstrel tradition.  He doesn’t like that the book is not openly a protest novel, and that it doesn’t have an idea that “lends itself to significant interpretation.” I agree with Wright that this book isn’t a protest novel.  Maybe if Janie gained her confidence a little bit earlier and if she displayed that confidence in front of a white community, like the speaker in “Still I Rise,” but she doesn’t. And while Wright might not agree with that, there is literally no problem with it.  Maybe Hurston didn’t want her book to be explicitly about social problems, maybe she just wanted to focus on the more romantic aspects. And that is perfectly acceptable and led to an amazing novel.

Ellison and the Narrator

One of the first things I noticed while watching Ralph Ellison: An American Journey was how similar Ellison’s life was to the narrator’s in Invisible Man.  Both of them worked hard in school in order to better themselves.  The narrator had to go through the Battle Royale in order to get a scholarship to college, and while it was not very realistic, it was a good metaphor for how hard it could be for African-Americans to get it into college.  Ellison also experienced problems when applying to college. He wanted to go to Tuskegee and applied twice and was denied before finally getting a scholarship for music. But after a while, he started endangering his scholarship.  Unlike the narrator, he didn’t take an important white man to a controversial man’s house, but he did start spending less time on music and more time in the library reading and getting more and more interested in literature.

Like the narrator, Ellison chose to leave behind the university and head to New York for more opportunities and to get a job, although Ellison had more of a choice than the narrator did.  While in New York, both Ellison and the narrator meet people who influenced them and presented them with opportunities, but in very different ways. The narrator met Mr. Emerson who gave him a job at a paint factory and then he met Brother Jack.  Ellison met Langston Hughes and then Richard Wright. The movie referred to Invisible Man as a “fictionalized autobiography” and I agree.  Ellison took the basic facts from his life and gave them a slight twist and made them less fortunate.  While Ellison met other writers and artists who inspired and encouraged his work, the narrator met a man who took advantage of him and led him in the wrong direction.  And while Ellison and the narrator hid similar beginnings, they had very different endings with Ellison being an accomplished writer, and the narrator living in a hole for a long time.  It’s easy to see that Ellison was very fortunate with who he met in New York and how his life could be very different without that happening.

The King of the Bingo Game

Sorry about the formatting.  I can't get it to change for some reason.

One thing that really stood out to me while watching Ralph Ellison: An American Journey was one of the short stories that he wrote: The King of the Bingo Game.  Just hearing the summary was enough to draw me in, but combined with the clips from the video adaptation made me curious as to the whole story, so I read it.  In it, the unnamed main character is in a movie theatre thinking about how the characters on the screen can escape their problems while he can’t escape the fact that he is broke and his wife is sick.  He falls asleep and dreams that he is on a train track with a train about to hit him. When he jumps off to escape, the train follows him onto the streets of the town. He wakes up screaming in his seat.  After the movie, there is a bingo game. In order to have a higher chance of winning, the narrator has brought five cards, which was harder to keep track of, but it ends up paying off when he gets a bingo.  In order to win the jackpot of $36.90, he has to press a button to spin the wheel and it has to land on 00. The narrator knows the correct strategy is to press the button quickly, but as soon as he presses the button he can’t let go.  He compares the experience to being God. The bingo caller and the audience mock him and yell at him to hurry up, but he is drunk on the feeling of power. Eventually two guards come, and as the curtain is being lowered, they wrestle him away from the button.  The last thing he sees before blacking out is the wheel landing on 00.

In Native Son, Bigger is controlled by a series of events that end in Mary’s murder.  Bigger feels that he regains some of the control of his life when he writes the ransom letter because he feels like he has a plan and a way out.  He starts feeling powerful when he is walking down the street and no one around him knows what he did. In Invisible Man, the narrator is controlled by the letters that keep him running and then later he is controlled by the Brotherhood.  He feels he regains his control when he starts to follow his grandfather’s advice and “overcome 'em with yeses.”  In The King of the Bingo Game, the narrator is controlled by his lack of money and his need for it.  He needs money to help his wife and he has to resort to bingo games to try to get it.  He feels trapped and that is symbolized through his dream. The train is bearing down on him and all he can do is run, but it still follows him.  He finally gains some control as soon as he pushes that button. He realizes this and then can’t let go. He is finally in control of his life. If he just keeps pushing the button, he has the potential of winning that money.  As soon as he lets go, he loses that chance. So he just keeps holding it, at least until the choice is taken from him.

Fired Up!!

I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about until I heard the poem Fired Up!! today.  Written by Everett Hoagland, I loved hearing Winnie Mandela’s story.  Although she has been accused of taking bribes and various other crimes, I loved the way that this poem explained her reasoning and possibly how she felt.  One of the first things I noticed about the poem was the irony of the whole situation. How Winnie married a revolutionary, became one herself, and then was later fired by her revolutionary husband for being too revolutionary.  This dynamic made me more interested in looking at their marriage and what went wrong.

Before they were married, Nelson Mandela was involved with many political activities and was already being arrested for various protests.  Winnie was more calm and had studied social work in college. During the course of their marriage, they both spent time in jail. Nelson came out and got back involved with politics.  Winnie also did the same, but with new ideas. As the poem mentions, she was tortured during her time in jail and this among other things led to her being more accepting of violent tactics, such as necklacing and even murder.  This difference in opinion may have been what caused them to divorce.

Another thing this poem does well is show the harsh realities of Winnie’s life, using the tactic of comparing her to the queen.  While Winnie was in jail being tortured, Hoagland points out that the Queen never had to raise her “genteel, white-gloved fist in the face of an automatic weapons-wielding police charge.”  But, the poem also shows that these experiences helped her by making her stronger, shown by the image of her “pregnant with a new nation.” One stanza that we didn’t really discuss in class that stood out to me was the second to last one.  In it, the “Warrior Prince,” (Nelson Mandela), has tea with the Queen while she has a crown and jewelry made from the coins, tears, and sweat of the natives in South Africa. This could have been a reference to when Winnie was angry that money went towards showing the Queen around, instead of more humanitarian things.

Then we get to the last stanza, with the final words being: “Winnie Mandela was fired (...) for doing what she had been asked, told, inspired to do-for a quarter of a century.”  This final statement shows how Winnie was doing what she believed in: being a revolutionary.

Bigger and his Free Will

After reading Native Son by Richard Wright, we read How “Bigger” was Born, which was Wright describing how he came up with the character and we discussed what we called “Wright’s Lab Experiments.”  Since Wright based Bigger on people that he had met and seen in real life, he had the idea of the character before he had any idea what was going to happen in the book.  This inevitably led to Bigger being classified as a reactive character in many situations, instead of taking charge and performing actions, he waits until an action is performed on him.  Wright himself wrote, “Why should I not like a scientist in a laboratory, use my imagination and invent test-tube situations, [and] place Bigger in them (…)?” In other words, he takes his pre-written character and places him in different situations to see how he reacts.

Writing a story this way may lead to it being a little boring at times, with the character not doing anything proactive, but it also serves as a way for Wright to comment on life as an African American man.  In Native Son, there are many times where it seems that Bigger has no free will and no choice as to what happens to him.  He is constantly being backed into a corner where he just has to fight his way out. This may be because he is a reactive character, but it also portrays life for a black man in this time period.  The whole night where he first meets the Daltons, he is constantly put off guard by Mary and Jan. They try to be familiar and comfortable with him, not noticing that it is doing the exact opposite.  By asking him to call them by their first names, it is going against everything Bigger has ever learned about interacting with white people. If he does call them by their first names, it is going against a societal rule, but if he doesn’t, he is going against their orders.  The night goes on and Mary and Jan get more and more drunk. By the end of the night, Mary can’t walk so Bigger has to help her. He can either do so, or go to her parents and get fired for letting her get so drunk in the first place. Since he doesn’t have any other options for a job, he helps her up to his bed.  Unfortunately, he is stuck in her room with a blind Mrs. Dalton. His option here is to try to keep Mary quiet, or be found by Mrs. Dalton, which would lead to being accused of rape and being sent to jail. He chooses, and with that one choice (which wasn’t really a choice at all), he seals his fate.

Up until that point, Bigger truly was a reactive character.  He went along with what was happening, and didn’t have much choice in the matter.  But after that one night, he gets more free will, and ends up not making the best choices.  When he finally gets the chance to make his own decision, he ends up writing a fake ransom note, hiding bodies, and raping and killing his girlfriend.  But is it really free will? Besides the part with Bessie, he is doing what he thinks is right to make sure he doesn’t suffer for making a mistake. He knows that it was an accident, but because of his race, confessing and going to court is not an option.  His only choice is to try to make sure that no one knows what happened. Having Bigger be a reactive character is a great way to make sure the reader understands what life as an African American in the time period is like. It highlights how even if you do have free will, there is still a lack of options and also how hard it can be to overcome one mistake.