These differing attitudes come into clearer focus in their more autobiographical poems. Baraka's "Leroy" shows his yearning for the black heritage that he sees being passed down to him through his mother and through him to the next generation of African-Americans. The poem is far more intimate than "Fresh Zombies." The title, Baraka's given name, announces the poem as a self-study, and the use of the first person voice makes the reader feel as if he is privy to a private thought. Baraka sees his mother "carrying life from [his] ancestors" (4) and, with it, knowledge -- not just any knowledge, but "the strong nigger feeling" (5). He is not describing the human connection to the human past, but the black connection to the black past, one that has been infected with "bullshit rotten white parts" that need to be expunged (14).
Soyinka, on the other hand, offers in "Civilian and Soldier" a different shared heritage, one that transcends blackness and reaches for human nature in general. The poem describes his meeting...
African-American Art Creative African-American Literature Were one to pause to give this subject consideration, it would appear that the vast majority of African-American artwork within the 20th century was organized around and largely revolved about pressing social issues of the time period. Despite the fact that African-Americans had been legally emancipated from slavery in the middle of the 19th century, there were still a number of eminent social issues (most noticeably civil
Context Baraka and his contemporaries show distinctly modernist trends in their works, which are also distinctly colored by the Civil Rights Movement era through which they lived and in which many -- including Baraka himself -- began their literary and intellectual careers. Baraka's own upbringing as the son of relatively well-off African-American parents, his experiences in higher education and in the military, and the details of his later life and relationships
In fact, he identified himself entirely with it, even in his own self-reflection. In the reflective poem "leroy," published in 1969 under his newly adopted name Amiri Baraka, a nostalgic comment on his mother becomes a lofty vision of himself as the bearer of black wisdom -- that "strong nigger feeling" (5) -- from his ancestors forward to the next generation. He refers to this legacy that he is
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