A long way gone by Ishmael Beah is a story about his experiences as a child soldier in a civil war in Sierra Leone. He vividly showcases his life during the war by writing about his memories and his emotions in those particular situations. By displaying such scenarios, Beah indirectly explains his audience and purpose of his writing.…
How would one feel if one were violently taken from home to a backwards place one would never understand? Aminata experienced these events first hand, which she conveys in her memoir. In this story The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, she tells the story of her life. From how she was taken from her village of Bayo in Africa, where she enjoyed freedom, lived with dignity, and shipped across the 'big river’, as a slave, to the thirteen colonies now known as the United States America. Aminata experiences grief and hardship, Anger and joy, and a fiery determination to get back home. In this compelling story, Aminata grows in various ways as she deals with slavery, discrimination, and the loss of her family.…
Maria W. Stewart delivered an emotionally charged lecture that expressed her views regarding African American freedom and treatment in America. Stewart addresses many other positions and logically appeals to them. Stewart was trying to send the audience a message of awareness to the continued injustices and mental barriers America is facing. She uses allusions, pathos, and anecdotal evidence to effectively portray her position.…
Have you ever been consider an outsider? Do you know what it feels like to have your ethnical background view as inferior or strange? In Amy tan’s “Fish Cheeks” and Mya Angelou’s “champion of the the world” it gives insight as to what it is like to be non- white in a dominantly white America. They show the differences and similarities of what sets them apart from dominant culture, and how the events that both portrayed effected that difference.…
Intro: Imagine living in the time where Jim Crow laws were at its peak. Just think, not being able to hold the door open for a lady who has hand full of groceries or even communicating with the opposite race. Imagine being a 14 year-old black male at this time. For those of you who don’t know what it’s like to be black in those days, it was pretty tough. I’m not here to speak to you about Jim Crow and its stupidity, but more a young man whose life was completely changed after what was a visit to his uncle’s house for a summer vacation.…
Summon a vision of yourself in a crowded setting, surrounded by white men, women, children and seniors. With that image carved, draw yourself as a young African American in the 1960s, despised by the white man. Though you stick out like a sore thumb, eyes glance past you, blinded in your midst. An ‘outcast’ has now become your terminal label- segregated, judged, despised. Does this story sound familiar? Yes, it does, as millions of books in the 21st century alone, have exhibited these themes. While eloquently written, Melba Patillo Beals unoriginality in the subject of hardships in African American lives in the time of severe oppression makes this story a tale told too often, which should not be exposed to a classroom of easily distracted teenagers.…
Life for Charlene Hunter-Gault wasn’t easy. She had to live a life surrounded by hatred. She wasn’t wanted wherever she went and because she lived in the same time as the Jim Crow Laws, which restricted African Americans from having the same amount of freedom as Americans, she had to fight an internal and external conflict at the same time, when she was given an overture to attend the University of Georgia, an all-white university. Despite the conditions she was given to attend school, she didn’t let that stop her from continuing her career for a better life. Hunter-Gault’s experiences can be compared to both the caged bird and the free bird because she had more opportunities than a caged bird, but not as many as the free bird.…
The African-American heritage has become a very influential part of the American culture of present times. It has a long and troublesome history that leads to fulfilling their “American Dream”; a dream of hard work filled success. This hard work was introduced to the United States initially in the form of slavery. Stories of the trials, tribulations, and hardships of those indoctrinated into slavery can be educational for students of today on many levels.…
In a person’s life, there will be times when one loses them self in the large and unpredictable world. An individual will be worse off, no matter what kind of losses an individual has to suffer. This is shown in The Book of Negroes. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill is a fictionalized, historical account that explores the story of the protagonist, Aminata, who is separated from her home, family, culture and faith. This book demonstrates the effectiveness of Hill's ability to portray imagery. Hill uses effective imagery to emphasize the fact that often loss is worse than death itself. This is shown through the book when Aminata loses her parents, her child and her home. These losses are worse than death itself.…
Richard Wright was determined to make a profound statement. In his novel, Native Son, he endeavors to present the “horror of Negro life in the United States” (Wright xxxiii). By addressing such a significant topic, he sought to write a book that “no one would weep over; that would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (xxvii). Native Son is a commentary on the poverty and helplessness experienced by blacks in America, and it illustrates the abhorrent ways that blacks were treated, describes their awful living conditions and calls attention to the half-hearted efforts offered by white sympathizers. Told from the perspective of his character Bigger Thomas, Wright crafts a story depicting the oppressive lives endured by Negroes and makes it so despicable that it grabs the attention of the reader and forces him to reevaluate the state of society. There is much in this novel that would cause a reader to cry, but, to Wright’s point, the topic is so significant that it resonates more deeply and elicits a deeper response.…
The streets of Chicago have always been riddled with gang violence and poverty in African American communities. Dominic A. Pacyga’s novel Chicago: A Biography explores the obstacles faced by blacks during the evolving of Chicago through accounts of public housing, street gangs, education, and juvenile delinquency. The film There Are No Children Here tells the story of two boys growing up in a housing project in Chicago infested with crime and a shortage of money, guidance, and tranquility. Knowledge of the struggles of the residents of Chicago, in particular African Americans, is essential to the history of the city. Were these struggles possibly dreams deferred? Both Pacyga’s novel and the film There Are No Children Here convey the trials and tribulations of the African Americans who made their homes in Chicago years ago. However, Pacyga displays a bird’s eye view while the film provides a front row seat to African American struggles in the evolving Chicago.…
To conclude, both writers come to a consensus that a shared history creates a community whether or not you can personally identify with it or not. Through African American literature, Bambara’s short stories encroach upon rebellion as a means of exploring the link between the status…
intervention in the social process to reshape reality in African-American images and interests and thus, self-consciously make history (Karenga, 69). African American History…
“The more your delve and backtrack and think, the more clear it becomes that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skein of necessity and interdependence and chance that all could have produced only one result: what is.” This quote provides insight to a brilliant memoir by John Edgar Wideman called, Brothers and Keepers. This is a story that tells how two brothers from the same predominantly African American neighborhood in Homewood, Pennsylvania and from the same background can go on two different paths. John, the oldest brother grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar and a college professor and was able to at least theoretically escape the powerful grip of the ghetto. However, for his younger brother Robert this was not the case. Robert became a victim of social pressures and was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. He becomes a convict who retains his dignity by loss and tragedy. Wideman was affected by a wide range of challenges. While he grew up under such unbearable conditions, it is convincing that one could take a cultural studies approach to examine…
* Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. The African-American Odyssey. Vol. 2 4th Edition. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey. Chapters 21 and 24.…