Theme Of Southern History By Natasha Trethewey

Response to Viewing a KKK Uniform At The Civil Rights Institute Ashley M. Jones is an excellent poet, her book Magic City Gospel is full of imagery and feeling. Most of the poems throughout give the audience a good impression of the pride she feels about Alabama and some of its culture. However, she also feels another type of way to some of the bad culture and history riddled and woven into Alabama’s core. One can feel her emotion as she speaks about a certain object inside of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. In Ms. Jones’s poem, “Viewing a KKK Uniform At The Civil Rights Institute”, she voices the haunting ghost of a feeling the uniform gives her.

The use of allusion in the two poems “The History Teacher by Billy Collins and “Outdistanced” by Larry Rubin punctuate the shared theme that that a willful lack of self-awareness can quickly lead to a greater ignorance of what could shape humanity. Throughout both poems, allusion is applied in order to create the theme that ignorance, due to a lack of self-awareness, can shape humanity. In Collins’ poem, a history teacher tries and fails to disseminate the misinformation that there is no violence in history in order to protect the innocence of his pupils. However, this severe lack of wisdom leads to the, “torment of the weak/ and the smart,” (lines 14-15) on the playground.

With freedom coming, some slaves were still loyal to their masters. Yet, the slave masters still consider slaves to be the bottom rail of society. The bottom rail was considered the “lowest level of America’s social and economic scale” (Davidson & Lytle, p. 179). The slaves were portrayed to be dumb or stupid because state governments discouraged slaves

Captivity is defined as the state of being imprisoned or confined. A tragic experience is given a whole new perspective from Louise Erdrich 's poem, “Captivity”. Through descriptive imagery and a melancholic tone, we can see the poem and theme develop in her words. Erdrich takes a quote from Mary Rowlandson’s narrative about her imprisonment by the Native Americans and her response to this brings readers a different story based off of the epigraph. Louise Erdrich compiles various literary devices to convey her theme of sympathy, and her poem “Captivity” through specific and descriptive language brings a whole new meaning to Mary Rowlandson’s narrative.

Tracey Lindberg’s novel Birdie is narratively constructed in a contorting and poetic manner yet illustrates the seriousness of violence experience by Indigenous females. The novel is about a young Cree woman Bernice Meetoos (Birdie) recalling her devasting past and visionary journey to places she has lived and the search for home and family. Lindberg captures Bernice’s internal therapeutic journey to recover from childhood traumas of incest, sexual abuse, and social dysfunctions. She also presents Bernice’s self-determination to achieve a standard of good health and well-being. The narrative presents Bernice for the most part lying in bed and reflecting on her dark life in the form of dreams.

In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears.

As a woman of both white and Native American cultures, Linda Hogan’s collection of poetry The Book of Medicine, reflects how both sides are affected by white narratives. Her collection is about the illness these narrative cause and how creating new narratives we can heal from them. The first half of the book explains the destruction in the world and in our culture caused by “white” culture of separating from nature. In white culture, there is a clear distinction between “us” and nature and animals. The two, supposedly, cannot co-exist.

In the poem, “The Child Who Walks Backwards”, Lorna Crozier discusses the cover up of parental abuse in narrative style of poetry. Lorna Crozier expresses the point of view as if someone is observing the abuse from the outside, specifically the neighbor to the mother and child. The poem proclaims that the son of a mother constantly runs into things and sleep walks during the night which supposedly were the causes for the marks and injuries that appeared on the young boy. Upon closer analysis, it comes to realization that the child is the victim of abuse. Parental abuse is something that everyone should be wary about because a lot of parents abuse their children and force them to be silent about it.

In the poem “Treblinka Gas Chamber”, by Phyllis Webb and in the TRC’s “The History”, both texts share a common theme of inhumane treatment towards children within certain cultural and ethnical groups. While the two authors explore distinct historical contexts, both texts are centred on racial segregation with nationalistic motives. Phyllis Webb appeals to a logos strategy through the use of allusion. In her poem, “Treblinka Gas Chamber”, Webb presents fictional and historical examples to display her knowledge and establish her credibility.

Heaven and hell, the rich and the poor, dark and light, love and hate….these opposites seem to coexist in our world peacefully, never veering off the path life has made for them. They say opposites attract, but how do they attract within us? The book Heroes by Robert Cormier contains the recurring theme of love and hate, making the story more emotional and complex as it develops. Events throughout the story help to contribute to this theme and emphasize the importance of it. The “love triangle” occurring between Larry, Francis, and Nicole contributes to the theme of love and hate in Heroes.

Throughout history, there have been many literary studies that focused on the culture and traditions of Native Americans. Native writers have worked painstakingly on tribal histories, and their works have made us realize that we have not learned the full story of the Native American tribes. Deborah Miranda has written a collective tribal memoir, “Bad Indians”, drawing on ancestral memory that revealed aspects of an indigenous worldview and contributed to update our understanding of the mission system, settler colonialism and histories of American Indians about how they underwent cruel violence and exploitation. Her memoir successfully addressed past grievances of colonialism and also recognized and honored indigenous knowledge and identity.

A Monument to the Dead Throughout Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey there are themes of death, grief and change. These themes are carried through the collection and are present within the entire collection. These set up the mood that this collection is ultimately about change but change for the reader as well as what happens in the collection. In “Monument” we can see all these changes through a paraphrase of the poem and the sense of elongated time from the from the form and imagery of the poem.

Maya Angelou recalls the first seventeen years of her life, discussing her unsettling childhood in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya and Bailey were sent from California to the segregated South to live with their grandmother, Momma. At the age of eight, Maya went to stay with her mother in St. Louis, where she was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. Maya confronts these traumatic events of her childhood and explores the evolution of her own strong identity. Her individual and cultural feelings of displacement, caused by these incidents of sexual abuse, are mediated through her love for literature.

Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420). For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue.

The theme of “Your World” by Georgia Douglas Johnson is that you should take risks and explore places that you desire to go. For example, the poet states that he “battered the cordons / and cradled [his] wings on the breeze / then soared to the uttermost reaches” (10). This indicates that he was trapped inside of a barrier that restricts him to explore, but the hunger of exploration made him break out of the barrier. The poem “Your World” connects to the reading we have done in this collection is because the poem mentions about taking risks to explore the unknown.