Instructor’s Manual Arguing through Literature

Chapter 15: Instructor’s Manual

Race and Ethnicity

Poetry

Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

1. A reporter from the black newspaper The Chicago Defender is sent to Arkansas to report on the riots that erupted when the high school was desegregated to comply with the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown vs.Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools.

2. The puzzle for Little Rock is how the people could appear so normal and ordinary, so concerned with the everyday matters of life, from tea and cookies to Beethoven and baseball, and yet be participating in riots in which people were spitting at school children.

3. The language about the townspeople in their guise as ordinary citizens is, except for the rhyme, plainer. The language about the rioters is more densely metaphorical: a coiling storm a-writhe / on bright madonnas. And a scythe / of men harassing brownish girls” (53-55). Alliteration gets more concentrated in the last three lines, which include the leap to the identification of the harassed students with the crucified Christ (58-60).

N.B. A fascinating source for putting this poem into historical context is May It Please the Court: The Most Sigificant Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court Since 1955, ed. Peter Irons and Stephanie Guitton (New York: The New Press, 1993), which contains transcripts and an audio tape of the oral arguments in “Cooper vs. Aaron (358 U.S. 1 (1958), in which the Little Rock School Board seeks to delay implementation of Brown vs. Board because of the 1957 riots. The lawyers for the Board sought to separate the rioters from the ordinary townsfolk. Students can contrast the way Brooks treats them as if they are the same people (48, 51).

Ambitious students might investigate how The Chicago Defender actually reported the 1957 riots.

Joshua Coben, “Ishmael”

1. Ishmael and Isaac are thought of as founding patriarchs of Arabs and Jews, respectively. Thus, despite the contemporary conflict between them, especially in Israel and the territories it has occupied since the 1967 war between Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, both peoples acknowledge a common source in Abraham. The narrator, speaking as Isaac, is acknowledging his kinship with Ishmael through the similarities in their looks, history, and heritage.

2. In stanza 2, the poem alternates its pronouns in order to blur the lines between the two men. Perhaps as a result of the erasing of the boundary, the rest of the poem uses the first person plural pronouns. It uses a lot of alliteration and assonance (e.g., first stanza: short “i,” short “u,” the diphthong “oi,” and repetition of initial “s”). Stanzas 3 and 4 have metaphors of fire. The line break between lines 23 and 24 increases the surprise of “suffocates” and therefore (along with the alliteration) its impact. The line break of 30-31 produces surprise and therefore emphasizes the closeness of the brothers through time.

Countee Cullen, “Incident”

1. The title makes the encounter seem small and unimportant, which heightens its paradoxical importance in his mind.

2. The regular meter and rhyme builds up expectations in the reader. This allows him to put the word “Nigger” in a place where it will get a good deal of emphasis (the end of a line at the end of a stanza as a rhyme word). The same is true for “remember” in the last line of the poem.

3. The fact that the boys are equal in size (and possibly age) puts emphasis on the other boy’s prejudice by contrast.

Nikki Giovanni, “Ego Tripping”

1. The anaphora creates a rhythm that gives the poem some power and momentum. The anaphora structures a list of hyperboles that make the narrator monumental and monumentally creative as her ordinary bodily functions produce the world. They make the poem outrageous and exhilarating.

2. Donne exaggerates the power of love to claim his own inoffensiveness. Giovanni embraces the exaggeration to claim her effect on the world.

3. Giovanni was involved with the Black Arts movement and civil rights movement. She was interested in the Black Panthers and Black power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The poem’s assertive self-affirmation reflects that time.

Suheir Hammad, “Exotic”

1. The form is created by the anaphora of the first line of each stanza and the subsequent indentation. The anaphora, slightly varied in most iterations, repeats the negative claims of the speaker and establishes the hostile relationship between speaker and audience. The indented lines elaborate on the speaker’s attitude, explaining what she means by it and the reasons for it. The indented lines of the stanzas almost function as glosses on the first line.

2. Anyone fascinated with the speaker’s sexuality because of her “otherness;” from the list in stanza 5, it seems she expects the people tempted to treat her as an objectified other to be mostly male. She wants to reject advances of this kind.

3. She wants to be understood for her commonality with other women (stanza 2), not her differences. She feels that to be loved for her difference obliterates her individuality (stanza 4) and means that “I am dead to you” (25).

4. Stanza 3 rejects the long history in Western literature of describing beautiful women, the same tradition that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (p. 758), plays with.

5. The poem’s informal diction (“wanna,” “ain’t,” and the slangy lexicon of stanza 5) make the poem more informal. There is an intimacy to its hostility.

6. Line 31 is possibly an allusion to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which refers to the Virgin Mary, who was conceived and born without original sin. In referring to the objectified “immaculate princess” that some men seem to want her to be, she warns them that in doing so they give up some of their power, noting that the princess is “emasculating.” This warning is friendlier than the hostile tone of much of the rest of the poem in that it sees the situation from the male point of view.

Langston Hughes, “Harlem”

—, “Same in Blues”

1. “Harlem” is not only shorter but more abstract. It has no characters, no dialogue, no hint of a dramatic situation. It works by the sequence of similes seeking to answer the question of the first line. The first, the raisin, is pretty innocuous: Although it isn’t good to dry many things, raisins need to dry in order to become raisins. But the fact that it stands for a dream makes the raisin’s drying troublesome. The negative connotations gather with the next similes, the festering sore and the spoiled meat. Although we discover in line 5 that the poem contains rhyme, the sweetness of rhyme contrasts with the bitterness of the poem’s content. Intensity builds when at the end, the distance between rhyming words collapses into a couplet and the syntax again takes the form of a question in the last line. In the context of the poem, the question is hostile and its intensity is magnified by the rhyme.

“Same in Blues” puts “Harlem” into a setting with characters and concerns of daily life like relationships and telephones. It provides the abstract rubrics “traveling,” “nothing,” “impotence,” and “confusion” instead of the similes of “Harlem” and finishes with the emphatic repetition of one line.

2. In “Harlem,” it’s really only the title that indicates that the dream has something to do with race. But that word alone identifies the dream as that of equality, which has been deferred by over two centuries of slavery and the indignities and dangers of Jim Crow and more subtle racial discrimination.

Claude McKay, “The White City”

1. The twenties were part of the making of New York as a center of manufacturing, commerce, finance, and trade marked by newly-designed skyscrapers and the development of the transportation system. The black population, concentrated in Harlem on the northern end of the island, was poorer than average white Manhattanites. In the twenties, it was the site of so many writers and artists that the period was called “the Harlem Renaissance.”

2. In that his hatred “fills my every mood” (6), it seems to nourish and sustain, and to “feed me vital blood” (8). It is what allows him to make a private “heaven in the white world’s hell” (7). In knowing the city so well in almost romantic terms (“spires and towers vapor-kissed,” “fortressed port” (11-12), the narrator reveals a love-hate relationship with a place that oppresses (“the goaded mass,” line 10) but also offers places that are “sweet like wanton loves” (14).

3. The poem is a sonnet with 3 quatrains and a couplet. The strict form may be part of what allows him to take in the chaos of the city and handle his anger in order to “bear it nobly as I live my part (4).

4. Both are sonnets and Wordsworth’s line 6 corresponds to McKay’s lines 11-12, a clue to McKay’s somewhat romantic view of the city, despite its being filtered through his hate for it.

Pat Mora, “Immigrants”

1. Hot dogs, apple pie, football, and, of course, the American flag signal the parents’ wish that their children to assimilate into American culture. Blonde dolls with blue eyes may be iconically American. There is no reason that Polish children couldn’t identify with them. Insofar as Hispanic children can’t, some psychologists might find the use of them somewhat alienating and damaging to the children’s self-esteem (as the plaintiffs argued in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education). Furthermore, insofar as some immigrants want to affirm and preserve their ethnic heritage, the parents’ shame at their language takes on a certain pathos (see 2 below and Sagel’s “Baca Grande,” p. 901).

2. The parents seem to want to protect their children from their own foreignness.

Sharon Olds, “On the Subway”

1. The threat she perceives is based on a stereotype about violent black youths. Olds expands the dynamic through an economic analysis of the dependence of white affluence on black poverty, a racially inflected Marxist understanding of the economic utility of an underclass available for economic expansions and serving as a brake on wages.

2. Yes. Her observations might tell us more about her than they do about the young man, because she really knows nothing about him. Thinking that his “cold casual look” makes him look like a mugger, thinking that he could kill her easily (so could any other commuter) is pure projection. Trying to understand how she lives “off his life” is politically correct and perhaps too easy. Christian McEwen, the reviewer in The Nation when the book first came out, thought the poem betrayed “laziness here, a failure to imagine and take responsibility” (11 Apr. 1987: 472). However, McEwen calls the narrator “Olds,” perhaps collapsing persona with poet.

Jim Sagel, “Baca Grande”

1. In that the narrator includes himself in the “us” of line 45, he is a member of Baca’s audience, perhaps a member of the class of 1980, and he takes a sardonic tone toward what he sees as Baca’s condescension to the less-assimilaed audience: “if he / the former bootstrapless James A. Baca / could dazzle the ass / off the universe / then even you / yes you / Joey Martinez [. . .].” The speaker, mouthing platitudes that make it clear that Baca has low expectations for Joey Martinez even while supposedly encouraging him. The last line of the poem points to his hypocritical wish to escape his roots.

2. The surprising image, accentuated by the break between these two lines, refers to Baca’s loss of his Hispanic accent.

3. Sagel wouldn’t approve of the parents’ shame about their native languages in Mora’s poem.

4. Baca is the ideal Mexican-American for the administration that wants a non-troublesome symbol of its inclusiveness: “bilingual, college educated, ambitious! Say the word ‘acculturate’ and he accelerates. He is intelligent, well-mannered, clean—did I say clean?” But like the engineered Mexican-Americans of the play, he has ideas of his own. Unlike them, he is pro-assimilation and has political ambitions.

William Jay Smith, “Old Cherokee Woman’s Song”

1. Eighteen thirty-eight and 1839 saw the forced removal of Cherokees from their ancestral lands in North Carolina.

<http://www.powersource.com/cherokee/history.html>

“Under orders from President Jackson, the U.S. Army began enforcement of the Removal Act. Around 3,000 Cherokees were rounded up in the summer of 1838 and loaded onto boats that traveled the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas Rivers into Indian Territory. Many were held in prison camps awaiting their fate. In the winter of 1838-39, 14,000 were marched 1,200 miles through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas into rugged Indian Territory.

An estimated 4,000 died from hunger, exposure, and disease. The journey became an eternal memory as the “trail where they cried” for the Cherokees and other removed tribes. Today it is remembered as the Trail of Tears.

Those who were able to hide in the mountains of North Carolina or who had agreed to exchange Cherokee citizenship for U.S. citizenship later emerged as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of Cherokee, North Carolina. The descendants of the survivors of the Trail of Tears comprise today’s Cherokee Nation with membership of more than 165,000.

2. Part of the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty agreeing to their removal from the south Atlantic states.

3. The more prominent connection is between the cold ground and the red water, elements that are repeated in the poem.