African American literature and movements

African American literature

African American Literature is the body of literature produced on the United States by writers of American descent. It can also be defined as writings by African descent people living in America .
Before the American Civil War, African American Literature primarily focused on the issue of slavery. But then and during the Civil Rights movement, the African American Literature
focused on issues of racial segregation and Black Nationalism.


Characteristics and themes of African American literature
African American Literature has generally focused on themes of
particular interest to black people in the United States, such as:
Black freedom and equality.
African American culture.
African American racism.
African American slavery.
African American sense of home.
African American religion


African American Writers

They were realistic and they used words that can leave lasting impression.
Their early writings contributed to the modernistic traditional form. Moreover, their later writings are creative and original.
Their themes, forms and techniques are from fields about songs of slavery, religious background and blues of jazz players during their times.
They had only two choices when it comes to writing:
Either to use standard language mixed with comic elements of exploiting the black character.
Or They could use radical style



At the turn of the Century, black Writings became
More Fundamental.
The dialect changed as well as the themes

The themes changed into
Black pride.
Black identity and solidarity.
Black humanism and caritas

History of Black Americans
Black American poetry clearly reflects the phases of struggle and oppression in America. White Americans have been enslaving, oppressing, and abusing black people for more than 200 years.
Black Americans overcame many difficulties to claim their identity and respect
A large migration African Americans began during the First World War, hitting its high point during the Second World War. Blacks left racism and lack of opportunities in South American and settled in northern cities like Chicago. In their eyes the North became the Promise Land which they can fulfill their American Dreams.
But the Northern attitudes were extremely unwelcoming. The White people were still higher and Black people were still lower. This “freedom” just ended one phase of black American experience and began another.

Black people began to struggle for meaningful identity against oppression, while they were forced together in these types of communities. They wanted equality but most importantly they wanted their voice and struggle to be heard


Movements in 20th century

Post-slavery Era
After the end of slavery and the American Civil War , a number of African authors continued to write nonfiction works about the condition of African Americans in the country .
Such as: - W.E.B. Du Bois & Booker T. Washington.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE (REGENERATION
Harlem starts from 1900 – 1940: African American Community.
In 1920s, African-American literature, art, music, dance and social commentary began to flourish in Harlem, a section and neighborhood of New York City.
This movement became known as “The New Negro Movement" when black and white American alike '' discovered '' the uniqueness of black art, music and especially literature.
The most important writers of this movement are : - Langston Hughes – Richard Wright – Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer .
Hughes was very fascinated and influenced by Harlem's people and the life itself , there .
One of his first poems that was affected by Harlem's life was called "The Weary Blues "
Some critics said , that Harlem was a period where blacks expressed their talents they developed within American Society .The idea of two-ness was a common theme and that African Americans are both African and American .Two separate identities that join together to make up one individual .
The Harlem Renaissance showed the entire world that these people who WERE once thought of as slaves : who couldn’t think for themselves and who couldn’t be educated and were not allowed equal rights were NOW making significant contributions to societies all over the world in education , literature ,arts and culture .
African Americans were being respected for their contributions especially in the north of the U.S. and as a result , segregation was changing into integration


Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights movement was a movement of blacks in support of equality in education, employment, and all other public sectors that were all forbidden for the black population of America. Social segregation left most of them poorly educated, while economic discrimination kept them in a state of poverty. Many African Americans at this time did not accept segregation. This led to the movement of Civil Right Movement. The African-American Civil Rights Movement starts from (1955 to 1968).
The origins of the modern civil rights movement can be tracked back to the movement of millions of African Americans form the rural South to the urban centers of the South and the North. The movement started in the South to protest segregation that existed legally in some of the Southern States.
During the Civil Right Movement, liberal politicians and African-American Community leaders fought for equal rights under the law. The aims of the movement were to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans and to make sure that all citizens, all races, all religious groups and all nationalities are treated equally under the law and to gain full citizenship rights for African Americans. During the movement, individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches, boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws

The civil rights leaders are Martin Luther King who is his famous work is “I have a Dream”, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and A. Philip Randolph who said that freedom is never given, it is won. For centuries African-Americans had to fight for many rights that white Americans had taken for granted.
Civil Right Movement was the period when the African American made their real impact against inequality and prejudice. No societal movement had a more profound effect on the lives of Black Americans than did the Civil Rights Movement. Although the movement was plagued with violence and death, it was eventually successful.

During this movement many black writers begin to produce works that helped to shape and define the Civil Rights movement. Among them was Langston Hughes whose poems and writing contributed directly to the rhetoric of the day and inspired many African-Americans, both in and out of the Civil Rights movement. His poem “Dream Deferred” was written during (the birth of the Civil Rights Movement)
This Movement made a powerful impression on Black writers. The activists were pushing to end segregation and racism and create a new sense of Black Nationalism, so the black writers attempted to address these issues in their writings. Also the Civil Right Movement saw the rise of female black poet such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanches .
It is also worth noting that the leaders of the Civil Right Movement wrote a number of important essay books about human rights. One of them is Martin Luther King who wrote “Letter From Birmingham”.
.
Black Arts Movement (1965 -1975

The Black Arts Movement was established after the murder of three great men. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and President Kennedy (the leaders of the Civil Right Movement). Black writers had a violent reaction because of these events.
Black writing depicted the rejection of European style. It was powerful and violent and it became very political. Some writers during this movement were James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. There writings attacked white society and presented and told the tragedy of black life in America.
.

Since the 1970, many critics of modern American poetry focused on the issue of subjectivity, particularly “I” or speaker in the poem with its political implications. Also shape the poets’ notions of their audiences and determine how that work is received and understood.
In 1971, Ron Karenga called for poetry of the Black Arts Movement to reflect and support the black revolution, to expose the enemy and to praise people. So the readers would receive from the artists clear messages that would help to build a new consciousness of racial identity and of the need for revolutionary actions

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Langston Hughes

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/pictu...ton_hughes.jpg

Langston Hughes was the most popular and versatile of the many talented black writers connected with the Harlem Renaissance, he wanted to capture the dominant oral improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form .
Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and in childhood, since his parents were separated, he lived mainly with his maternal grandmother. He did, however, reside intermittently both with his mother in Detroit and Cleveland, where he finished high school and began to write poetry, and with his father, who, disgusted with American racism, had gone to Mexico. In eighth grade, Hughes was selected as class poet, and during high school he was a frequent contributor to his school's monthly magazine. His first professionally published poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," appeared in the magazine The Crisis when Hughes was just nineteen years old. After studying for a short time at Columbia University, Hughes spent the next several years writing poetry and traveling the world as a seaman.
Like other poets in this era – T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost- Hughes had a mother sympathetic to his poetic ambition and a businesslike father with whom he was in deep, scarring conflict.

Hughes resigned himself to entering Columbia University in the
fall of 1921, but he didn’t like it. With one year in studying in Columbia, he decided not to return , but settled in Harlem and looked for work. He soon realized that, for a negro, this was not an easy matter. A Greek truck-gardener finally hired him. But at the end of the season, he had to try his luck elsewhere . A florist took him on as a delivery boy, but this was only to tide him over. For Hughes felt a too-long-denied yearning for adventure rising with him, and the desire to free himself from all the shackles of the past.
The sea was calling him and , beyond it , the ancestral land of Africa. He signed up on a cargo vessel in June 1923, and during the periods spent in port he was able to see something of the west African coast. But, before the hawsers were dropped , he insisted on proving to himself that one chapter of his life had come to an end .
Upon his return from Africa, he signed up on a vessel to Holland. But when it put into port for the second time at Rotterdam in February 1924, he decided to jump ship and make his way to Paris, this being an old dream for him. There, every morning American jazz musicians gathered for a jam session. Then, he went to Northern Italy, travelling with one of his fellow employees. Finally, he found a vessel heading him for New York whose captain let him pay his way by doing minor jobs on board. After a number of calls in Naples, Sicily and Spain, he once found himself in Harlem on November 1924.


His poetry



Like all the Harlem Renaissance writers (many of whom were not Harlemites), Hughes faced many difficulties in writing a self- proclaimed “Negro” poetry. Could or should and individual speak for an entire “race”? If he or she tried to, wouldn’t that speech tend to homogenize and stereotype a divers people? Harlem poets, aware that the audience for their poetry was almost all white, had to consider whether a particular image of black people would help or harm the cause. To the extent that they felt compelled to idealize black folk, their work risked lapsing into racist primitivism. African American writers questioned, too, whether their work should emphasize their similarities to or differences from whites. Hughes response to these problems was to turn his focus from the rural black population toward the city folk. The shift to the contemporary urban context freed Hughes from the concerns over primitivism; he could be a realist and modernist. He could use stanza forms deriving from blues music and adapt the vocabulary of everyday black speech to poetry without affirming stereotypes. And he could insist that whatever the differences between black and white Americans, all Americans were equally entitled to liberty, justice and opportunity


The Rise of Jazz Music


Jazz is a uniquely American musical style created by drawing from both traditional African and popular American music. The earliest versions of jazz featured elements of ragtime, blues, hymns, and even military marches, and appeared in numerous African American urban and cultural centers across the United States in the first two decades of the twentieth century
Langston Hughes derived great inspiration from the everyday scenes and sounds of his surroundings. He was especially inspired by jazz and blues, spending hours in the nightclubs of Harlem and Washington, D.C., listening and writing. “I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street,” he said of his verse. This influence is apparent in much of his work and can be seen clearly in such poems as "The Weary Blues," "Jazzonia," "Harlem Night Club," "The South," and Montage of a Dream Deferred. The poet's relationship to music stretches far beyond the rhythms and images of his poems, however: he also wrote musicals, operas, and cantatas, and he collaborated with several composers and jazz musicians.


His realations with other poets

Hughes cited Walt Whitman as one of the greatest influences on his poetry. Hughes' poetry, like Whitman's, is prophetic, all-encompassing, and spoken from the heart.In his poems Hughes both implicitly and explicitly responds to the great poet of freedom and democracy,
Walt Whitman.
Like Whitman, Hughes constructs a poem that not only connects the individual to the land, to particular geographical places but also to history and to a distinctive culture, making the poem, like a vehicle by which one flows through one space into another.
Of course, poets have been using the first person for centuries, but Whitman and Hughes both use the lyric “I” in ways unlike other poets. For one thing, the “I” in the poems does not really stand for the literal, biographical human beings Walt Whitman and Hughes. In some of their poems, the poets use the lyric persona to let the individual stand for many, or, to be more precise, to stand for everyone. Whitman lays the groundwork for Hughes; he establishes the ability for the lyric “I” to stand for both the individual and society.
- Both of their poems works not ONLY just on a cultural or spiritual level , BUT also works on apolitical level .
- Also their poems are deceptively COMPLEX . On the surface , they seem easily accessible or even simple . But , in almost every instance , the poem carry a subtext of anger or resistance or outrage . yet , Hughes is able to make his vision palatable to white audiences .
Whitman turns America into a kind of myth. He says in his introduction to Song of Myself that America is itself the greatest poem. Similarly, Hughes elevates the experiences and history of African Americans to the level of myth. Through one of his poems, Hughes suggests that African Americans are themselves a great poem and a masterful epic.

One of Gwendolyn’s “race heroes” was her close friend Langston Hughes. She was greatly impressed by his poem “The Weary Blues”. She paid the highest tribute to Hughes as “the noble poet, the efficient essayist, the adventurous dramatist
who strongly influenced her life and her art.”

Many parallels may be drawn between Brooks and Hughes in their ways of expressing the “Black experience”; these would involve their African heritage and the absorption of blues, jazz and street language into their poetry.

Brooks admired the way in which Hughes befriended younger poets (like herself) and helped to pave the road for their literary successes. Brooks would later pay special tribute to her close friend in a poem entitled “Langston Hughes”.
This poem pleased Hughes very much. The poet describes Hughes as a luminous guide, one who is determined that the American dream should apply to all peoples. He twists away from the bonds of slavery, racism and discrimination. She considered him as a hero while she was appreciating his efforts in leading others to freedom.

Brooks has influenced highly by Hughes, their poetry reflected the distinctive lifestyle of their people. Their poetry became revolutionary, extolling their Blackness and their grief


His Book Montage of Dream Deferred

"What happens to a dream deferred?" That question—one of the most famous lines of poetry to issue from the pen of an American writer—captures the essence of Langston Hughes's 1951 work Montage of a Dream Deferred. In this tightly interwoven collection, the "dream deferred" is the collective dream of the African Americans. Although slavery was abolished nearly a century before, black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s were still not seen as equals in the eyes of the general public nor, often, in the eyes of local and state lawmakers. While white Americans were riding a wave of post-World War II prosperity toward the fulfillment of their vision of the American dream, most blacks were left waiting for their opportunity to join in the country's success.

A montage is an artistic work that consists of smaller pieces of art combined into a unified whole that reveals a larger picture or meaning. This is an accurate description of Montage of a Dream Deferred, which Hughes preferred to think of as a single, book-length poem. Recurring themes and phrases occur throughout the smaller poetic works that make up the book; in fact, the book begins and ends with the same two lines: "Good morning, daddy! / Ain't you heard?”

Montage of a Dream Deferred opens, returns to often, and closes with the idea of dreams deferred. It is present in the "Boogie" poems, as well as several others. Early in the collection is the fiveline "Tell Me," which asks why the narrator's dream has to be deferred for so long


The Poem

A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes



What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Introduction

"Harlem" is a lyric poem that sums up the white oppression of blacks in America.
As a black man in a time period where African-Americans were considered an inferior group of people. People’s dreams and goals would have been difficult to realize.
Langston Hughes aptly expresses his frustrations in his poem, "Dream Deferred." As people read this poem, in any time period, they can relate to the simple universal message that the poet expressed.
Hughes is very expressive in how he feels about dreams he has had and his frustration and the fact that he is unable to pursue or fulfill those dreams.

Langston Hughes was a blues writer who often wrote in rhetoric. this poem in particular is a collection of rhetorical questions in the form of thoughts

The meaning of the title and the poem


The title, "Dream Deferred", is a symbol in itself. It represents the dream of racial equality.
Langston Hughes's poem "Dream Deferred" is basically about what happens to dreams when they are put on hold. Hughes probably intended for the poem to focus on the dreams of African-Americans in particular because he originally entitled the poem "Harlem," which is the capital of African American life in the United States; however, it is just as easy to read the poem as being about dreams in general and what happens when people postpone making them come true.

Hughes suggests that if we put a dream aside for long enough we will loose all hope of it ever being accomplished and, therefore, the dream will essentially die. As a result of this explosion the individual may become depressed, angry or filled with regret. The message behind this poem is that the time is now to accomplish our goals, if we put them aside it is sad but certain they will whither away. This poem does not choose the dream but leaves it up to the reader. The speaker's position is clear that any important dream or goal that must be delayed can have serious negative affects. This poem does not choose the dream but leaves it up to the reader. The speaker's position is clear that any important dream or goal that must be delayed can have serious negative affects.
It is obvious that the poem "A Dream Deferred" is written in three stanzas. The first stanza is longer, and it conveys a general idea, however the second and third stanzas are only two, and one line long, respectively. This places a special emphasis on this part of the poem.
In his poem, Hughes asks the reader to think by posing the question? What happens to a dream deferred?? The question appears to be answered with nothing but more questions. But if we analyze each question we get an idea of what the speaker really believes about the bad effects of the dreams being postponed.
As we look at each question we find out what those affects are. With each question the speaker offers a possibility of each negative affect.

After reading the poem, we notice that the Lngston talks about three main things

Dreams: He's noticed that many people are deferring their dreams, and he's got something to say about it. As a way of reminding the world of how important dreams are, he offers a series of possible responses to the central question, "What happens when dreams are put on hold?"

Foodstuffs and Domestic Life: As he explores what happens when dreams are put on hold, our speaker uses a series of similes that compare the act of deferring dreams to some foodstuffs like raisins, meat and sugary syrup which shows that dreams are as important and as necessary as eating, cooking.

Violence and Oppression: If a dream is deferred too long, then it could explode into violence. When dreams are ignored, our speaker argues that the consequences can be really bad (even dangerous



Analysis

Line # 1,2,3:

The question Hughes poses in line one, "What happens to a dream deferred?" sets the environment for the plot and symbolism of the rest of the poem.
This symbol means that a dream that is disintegrating and dying like a raisin left out in the sun. The emphasis on the sun is important because it stresses time-we measure time by the sun's movement.
If a raisin is left out in the sun too long, it will inevitably die. The same principle can apply to a dream left in the mind too long. Like a raisin, a dream deferred shrivels up and turns dark because the sun has baked it. Like the raisin, the dream has been on hold for a long-time consequently, it has transformed into something very different than it once was. Here we can see the raisin, which used to be a moist but if a raisin is left in the sun to long it becomes too hard to eat. Similarly, a dream that continues to be postponed won't be the same as the original. This action of drying a raisin under the sun symbolizes a dream.

Line # 4,5:

If the dream does not dry up, maybe it will “fester like a sore— / And then run.” If you have a sore, you want it to dry up so it will heal, but if it festers and runs, that means it is infected and will take longer to heal. The dream that festers becomes infected with the disease of restlessness and dissatisfaction that may lead to criminal activity for those who are deferring the dream.
By comparing the dream to a sore on the body, the poet suggests that unfulfilled dreams become part of us, like scars.

Line# 6:

Does it stink like rotten meat? [Rotten meat smells REALLY BAD]
The speaker asks if the dream deferred stinks “like rotten meat.”
Meat that some people use for food will turn rancid and give off horrible odors if not used within a certain period of time. If the dream is not realized in a timely fashion, it may seem to decay because it dies.
It reinforces the idea that if you leave a dream out too long it will eventually begin to fester and rot like meat. The dream could begin to rot in the person’s mind or heart, which would cause them to become sick.


Line# 7,8:

If you leave pancake syrup or honey unused for several months, and you go back to fetch the bottle, you might find that there is crusty accumulation on the top of the bottle and the contents are no longer usable. Lack of use had formed that crust and delaying the dream could make the dream more difficult to be achieved and this could lead to feelings of depression.

Line# 9,10:

The second stanza is not a question but merely a “maybe” suggestion: maybe the dream-goal just sags like trying to carry something heavy. The dream not realized may become heavy to bear “in the mind” this lead to depression and mental lethargy.
Yet it also seems to relate again to the heavy work that men did during the time from of Hughes' life.

Line# 11:“

Or does it explode?” is the most powerful
line of the poem. It is separated from the other lines of the poem and italicized, adding emphasis to it visually. The concept of a dream exploding is a powerful conclusion of what could happen to the poet's or reader's dreams if they are pushed aside or unable to be pursued. The poet returns to the question again. If all the other possibilities of a deferred dream are bad with some worse than others, then the last possibility is the worst. "Or does it explode" it doesn’t literally mean your going to randomly explode. It can mean does it explode as in never come true and go away. Or it can mean does it explode as in come true and explode in a happy way bringing a force that pushes us to accomplish that dream that for so long has seemed unreachable.

In short

Hughes never says what happens, he merely takes a thought path in order to explore the potential choices. Dreams are good to shoot for, but don’t let them ruin your life trying to fulfill them. Someone who does not accomplish his/her dream can struggle and suffer a lot and then be destroyed by it.

A very good Interpretation


This poem means whatever the reader wants it to mean. At a literal level, the poem is so simple that it is almost impossible to find the "hidden meanings."
Perhaps this poem is the progress of blacks' life in America. First they burned under the sun (i.e. in the fields/like the raisin) then they posed a problem and rebelled (a sore and rotten meat) It could be referring to the rancid smell of the dangling lifeless bodies. then they were given civil rights and were happy (sugary sweet), but then they felt the burden of segregation (a sagging heavy load), and, although Langston Hughes did not write this poem with Dr. King in mind, the explosion would be the blacks becoming fed up with their situation and doing something about it

Main themes


In "A Dream Deferred" the theme
is not to put dreams aside, or you are going to have bad and negative effects.

Frustration: frustration characterized the mood of American blacks. The Civil War in the previous century had liberated them from slavery, and federal laws had granted them the right to vote, the right to own property, and so on. Hughes is clearly affected by inferiority. The narrator asks whether a dream becomes a dried-up fruit, a running sore, rotten meat, or a sweet that crusts and sugars over. He also asks whether the dream sags or explodes. All of these tropes enable to reader to see and smell the frustration of American blacks


Figures

Metaphor and Simile: Each question in the first stanza uses simile: “like a raisin in the sun,” “like a sore,”like rotten meat,” “like a syrupy sweet.” The second stanza which is not a question but a suggestion also uses simile “like a heavy load.” The last stanza uses metaphor, “does it explode?”


Symbols: The words and phrases, ?Or fester like a sore?(4), and ?Or crust and sugar over?(7) are both symbolic of the hard manual labor that African-Americans had during the early 1900 they worked hardly in the cotton and sugar fields, or with crops.
"A Dream Deferred" uses a dried up raisin to symbolize a broken dream.
“Sun” used to symbolize the time. We measure time by the suns movement.

Alliteration: An alliterating d appears in the first two lines, and an alliterating s in Lines 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9.


Structure and Techniques

"Harlem" consists of eleven lines broken into four stanzas.
The first question is, in fact, a question, introducing the theme of the poem. The following questions, however, are rhetorical. Their answers are obvious to the reader. Rhetorical questions have power because the reader (or listener, in the case of a speech) makes the connection between question and answer for himself. Also, Hughes' rhetorical questions create a catalog of powerful, disturbing similes, concluding suddenly with the implication of violence or destruction in the single final line.

Hughes describes the dreams failure with all five senses: you look at a raisin; you feel a sore; you smell rotten meat; you taste sugary sweet; and you hear it explode.

The length of the first five lines also varies: Line 1 has eight syllables, Line 2 has four, Line 3 has seven, Line 4 has six, and Line 5 has three. This irregularity gives these lines a jagged edge, like the edge of a shard of broken glass, enabling Hughes's message to lacerate its readers.

Although the poem does not imitate any format used by previous poets, it does exhibit regularities, including the following:
In each line except Line 7, the last syllable is stressed.
Six of the seven sentences in the poem are questions.
All of the sentences except the first and the last contain similes using like.
An alliterating d appears in the first two lines, and an alliterating s in Lines 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9.
Line 3 rhymes with Line 5; Line 6 rhymes with Line 8; Line 10 rhymes with Line 11.
Lines 4, 7, and 11 begin with or.
Lines 3, 8, and 10 begin with like

Form

Free Verse, Irregular Meter
Free, free, free! Six questions and one very meek declarative sentence compose the bones of this poem – it's a poem built of questions, and questions makes us think of uncertainty and the quest for knowledge.


The rime scheme

The rhyme scheme for "A Dream Deferred" is ABCDCEFEGHI.
Line 3 rhymes with Line 5; Line 6 rhymes with Line 8; Line 10 rhymes with Line 11.

Style

Hughes uses an irregular meter in the lines of "Harlem." That is, he stresses different syllables in each line and varies the length of each line. Together, the varied line lengths and meter create a sense of jagged, nervous energy that reinforces the poem's themes of increasing frustration.

Language

The poem by Langston Hughes uses symbolism, description, and figurative language.
Every line in this poem has a figurative, not literal, meaning and relates precisely to his experience in New York.

Tone

The tone is serous.
The overall tone of the poem is overwhelmingly negative but yet it manages to send a positive message.

Mood

At the beginning of this poem the mood that accompanies a dream deferred is a questioning one that begins a search for definition. This mood induces the reader to reflect upon the meaning of a dream deferred, preparing them for its development.
The feelings those accompany the theme range from foreboding to anger to gloom, creating a sense of each in the reader.

Coming soon to complete the rest
^_^

Mother to Son by Langston Hughes
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now—
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.




Poem Summary

Lines 1-2

The first two lines establish what the title implies: this poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by the persona of a mother to her son. The son never speaks; the mother’s life experience and advice may therefore apply to all readers, but particularly to young African-American readers. The metaphor of the crystal stair may represent several things. It may symbolize dreams that the mother once held but which she has learned no longer to expect. The crystal stair may also represent the mother’s spiritual quest toward heaven, Christian grace, and redemption. Or, in material terms, it may invoke the large, gleaming staircases that starlets glide down in movies. In each possible interpretation, the crystal stair connotes smoothness and ease, delicacy, wealth, and a clear, well-lit path toward a rich (material or spiritual) destination. These connotations contrast with images in the poem that show how rough and discouraging the mother’s actual life has been.

Lines 3-7

In these lines, the mother describes the specific ways that her life’s journey has diverged from the ideal of the crystal stair. Grammatically, the “it” in line 3 refers to the subject of the previous sentence: “Life.” Thus one might interpret the line to read, “my life’s had tacks in it.” Or, extending the metaphor of the stairway (of life), the “it” may refer to stairs. Tacks and splinters may be read as figurative hazards one might find on an actual stairway in a rundown building. The tacks, splinters, worn-out carpet, and torn-up boards represent overuse and neglect. Many travellers before the mother have hauled themselves on this journey, and many will do so after her. The damaged parts of the stairway may represent the inability of individual sojourners to repair the structures under-girding their lives (such as poverty and reduced opportunity) or it may represent the disadvantaged state of black life in America itself. The “torn up” boards may represent someone’s attempt to dismantle this stairway altogether. R. Baxter Miller interprets the “tacks” and “splinters” in this poem as threats to the mother’s body and soul. Physically, the tacks and splinters represent small, nagging pains that might puncture and infect the mother as she struggles upward. Symbolically, however, these small threats represent potential injuries to “the black American soul.” The mother’s recognition of these obstacles and her apparent avoidance of them signal her wise negotiation of life’s setbacks.

Lines 8-11

Having listed some of the literal and figurative hazards the son might encounter on his journey, the mother affirms the value of persistence and faith in one’s goal. From lines 8 to 13, she makes it clear that, despite obstacles, she has continued to make gains. The mother’s personal advancement represents progress for the black race as well. The landings and turns in the mother’s climb may be metaphors for brief victories or respites from personal, racial, or spiritual struggles. The mother may mention these moments of ease to assure the son that some parts of life’s uphill climb will offer glimpses of hope and accomplishment.

Lines 12-13

Like the tacks and splinters in lines 3 and 4, the image of a dark stairway with the light removed, broken, or never installed, calls to mind an actual stairway in a building of poor tenants. Hughes includes such realistic details to make the metaphor of a stairway literal and symbolic at once. It is easier for readers to grasp and remember ideas that they can picture or sense, so poets often include sensory details in their work. In this poem, Hughes carefully includes details that appeal to the reader’s vision, hearing, and touch. The tacks and splinters of lines 3-4 awaken the reader’s sense of touch and danger; the darkness in lines 12-13 causes the reader to experience the mother’s blind groping around obstacles toward an unseen goal. The mother’s “goin’ in the dark / Where there ain’t been no light” may represent her persistent struggles despite her own waning faith or hope. Or, the dark may symbolize the external obstacles despite which she climbs. Hughes may repeat the idea of darkness twice in lines 12-13 to suggest different kinds of darkness: physical and spiritual. Or the repetition may serve to make the mother’s words sound like real speech, which is usually more repetitive and colloquial than written words.

Lines 14-20

From line 14 to 20, the mother’s advice takes a final turn. Whereas the first seven lines depict the hardships the son can expect in life and the next six lines assert the mother’s example of persistence through adversity, the final seven lines urge the son to keep going, despite setbacks and his wishes to stop or turn back. The critic Onwuchekwa Jemie translates the mother’s command in line 15, not to “set down on the steps,” into specifically black, urban, social terms. In Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry, Jemie argues that “to stop is to become a sitter on stoops and stander on street corners or to become a prostitute, pimp, hustler or thief. To despair is, in short, to wither and die.” The mother urges the son not to succumb to the temptation to give up. Having felt despair and resisted it, she knows that the choice to persist benefits the individual and the race. She warns him in line 17 not to fall ‘now’ because she has brought them so far and is ‘still climbin’.” The potential “fall” might symbolize both their falls from spiritual grace as well as a political setback for African Americans. Collectively, if many sons (and daughters) despair and drop out, the struggle for equality is that much less likely to succeed. In the last line, the mother repeats her refrain regarding the moral, spiritual, and political necessity to endure adversity and keep climbing.



Themes

Race and Racism

The struggle that the mother in this poem describes is common to all people of every race and class, but Hughes narrows in on her identity by giving the speaker’s voice the dialect of a poor, undereducated African American. Readers who recognize this dialect and who have even a little knowledge about the struggle for racial equality in the United States will be able to associate the “staircase” metaphor and the setbacks that the speaker says she faced with the obstacles faced by American blacks, particularly in the early twentieth century, when the laws of the land permitted discriminatory practices. Particular clues that this is a southern black dialect include the contraction of “I is” (“I’se) meaning a mixture of “I am” and “I have”; the addition of the prefix “a-” to the word “climbin’” to indicate that the action is still going on; and the term of endearment “honey.” Independently, none of these stylistic traits would be enough to identify the speaker’s culture, but Hughes does such a thorough job of weaving a pattern together, that even a reader who is unfamiliar with the author’s racial background would get a sense of who the poem’s speaker is.

The difficulties faced by the mother in this poem are symbolized by tacks, splinters, bare floors, and dark hallways — all signs of poverty. In associating this particular black American speaker with these particular images, Hughes is able to hint at the injustice in the relationship between poverty and race. This mother certainly is not poor because she is lazy or weak-willed, since we can see her determination to work and succeed in almost every line. For a woman of such determination to be kept this poor indicates that hardship is not a moral issue, but is related to an external cause, such as the limits that are put on people because of their race.

Individual Vs. the Universe

The point that the mother is making in this poem is that life is a struggle and that her son would be mistaken to expect anything better than difficulty. She mentions symbols of her struggle that reflect her own life, apparently to show that she knows the subject from firsthand experience, thus assuring him that his own problems are not being unfairly apportioned to him and him alone. Because she has to explain this to her son as if it is news to him, we can assume that she was not the type of person to complain about her troubles while her son was growing up: he might easily have interpreted her quietness as a sign that she was comfortable with her life and, from this, assumed that her life indeed was a crystal stair. She addresses him in this poem in order to correct any mistaken assumption he may have that life should be free of problems just because hers has seemed to be so. In the implied fact that the mother has accepted her difficulties so quietly that her own son was unaware of them and has to have them explained to him, Hughes has raised a few philosophic issues about mankind’s relationship to the universe. The most obvious one is that of struggle. When the mother says “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” we can assume that the same would hold true for many, if not most, honest, hard-working people. The second lesson that is implied here is that we should bear suffering quietly and not draw attention to it. The mother in this poem does not tell her son this directly, but Hughes obviously intends for us to admire her and to learn from the fact that her life’s difficulty had been quietly accepted.

Identity

If the son being addressed in this poem hopes to deny that his situation will be different than the one that is described to him (as seems to be his mother’s point in describing her situation at all), it will not be easy: too much connects his own identity to his mother for him to think that life will be very different for him. Usually in human affairs the fates of two family members will turn out more alike than the fates of random strangers. Psychologists explain similarities in families with a range of theories that all touch upon the famed “nature/nurture” argument: that is, different opinions stress whether relatives have similar experiences because they are taught (or “nurtured”) to behave in similar ways or because their behaviors are determined by their genetic code (their “nature”). The use of an African-American dialect in this poem highlights the idea that the son should expect certain difficulties, because to some extent society treated all blacks the same. But the fact that it is his mother speaking tells him, and us, that the struggle ahead of him is not just a theory but is his fate.

A more complete identification between the speaker and the intended audience would exist if this poem were “Father to Son.” Hughes apparently wanted to make use of the inherent contrast caused by crossing the experienced party in the parent/child relationship with the traditionally “weaker” gender in the male/female relationship. Sons often feel protective of their mothers, but mothers are always more worldly. If the speaker of this poem had been the son’s father, he may not have needed to explain the difficulty of his life, because the son would have identified more completely with the older man and known about his life without being told. But our society creates so much distance between the two genders that this son apparently could not identify with his mother’s quiet determination, instead mistaking it for acceptance.


Style

Since “Mother to Son” is a dramatic monologue, the primary purpose of Hughes’s word choices and line arrangements is to quickly and convincingly capture the speech and character of a disadvantaged African-American mother. To more closely approximate the rhythms and folk diction, or word choices, of a black persona or character, Hughes uses a number of poetic and literary techniques. He writes in free verse, meaning the lines are un-rhymed and vary in length and meter (the pattern of beats in each line). Specifically, the number of syllables per line varies from one (line 7 is “Bare.”) to ten (in line 20, which iambic pentameter). In addition to capturing the rhythms of ordinary speech, the poem’s irregular line lengths may mirror the setbacks, turns, and uneven progress of the speaker on her life’s climb. Sometimes, a poem’s shape on the page reinforces its themes.

Hughes uses other markers of African-American speech, such as contractions and colloquial uses of the verb “to be”: “I’se been a-climbin’ on” and such variations as “set” for “sit”: “Don’t you set down.” Hughes sought to represent African-American speech with dignity and verve for, in the hands of many white American writers, black dialect was used to perpetuate stereotypes of black ignorance. Hughes sought to overturn such caricatures by representing humor, strength, wisdom, and music in the plain speech of his African-American poetic personas. After carefully interpreting the mother’s insights and messages to her son, the reader recognizes that in “Mother to Son” and many of Hughes’s poems, uneducated diction signifies a lifetime of reduced opportunity rather than ignorance or lazy speech. Thus, the emotional drama of the mother’s will to persist is heightened considerably by the disadvantage that her diction bespeaks.

Lost Lady


keep it up dear

^_^

الف شكر لك
وبارك الله فيك
جهد رائع
وعمل جميل
وفقك ربي
وجزاك الله كل خير

تم التقييم

جزاك الله كل خير وبارك الله فيك

thank you all
great studies and models

useful topic
keep it up

Thanks a lot LL .It is a great effort indeed

It looks great work,,,,,