poems/plays Flashcards

Question

Mother to Son

Answer 1

Langston Hughes

Answer 2

Langston Hughes

Answer 3

Langston Hughes

Answer 4

Langston Hughes

Answer 5

Langston Hughes

Answer 6

Langston Hughes

Answer 7

June Jordan

Answer 8

June Jordan

Answer 9

June Jordan

Answer 10

June Jordan

Answer 11

June Jordan

Answer 12

June Jordan

Answer 13

June Jordan

Answer 14

About a dream dying Connect to Hughes Worn-through soul “Blue” farewell Crystal rags / viscous tatters Crystal makes one think of beauty, which conflicts with ‘rags” and “vicious tatters”

Answer 15

Representation of violence Not always seen in the art forms Like the older plays “We aided in the killing” Who is the “we” in question? “Beyond our seeming” What is “seeming”?

Answer 16

“Slavery’s chains too long” → 1st stanza about slavery Lasted too long Moves on to some influential figures/Civil Rights movement figures Guilt over being alive still and not being dead Reference to lynching “I” take to dying like a man Dies with dignity and pride / not screaming

Answer 17

“Dream was true” → another connection to Langston Hughes I could make How dangerous love can be “Dared” the cost Ode with no meter Only thing the speaker is sure about is their lover Not sure if fact/fiction is true Consider: it’s called “Senses of insecurity” How does insecurity play into love here?

Answer 18

Line breaks makes you read slowly Basically each stanza is a sentence The second stanza is a question but not phrased as such How does time function? Proximity? Who is more dead?

Answer 19

About children lost in the Middle Passage “Rippled surface of our grave” “Wrapped in the entrails of the whales” Look at how the lines are broken into sentences/capitalization “Deep dirges moan” → “Your song floats to me” From the sound of the slave ships to the memory of the past “Childhood’s absence” → sign our speaker is a child

Answer 20

About death once more (obviously) Life comes from death Before, we had children buried under the waves and now we have a “mother” like figure buried under the soil We grow from our ancestors We grow from loss Consider: “grow” always being its own line

Answer 21

NOTES: Every day a little death We live despite pain and unpleasantries “Rotting flesh and worms do not convince me against the challenge” “Cold defeat live deep in the lines along my face” → they wear their age/suffering

Answer 22

About Black Americans in the 1940’s Forced into tight housing units called “kitchenettes” Conflict between escaping poverty / exhausting day to day demands of poverty Recurring theme of “dream” Connect to Hughes and Angelou Can dreams survive in this kind of climate? Inescapable cycle of poverty

Answer 23

Scuttle off” → scuttle can mean to deliberately sink a boat About the children who are never born At one point tries to claim they are never made, but then says that’s faulty History: Brooks born in Illinois in 1917 Abortion made illegal in Illinois in 1867 Roe v Wade in 1973 About loss/possibility Mother faintly knew the aborted babies / loved them all

Answer 24

About an ordinary poor couple Mostly good Don’t have much “Old yellowed pair” They’re well weathered Couple remembers the past Keeps the twinkle in their eyes

Answer 25

About some delinquents Left school Lurk late Sing sin Will likely die young

Answer 26

Many broken lines Like the broken body of Emmett Till Many unfinished sentences spilling onwards Like the unfinished life of Emmett Till “Chaos in windy grays” Is anything black and white? “Red” prairie → red hot

Answer 27

Refuses to conform to happiness Won’t sing in may because the songs are happy Will sing in November when it’s fall/gloomy/gray Someone who is expressing their true/pure emotions and not what people want Even if it brands them as crazy

Answer 28

Freedom is not free when you’re in love “A ghastly freedom” Love is painful, but there is beauty in pain “You are the beautiful half of a golden hurt” “Your arms are water” → love is so all encompassing that you lose your solidity

Answer 29

About familial violence A son has scarred his abusive father The mother sits by the father despite his abuse Safe to say she chooses him over the son? He is now alone “Nobody’s got to love you” Is solitude what makes him realize himself as a human? Or is it freedom from attachments?

Answer 30

Again about the mother not connecting with her children Has multiple sons all fighting for her attention She hits them Doesn’t like it? Cries when she whips the speaker Had abortions but the speaker was somehow born Now she’s a grandmother Kisses the grandkids Doesn’t sound like she kissed her own kids Clear complicated feelings over his mother But it’s titled “Hero” and the word comes up at the end Unpack that

Answer 31

I will not kill myself → I will not give up Will not let the cops take him About police brutality If he is dead near a cop, the cop killed him At the same time, he will not kill himself via cop “A city can pay a mother to stop crying” His mother cried when she whipped him as well How will he die? Choking on meat → would denote doing well (unlike the Bean Eaters) Freezing to death → poor

Answer 32

Duplex = housing unit A poem is a gesture towards home Common themes emerge The abusive father The weeping mother Are they synonymous with the idea of home?

Answer 33

Avery R. Young → visual artist Blk → a stricture that mimics erasure or minimization The speaker inhabits not a physical space, but an aesthetic one, constituted by limitation Consider: the way the “Blk mind is a continuous mind” is not a continuous line You can’t always see Black but it always perseveres

Answer 34

Connect to Brooks poem on Emmett Till We do not know the history of the nation in ourselves We’re detached from our history/where we come from Because we don’t know what we believe How much does it cost to hold your breath underwater? Makes me think of Angelou’s dead children in the sea We buy things that should be free Sound of silence

Answer 35

Peace or guns We cannot have both Someone is always dying Does this tarnish beautiful moments like making love? “I thought of holding you as a political act” → bodies are warped Criminalized/politicized “May as well have held myself” → Being Black is as taboo as being gay

Answer 36

Includes dialogue/lyrics About the weary blues Pain/power of Black art There’s no satisfaction A longing for death

Answer 37

Narrator is moving North or West Done with the injustices of the South About the Great Migration

Answer 38

Mother speaking to son Life has been hard for her She’s climbing continuously But the stairs aren’t crystal/beautiful Staircase → metaphor to depict racism/difficulties/dangers one faces in life

Answer 39

All people are equal Should have a place at the table Black is beautiful

Answer 40

Land of the South → a concubine Influence of slavery on newly freed America About sorrow

Answer 41

About biding time until segregation Ride the cart until it’s time

Answer 42

The re-awakening of Africa? Multi-layered and complex

Answer 43

The poem from Raisin in the Sun About dreams/what happens to them when they’re not actualized A raisin in the sun → tiny thing someone may experience Poem speculates on the question it asks Dreams here are not these overexposed things per se but are imagined to be like them and subject to the same force They are both visceral and vulnerable, and altogether too much. Dreams, like history, hurt. By implication, they demand care—and all the work that care entails.

Answer 44

Free-verse About misogyny, sexism, aftereffects of colonialism How rape culture affects women of color Prevalence of victim blaming Patrice Lumumba → connection to Funnyhouse of a Negro Reclamation of the name/self Ability to stand against violence Battle cry almost

Answer 45

Again about rape More legal/technical The patriarchy’s depravity uniquely cripples women Especially women with intersectional identities Rape is a case in point that proves that the patriarchy brutally silences women. “there is no silence peculiar / to the female” → conversational tone Show an extreme scene of violence Nonchalance → the narrator comes across as non-threatening Level headed despite explaining violence “I was raped for the second / time in my life the first occasion / being a whiteman and the most recent / situation being a blackman actually / head of the local NAACP” No punctuation Second one almost seems like an afterthought There’s no silence peculiar to the female → then shows how that’s wrong

Answer 46

Speaker wonders what it would be like to be white None of the examples are very flattering to white people They can do “nothing” and that’s enough A level of carelessness in their existence

Answer 47

Longing A desire to be close Queer

Answer 48

Longing for human connection Repeated emphasis on “face”

Answer 49

Repeated use of “black and blue” About police brutality and racism

Answer 50

Things I do in the dark → a collection title “I am a stranger/learning to worship the strangers/around me” → similar to Poem for a Poet / looking at faces / in the eyes of others

Answer 51

Georgia Douglas Johnson - two women are raped by the same white man and realize their kids are about to get married It’s the Black women that have got to protect their men from the white man by not tellin’ on him

Answer 52

Georgia Douglas Perkins - Women doesn’t know if she should spend $50 on her daughter’s operation or her funeral

Answer 53

Georgia Douglas Perkins - Mom kills baby to keep it safe from lynchers

Answer 54

May Miller - Black mom wonders if her son is in the tomb of the unknown soldier Uses white characters

Answer 55

Shirley Graham Du Bois - Young mother contemplates killing daughter on eve of emancipation so she won’t be sold to a distant master Done as a Greek tragedy with the murder off stage

Answer 56

Alice Childress - a workplace comedy about the tensions between Black and white actors working on a new place

Answer 57

Alice Childress - a devoted couple’s caustic confrontations with anti-miscegenation laws, vicious family racism, community disapproval and finally deadly disease and their own long-buried feelings White husband injured About miscegenation

poems/plays Flashcards

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