Audre Lorde is the original angry
black women. In the poem, “Power” she
could be talking about the situation in Ferguson. She talks about how a policemen shot a child
down and shouted at him “Die you little motherfucker. (Lorde 24) She is
convinced that justice was not served. She writes about coercing a small black
woman to vote with the rest of the white male jurors. Her words are violent and
extreme. “and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our
children” (Lorde 37-38). I think Lorde demonstrates her feminism in the poem “Stations.” See writes of women waiting for another
person to fulfill their dreams and not be an agent of change in their own
lives. Until the last line of the poem, “Some
women wait for something to change and nothing does change so they change
themselves.”(Lorde 41-45). All of Lorde’s poems in this week’s presentation are
intense and not pleasant, light reading. She evokes powerful feelings of racial
injustices and women’s issues of inequality.
Lorde's poetry is intense, but she is dealing with intense subject matter, and I wonder if anger is the proper reaction to injustice? Is it a good rhetorical tool? A good poetic one? I wonder how we might compare Lorde to say Sylvia Plath, who discusses equally weighty subject matter but does so in a very different way at the level of language in her poem...
ReplyDeleteIn your post, you write "Her words are violent and extreme. 'and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children' (Lorde 37-38)." This is a good start to close reading; you have made a claim about the text and given a quote to support it. Now, you need to analyze this quote in detail. Why is she using these particular words? To what effect?
I think she is making an analogy that a mother's womb is the beginning of life but a womb filled with concrete is a graveyard for the children. She is stating that a life-giving event is turning into a cold barren desolate place for her children.
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