Analysis Of Grace Nichols 's ' The Fat Black Woman 's Poem '

What does it mean to you to be a black girl? If you aren’t one, what do you see when you visualize a black girl? If your imagination limits you to just an afro-centric featured, loud and slang-loving, uneducated woman, then this piece is addressed to you. The persistence of the stereotypes concerning average black girls have chained us all to the earlier listed attributes. One side effect of this dangerous connection is the wide opening for a new form of discrimination it creates. Whether it is depicted through slave owners allocating the preferable duties to lighter-skinned black woman, or in modern times where a dislike in rap music categorizes you as not really black, segregation within black communities occur. Tracing all the way back to elementary school, my education on the subject of racial segregation has been constricted to just the injustices routed by dissimilarities between racial groups. What failed to be discussed was the intragroup discrimination occurring in the black society from both outside observers and inside members. Unfortunately, our differences in the level of education, in physical appearance, and in our social factors such as our behaviour, personality or what we believe in have been pitted against each other to deny the variety of unique identities that we as black individuals carry.

In The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto, Imani Perry argues that the over-sexualized, unattainable bodies of black women in popular culture will lead to the breakdown of feminism and the positive body image of the everyday black

Nichols uses humour as the main deconstructive strategy to be an efficient tool for subverting the myths that have oppressed black women. The woman’s body acquires relevance, as the poems focus on a black immigrant woman within a context of white supremacy. Nichols creates persona who she uses to represent the black female body and she constitutes a challenge to black women’s objectification in the Western (British) society, in which she is exiled. The writer occasionally speaks in the first person, has no name, so the third-person poetic voice refers to her as ‘the fat black woman’. The fat black woman refuses to be a victim and, therefore, rejects all the traps laid by racist and sexist society by means of stereotypes that aim at constricting her into limiting roles. It is her that

“For Colored Girls” is comprised of seven women who represented a different shade of the rainbow. The colors are brown, red, yellow, white, green, orange and blue. Their costumes and make-up transformed each of them and were symbolic of the color their character embodied. The ensemble acting made all of their roles of equal importance, without one dominating the other. These women together formed a bond through their various adversities, gradually taking them from strangers to acquaintances. From an objective view, the audience is allowed to simply observe the events as they take place (Goodykoontz & Jacobs, 2011, pg. 82) chronologically. Throughout the movie during some of the conflicting and traumatic scenes, one of the women recites a

Lorraine O’Grady uses her essay “Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” to address the issue of how the black female body is portrayed within art. She discusses the racist portrayal of the black female body compared to the white female body in art, explaining how the black body is only their to accentuate the white one, in the contrast of colors and subject matter. The black female is presented in art often as a slave only their to serve the white female. Lorraine O’Grady explains how the black female body is given no individuality and is objectified. She describes how the black female is presented in the back or shadows of art as a supporting role to the main focus of the white female. Lorraine O’Grady uses this essay in order to reclaim how the

Louise Halfe’s “Body Politics” challenges the qualities and behaviour of the idealized feminine woman by contrasting the stereotypical “city woman” with a more masculine “real woman.” The poem’s speaker describes her mother’s opinion of what it means to be a real woman, which is seen through “Mama said.” Throughout the poem, the speaker uses vivid imagery to create a stark contrast between the idealized feminine “city woman” and a “real woman” who does not conform to the feminine gender norm. To begin with, the title of the poem itself can be viewed as an obvious critique of the feminine ideal. By definition a body politic is a group of people “considered as a collective unit” (Merriam-Webster). This is significant because in Butler’s theory, she emphasizes that a person’s gender can vary depending on a given situation, and therefore women cannot be grouped together and defined exclusively by their feminine qualities. Instead, she argues that women should be viewed as individuals capable of possessing both masculine and feminine behaviour. This belief relates directly to the poem’s title, as Halfe is clearly making a statement on the manner in which patriarchal societies expect women to conform to a singular feminine ideal. Moreover, it illustrates how women’s bodies become a political site for the masculinist culture to impose feminine gender on. With consideration to the title’s reference to a homogeneous group of women, it is interesting that stanzas two through four all

In a time when Africans were stolen from their native lands and brought through the middle passage to a land that claimed was a free country, a small African girl, who would later be known as Phillis Wheatley, was sold in Boston in 1761. In the speech, “The Miracle of Black Poetry in America”, written by June Jordan, a well respected black poet, professor and activist, wrote the speech in 1986, 200 years after Phillis walked the earth, to honor the legacy of the first black female poet for the people of the United States. Jordan, passionately alludes to the example of Phillis Wheatley’s life, to show the strength and perseverance of African-American people throughout difficult history and how they have overcome the impossible.

The short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, by Joyce Oates, (1966), and the poem, “What it’s Like to Be a Black Girl”, by Patricia Smith, (1991), are both about the coming of age of young girls and the conflicts that they encounter. The two pieces explore issues that most young girls have with their bodies and others during their puberty years. The literary elements that will be compared in this essay is imagery and symbolism. The main conflict in both pieces that will be explored is individual versus self. These literary elements and conflict will help us to explore the issues that these two individual young girls

This week’s reading of Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique offers a queer of color analysis that poses itself against Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, liberal pluralism and historical materialism, and opts instead for an “understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the idea of liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress and confirmation (3). By challenging some of the main complacent thinking that characterized canonical sociology, Ferguson pushes for an engagement with racial knowledge about African American culture as it was produced by American sociology if one is to fully understand the gender and sexual variations within the African American culture. One of the principle assumptions of canonical sociology is represented by its use of cultural, racial and sexual differences in the process of pathologizing African American culture. By juxtaposing canonical sociological texts from the Chicago School of Sociology with that of African American literature, Ferguson provides a genealogy of this foundational issue of imagining African American culture as sites of polymorphous gender and sexual perversions and how these perversions are in turn associated with societal and moral failings.

Alicia Keys is reiterating an identity that is universally accepted by most African-American women (Harris-Perry 184). This is the cultural identity of the Strong Black Woman (SBW): self-reliant, tough, and hardworking. Stuart Hall defines cultural identities as, “[A] sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which many people shared history and ancestry hold in common” (Hall 223). SBW is a self-construction manifested by black women in the Americas. It is used a coping mechanism in response to pervasive sexism and racism. The SBW construct dates back to slavery because the image projects traits of all three stereotypes established during the era of slavery: She looks like the Mammy but is loyal to the black community; She does not require physical and emotional security from men, thus, she resembles the Jezebel; She is angry, just like the Sapphire (Harris-Perry 187). This paper unveils the unfavorable impact of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) cultural identity in the Americas. The argument is centered on the effect of this cultural image on the private sphere, public sphere, and the health of black women. The paper also proposes

The short but inspirational poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes addresses what happens to aspirations that are postponed or lost. The brief, mind provoking questions posed throughout the poem allow the readers to reflect--on the effects of delaying our dreams. In addition, the questions give indications about Hughes' views on deferred dreams.

Throughout many decades, African American women have been able to set their own standards of beauty. Lonnae Parker, a writer for The Washington Post, states in her article Black women heavier and happier with their bodies than white women, poll finds, that “Freed from that high-powered media gaze, generations of black women have fashioned their own definitions of beauty with major assists from literature, music, and help from their friends” (Parker, 2012). The importance of this quote is that they were getting help from their culture, the music and literature is essentially the culture that helped them to define their own standards of beauty. By being isolated

Although embracement or celebrations of this stereotypically black feature may empower these women who reverse or redirect the hegemonic gaze that had been centered on their backsides for so long, these Eurocentric derived presumptions and idealizations of female blackness, nevertheless, remain. However, attempts to redefine these social constructions, while accentuating this feature Beyoncé refers to as “bootylicious,” has transformed beauty industries and ideas of sexual desirability which “subverts social hierarchies and normalcy” (Hobson 88). These redefinitions of beauty, more specifically, black beauty, from the “grotesque, carnivalesque body,” (Hobson 88) seeks “a healthier body image than their white counterparts” who are exclusively depicted as slender and petite (Durham 36-37). Thus, black women begin to visualize their own bodies and other black women bodies in ways that lead to non-sexualized, non-deviant conclusions. Challenging these “controlling images,” as Patricia Hill Collins identifies in Hobson’s article, only “unmirrors” black femininity and its history, a term Hobson cited from black artist and theorist, Lorraine O’Grady, because in order to “name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves” (89). She later adds

While reading both “On Growing Up Between Genders”, by Stephen Burt and “The Female Body” by Margaret Atwood, I was so moved by both poets writing that I felt as though I was living their experiences with them. Throughout the course of both pieces, I felt emotionally drawn to obstacles of both writers, while understanding their wants of an experience very different from the ones previously given to them.

The first poem in the collection is called ‘Body of a Woman’ and being the opening poem, it holds the responsibility of giving the reader an overall appearance of the collection as a whole. This is because this is the first impression the reader sees when opening the book and that imprints itself into the reader’s mind. The persona of the poem is presented as possessive and dominant. This is