The slam poem Hi, I’m a slut written and performed by Savannah Brown explores the empowering truths behind female sexuality through powerful, passionate, and emotional language. Throughout the poem Brown exposes the double standards, the objectification and the weakened female sexuality at the hands of misogyny. Brown addresses many topics on the surface such as abuse, derogatory terms, bullying, rape, sexism and in order to display and demonstrate the effects she utilised stylistic devices such as metaphors, repetition and tone of voice to highlight her overall message. Through this poem Brown raises awareness and exposes the double standards displayed by society in an attempt to make people talk about the issue. In order to demonstrate the reality of sexism within society, repetition was utilised to display the constant judgment on female sexuality. “Hi, I am a slut” is repeated throughout all stanzas to emphasize how flippantly it is used within society in such a degrading manner in an attempt to lessen female sexuality. When Brown performs her poem the tone and passion in her voice reiterates the idea that the word is used so loosely that it has now lost a sense of meaning. Brown also repeats the use of blunt vocabulary throughout the stanzas in order to share her views on the issue. For example “and since you can’t see it, it probably doesn’t exist anyway, I was probably faking it anyway, women don’t like sex anyway.” Throughout this example the bluntness of the
“‘Race Politics” by Luis J. Rodriguez was about him and his brother living in a place called Watts. They journey over the tracks, trying to get the “good food” for their family. They go to the store, and find themselves face to face with five teenagers who knock the food out of their hands, and beat up the main character’s older brother, causing him to vomit. The teenagers leave, with them on the floor. The purpose for writing this essay is to identify syntax, connotation, and imagery within this poem, and decide what makes it important to the overall poem. The overall impression that Luis conveys within his work is the feeling of separation.
A few stories from her book consist of young females, as young as fourteen, and their treacherous journey through adolescence with the title of “slut” weighing on their shoulders, when in reality it may not have been true or consensual sexual relations. Continued in her book, there are cases where women are asked about their sexual relationships and gynecology records when filing a lawsuit against people or companies for sexual harassment from males and payment inequality. When men were surveyed, 92% said that the double standards, that they themselves live up to, are unfair, but 65% said that if a woman they liked had slept with ten to twenty men the previous year, that they would not take them
During the time this poem was written, racism and prejudice towards African Americans was prevalent and habituated to whites. From the first stanza alone, the tone is already set as uncharitable and
In the poem “Incident” by Countee Cullen, Cullen explores the long-lasting effects of hurtful and offensive language through the storytelling eyes of a young boy living in a vastly oppressed world. By placing a drastic tone shift that is strategically placed at the climax of the poem and using emotional vocabulary to emphasize the shift, Cullen nonchalantly highlights the timeless issues of equality, kindness, and justice through the element of surprise. The poem itself starts out positively, his “Heart-filled, head-filled with glee” (Line 2). The speaker gallantly enters a brand-new environment, ready to take on whatever comes his way.
Cullen is hopeful to get to a place where people of different races will be able to look at others without prejudice and discrimination. However, the poem “Incident” is of a less positive tone. She expresses her experience in a shocked manner, saying, a boy stuck his “tongue out and, called, [her] ‘Nigger’,” (Cullen 8). She was so shocked that “From May until December; .../… of all the things that happened... /… that’s all [she could remember” in Baltimore (Cullen 10-12). At the young age that she was at, it is surprising and upsetting to her to be discriminated against for no reason.
This is a poem that is mainly directed to the violence that was often experienced by children with an African-American ethnicity. The violence was mainly experienced on the streets where a majority of these children lived.
The language Dawe uses in ‘The Raped Girl’s Father’, such as metaphors, alliteration and repetition create a dark and powerful atmosphere to the poem. The words used are chosen to reflect the father’s heartless rage and his daughter’s shock during her darkest hours. An example of repetition and alliteration is ‘eaten by the dark…and in that darker dark in which she lay’, which emphasises the ‘hell’ that the girl is experiencing in her dark bedroom and her vulnerability. Metaphors in the poem
Oppression is something that all humans are faced with at some point in their lives. No matter how large that oppressing force may be, it is sure to have an effect on those in its path. Zora Neale Hurston, and Celeste Ng are two authors who wrote about how their characters live in the face of hardships and both show a dramatic change in their characters from beginning to end. Hurston writes about a young woman, Delia, living in the 1920’s dealing with an abusive husband in her short story “Sweat.” Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere follows two families living in a prim and proper town in Ohio in the 1990’s. Throughout these works, the characters are consistently challenged by cruelty of the powerful forces surrounding them, but more importantly,
For many centuries, poetry has been at the center of communication and expression. Poetry has progressed, and styles have changed. However, there are some concepts in poetry that have stayed consistent; every single poem contains a theme that readers can analyze. Poets use different methods to make sure that readers understand their themes. For example, poets may use a variety of imagery, repetition, structure, and history to achieve their purpose. One poet who exhaustively uses literary devices to reach her goal is Dolores Kendrick. Kendrick’s renowned book of poetry, The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women, contains a multitude of poems that encapsulate exactly how it felt to be a woman and a slave. One specific poem from
True justice, for every man, woman, and child, no more racial profiling, rapists or pedophile.” In this poem it starts with a man talking about what he see in his eyes but it isn’t what other people see. He wishes for others to respect and not have any negativity in this world. All the bad things are creating bad things that lead other people in a bad mood or can harm others such as leading them into suicide. Racial profiling can be one of the many reasons for people’s deaths. The man’s thought while reading this poem shows how much he wishes for things to stop all the bad things and I can see where he’s going with that. We don’t need to live with this in our world, all we need is positivity around us and everything else will be fine but it seems that the world is not made that
Women yearn for their voices to speak loud enough for the entire world to hear. Women crave for their voices to travel the nations in a society where they are expected to turn the volume all the way down. The world expects females to stay quiet and ignore the pain brought onto them from sexual crime. They do not dare stand up for what they believe in or discuss their experiences that bring them pain. Poets such as Ana Castillo and Lawrence Ferlinghetti describe parts of life that society often ignores. E. E. Cummings supports the ideas of Castillo and Ferlinghetti by appropriating a more disturbing mindset. These poets demonstrate the way in which women obtained a supposable to behave and react to situations that have caused them harm or have the potential to.
To begin with, the author’s implementation of short sentence fragments throughout the poem illustrates the exasperation and frustration bottled up in women in response to
In both of William Blake’s poems, “The Little Black Boy” and “The Chimney Sweeper,” an innocent-eye point of view portrays the stresses of society in an alternative way to an adult’s understanding. The innocent perspective redirects focus onto what society has become and how lacking each narrator is in the eyes of the predominant white culture. Each naïve speaker also creates an alternate scenario that presents a vision of what their skewed version of life should be like, showing how much their unfortunate youth alters their reality. From the viewpoint of children, Blake’s poems highlight the unhealthy thoughts or conditions in their lives and how unfortunate they were to be the wrong race or class level. These narrators were cheap laborers and were in no control of how society degraded them. Such usage of a child’s perspective offers important insight into the lives of these poor children and raises awareness for the horrible conditions children faced in the London labor force prior to any labor laws. The children of the time had no voice or platform on which to express their opinions on their conditions. Blake targets society’s lack of mindfulness towards the children using the innocent-eye point of view and illusions of what they dream for in life.
Audre Lorde, a well-known poet, utilized her poetry to call attention over the political issues of class, feminism, sexism and racism for decades. These political issues are the symbols that transformed her into someone who is not just a woman, but a person whom clarifies these issues using poetry as a voice to define herself as a Black lesbian woman and an individual. The poem “Coal” is a poem that represents her ideals and her feelings towards being a voice among other feminists. It also shows her struggle as an individual that is caught between the issues of feminism coinciding with race, class, and sexism, which is also known as Intersectionality. Because of the attention being called from Lorde’s poetry, people should continue to recognize this political issue and utilize it to spread awareness of the prejudice and marginalization of today’s society.
In chapter one, also known as ‘the hurting’, the author focuses on trauma that people have dealt with such as sexual abuse from a father or relative, failed relationships with parents, and difficulty with one’s self-expression. One of the poems in chapter one states that the girl’s first kiss was by the age of five and was carried out in an aggressive manner by the young boy, she assumes that he had picked that up from his father’s interactions with the mother. In the poem it says “He had the smell of starvation on his lips which he picked up from his father feasting on his mother at 4 a.m.” It is insinuated that the father uses forceful actions towards the mother during times that should be gentle and affectionate. In that specific poem she felt as if that was when she was taught that her body is only for giving to those who wanted out of satisfaction but she should feel ‘anything less than whole’. In another poem in chapter one, there is a family setting during dinner in which the father orders the mother to hush. This represents how women are constantly oppressed in their own