How Does Lorde's Life Reflected In Her Poetry?

In this poem there is a lot of figurative language. One of the biggest types of figurative language used in this poem is irony. The irony in this poem is how the mother wouldn't let her child go to march because she feared her child would get hurt. Instead she sent her child to church because she believed it was a safe and sacred place but ironically the church ended up being bombed. Another piece of figurative language that is very effective in this poem is imagery. The way the poem is written helps me create images in my head for example, "She raced through the streets of Birmingham." I can imagine her running around desperately, looking for her child. The metaphors and hyperboles in this poem also help with the imagery, for example, "...night dark hair," and "…rose-petal sweet." These metaphors make me think of the girls smoothly combed black hair and her fresh and beautiful rosy smell. A hyperbole that had a huge effect on the tone was, "But that smile was the last smile to ever come upon her face." This hyperbole really helps me understand the effect of a tragic moment like this and how it can completely ruin

Specifically, she describes the irony behind the Fourth of July. In the beginning of the story, there was a happy and excited tone. As the story continues, the tone becomes angry. She was beginning to feel the injustice that she and her family faced during the trip.  The angry tone continues after she realizes the prejudice that she will continue to face while growing up. Then, at the end of the story, Lorde and her family go to the ice cream parlor. Once they realized the cause of the waitress’s strange behavior, the family became “straight-backed and indignant, one by one, her and her family got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged,” (16) and returned to their hotel. This shows the shame that she felt in this moment, but also the family’s lack of desire to cause a scene. During this time period, many black chose to stand up for their rights and retaliate against the injustice they face, but Lorde’s family rather stay quiet and respect the white people. By the end of the story, the tone changed to sympathetic tone. The reader could sympathize with Lorde on an inscrutable and piteous level because one could feel where the family was coming from. The reader was able to feel their pain of being shamed because of their skin

In the essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, Audre Lorde described the cause and meaningful that why we need to break the silence. Lorde believes silences will not protect ours, so people need to make contact to build a communication in order to bridge our difference. People exist difference due to the different race, gender, and sexual orientation. Then, keeping silence also a kind of fear that people afraid to face contempt, censure, judgment, re cognition, challenge, or annihilation. Lorde wrote this essay due to her was told by two doctors that she might have to have breast surgery because her tumor might malignant. Then, there was a three-week period between the telling and the actual breast surgery, so she started to reorganization her entire life. She realized that death is the final silence, and she needs to speak herself because silence cannot protect her as a Black lesbian poet. Honestly, I am curious about that the

In the course of reading, the Asian American literature I was particularly amazed by the work done by Theresa Cha in the book Dictee. Despite her Asian origin and the changing of the different places they lived as immigrants, she tried her best to write about art and particularly the poems that have attracted attention by literature scholars. Interesting is her use of mimicry to show the difficulty of speech, her use of international race and nation conflicts to educate the readers as well as her uniting idea of cheap nature of language and culture to show that integration is possible even without the mastery of the native language of a place. In my essay, I endeavour to analyze Cha's use of language in her poems, the stylistic devices she

Throughout history poetry has been written since earlier 2000 B.C. and it was not until the late sixteen centuries, that poetry for Chicanos, (Mexican-American), were getting written. During and after the Mexican-American War of 1848, is when the Mexican-American poetry became popular. However, the real popularity and the creative literature activity among Chicano authors was in the 1960 through the 70’s; l this era being called the Renaissance Era. Chicano's often shape their poetry and solidify their cultural and the struggles of their minority culture. In this paper I am going to compare and contrast two Mexican-American poets. Telling the reader about the different types of poetry each one used, along with ways that they expressed themselves.

Sexuality and spirituality thrives as other topics in which Anzaldua combines genres. In this instance she combines history and autobiography. Again this gives a more humane look at history. However, this use is more distinctly personal whereas the previous combination of history and poetry provided a more universal personal approach. This talks about Anzaldúa’s part in history. Anzaldúa writes, “Being lesbian and raised Catholic, I was indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)” (41). This line is found in a section dealing with homophobia that resides heavily in the cultures she identifies with. While this phobia exists in the culture at large and is recorded as such, Anzaldúa provides a personal account as an example.

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that throughout the book, she lives in houses, but never has a home. Lorde, being a double and sometimes even triple minority continues to experience hardship throughout the book. On page 255, Lorde again looks to her friends and lovers as a

Ross Gay’s book Against Which, portrays his poetry to readers allowing them to gain understanding of the cruel world that one lives in. Moreover, the unusual brutalities that people are inevitable confronted with in life. The common denominators within Gay’s poems such as violence, love, fear, and loss allows the reader to visualize characters’ transformation within his poems. In a world of calamity, Gay has created poems that portray the corporal conforming to gender and sex but also human development. Using a reader-response criticism lens, I will be demonstrating my interpretation of Ross Gay’s poems and the meaning that I believe to be a common interpretation of his work. Within, Gay’s poems, “It Starts at Birth” and Angels Out of Reach” one is able to see a pattern of human transformation. By experiencing pain, love, loss, fear, and wisdom one is able to see Gay’s characters evolve through the narrators and readers gaze. In doing so, one is able to reflect on Gay’s poems and gain wisdom themselves.

The Other is configured in the two writers’ works as victims of power play, their unjust mistreatment subsequently exposing underlying social inequalities. Through adopting the Gothic medium characteristic of Romanticism, the texts induce within the reader emotions of terror and pity towards the marginalised, leaving a profound effect which impactfully conveys the intended social criticism.

In presenting herself as a child on the verge of adulthood, Lorde indicated to the reader that the things she learned at this time would be pivotal and important for the rest of her life. For example, at the beginning of her essay, Lorde wrote that her trip to Washington D.C. was “on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child” (221). In this way, Lorde’s trip to the nation’s capital and her experiences of discrimination there provided an intellectual

The story set place during the Civil Right movement in a black household of a little girl and her mother. The poem signal that African Americans are not gifted with their freedom when the girl asked her mother to join the Freedom March “to make our country free” (Randall). Getting their freedom taken away, many African American children march the street of Birmingham to regain their natural rights. Taking a stand to fight for one’s right is the responsibilities of everyone. Another example is the mother’s reason for refusing to let her daughter go march because of her fear of the danger behold there. The mother then direct her daughter to “go to church instead” (Randall). Ironically, the girl meet her fate at the place thought to be the most sacred place. This ironic situation revealed that ignoring the violation of the rules upon civil rights is as dangerous as challenging it.

It was the first time Lorde was confronted with racism and her family’s reaction to it. They had to take a train to go to New York City and when it was time to eat, they were not allowed to enter the dining area so they had to eat in their seats. Her mother told her that it is better to eat home cooked food anyway. Audre Lorde did not question her mother since she knew her mother was right. Though her parents made the incident look okay, it deeply bothered Lorde. There was another incident when they arrived to D.C from New York City; when Audre’s family decided to get some ice cream treats from a drugstore, they were told to order their food and eat it outside because they were blacks. Her parents ignore the comment and left. Lorde was outrages by their reaction. She knew what was going on but she was not allowed to acknowledge this racism. She saw that her family was just as upset but they chose to ignore it and walk away, hoping for the racism to go away. These incidents were carved inside Lorde while growing up. It was a hard journey for her until she found a way to deal with it.

Akin to intersectional romance fiction, poetry is equivalently as radical. Poetry magnifies the significance of language as a revolutionary tool, one that liberates women and cultivates an environment in which women are free to address their aspirations and anxieties while condemning the ideals of a society that operates under the canons of male chauvinism. In a collection of letters published as a tribute to the late Audre Lorde in Off Our Backs, a feminist newspaper journal written for women by women, one anonymous contributor discusses how Lorde “encourages all women to find their own means of expression, their own poetry to value and to use” (Tyler 32) in her piece “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”. In the piece, Lorde discusses how for women, poetry is not a nonessential indulgence, as Caucasian men throughout history have suggested through how they render poetry as an opportunity to “cover [a] desperate wish for imagination without insight” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde contends that poetry is a “vital necessity of [the] existence” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36) of women because it establishes the infrastructure on which women “predicate [their] hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde’s text motivates women to exercise “the power of the word, a freedom for women greatly feared by…patriarchal society” (Tyler 32). Lorde states the poetry

Audre Lorde was born in New York City the 18th of February 1934 of Caribbean immigrants. As a child, the author had difficulties in communication that made her acknowledge poetry and its power as a form of expression, allowing her to become a writer, a feminist, and a civil rights activist. Which is very strong in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” in which the author describes her feelings using a style of superior journalism with elements of popular culture that leads to racial issues. In order to emphasize more her sociological argument, Lorde uses personal experience as ethos. “As a forty-nine- year- old Black lesbian feminist socialist, mother of two including one boy, and member an inter- racial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong”(Lorde, 114). Audre Lorde strength is in her inferiority and points out very actual issues such as: distortion of relationship between oppressor and oppressed and the misnamed differences that still leads to racism.

Audre Lorde’s poem, Coal, explores the idea of repression and the freedom of speech. On first reading of the text, the poem seems to be built around an idea of anger towards repressing one’s individual thoughts and not voicing personal opinion. However, through a deconstructive reading, there are inconsistencies within the text’s language that question whether the speaker is referring to the forceful repression of spoken words or other motifs like femininity, power and self worth within an individual’s voice. By examining the verbal, textual, and linguistic stages of Coal, one can see the contradictions, discontinuities, and unreliability in relation to one another within the poem.