Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Analysis of Literary Language, Thanksgiving, Colonization, Discrimination,…

- - - - Randall commemorates the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing with his poem, and highlights how not even churches, which should be a place of refuge, are safe for Black people in America.
    - - Clifton parallels Genesis in her poem through writing a story of creation where she creates a world. She positions herself as her own God in the poem by using words to create.
    - - Brooks follows the Sunday routine of a Black man getting ready for the day and going out, which falls into the religion category because like how people get ready to go to Church on Sunday, the man in the story has his own Church-adjacent Sunday routine.
    - - “Skywoman Falling” falls into the religion category because it is a sacred Native American tale that describes the story of creation different from how Genesis describes creation in Western religion.
    - - A central theme in The Poet X is religion. Xiomara grows up in a religious household, her mother being the most devout, and throughout the book, she attends religious school, questions and understands her own relationship with religion, and connects with her mother at the end through having her pastor, Father Sean, help guide a conversation between them.
- - - - In Black-Eyed Women, Nguyen describes how the narrator’s brother was murdered by pirates when their boat was captured as her family tried to escape the Vietnam war. Years later, her brother’s ghost visits her and they talk about their memories from the war and his death, and she learns to process her trauma and move on from it, essentially resisting the confines that were set on her by her experience in the war.
    - - Lahiri tells the story of Mr. Pirzada who comes over to a girl named Lilia’s house for dinner and watches the news on the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence with her parents. The story revolves around Lilia’s understanding of Mr. Pirzada’s experience with war and how they might be a part of different countries now, but they have more commonalities than differences.
    - - Vuong’s poem intertwines the song “White Christmas” with scenes of Vietnamese people during the Vietnam war. The song was played on the radio as a secret message to American civilians to evacuate during the fall of Saigon, whereas the Vietnamese people did not know what it meant and suffered the brunt of the battle.
    - - Nguyen recounts his family's experience fleeing Vietnam and being refugees in America.
  - - - In Randell’s poem, a mother and her daughter discuss a Freedom March in Birmingham and how she wants to attend, but her mother warns her of the dangers of protesting. In the end, the daughter is killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, illuminating racial prejudice in America. This poem relates to the theme of resistance because of the freedom marches, the Civil Rights movement, and the commentary it makes on race in America.
    - - McKay criticizes America’s racism and violence against the Black community in his poem by writing it as a Shakespearean sonnet. I put this in the category of resistance because McKay is speaking up against racism and asserting his opposition to it, essentially taking this European poem structure and making it his own.