Last but not least on this fine afternoon, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Langston Hughes if you need it. He is another figure in Black History who bears extended scrutiny, so this worksheet really serves as the sparest of introductions to him.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Got the weary blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
“Weary Blues” 1. 27 (1926)
Langston Hughes
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, poetry, united states history
Ama Ata Aidoo: (1940-) Ghanaian dramatist, poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Aidoo’s career as a writer began while still an undergraduate at the University of Ghana with the 1964 performance of The Dilemma of a Ghost (pub 1965). Her work, consistently engaged with women’s issues, uses Africa’s oral traditions and styles to place these concerns in the larger context of the African struggle against colonialism, neocolonialism, and exploitation. Aidoo’s second play, Anowa (1970), is set in the late 19th, and is an adaptation of an old Ghanaian legend. In her collection of short stories, No Sweetness Here (1970), Aidoo turns her critical yet compassionate attention to the postindependence era, demonstrating her ability to as a storyteller and witty social critic. Our Sister Killjoy (1979) is an innovative novel which examines, through an interplay of prose and poetry, the maturation of a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Germany and England. Her second novel, Changes: A Love Story (1991), which won the 1992 Africa Section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, recounts the trials and tribulations of the Esi Sekyi, a young educated career woman. In Aidoo’s sensitive depiction of Sekyi’s second marriage to a polygamous man, she explores the uses of Africa’s past to women and men who are attempting to create more meaningful personal and public lives. Aidoo’s other works include her two volumes of poetry, Someone Talking to Sometime (1985) and An Angry Letter in January (1991), and The Eagle and the Chicken and Other Stories (1987) and The Eagle and the Chicken and Other Stories (1987) and Birds and Other Poems (1987), both written for children. Aidoo is one of the most important African writers today.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, drama/theater, fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research
“I too, Sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes.,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.”
“I, Too” l. 16 (1925)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Bard: (Welsh, bardd; Irish, bard) Amont the ancient Celts a bard was a sort of official poet whose task it was to celebrate national events—particularly heroic actions and victories. The bardic poets of Gaul and Britain were a distinct social class with special privileges. The “caste” continued to exist in Ireland and Scotland, but nowadays are more or less confined to Wales, where the poetry contests and festivals, known as the Eisteddfodau, were revived in 1822 (after a lapse since Elizabethan times). In modern Welsh a bardd is a poet who has taken part in an Eisteddfod. In more common parlance the term may be half seriously applied to a distinguished poet—especially Shakespeare.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged poetry, readings/research, term of art
“Who was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in literature? Gwendolyn Brooks, in 1950, for Annie Allen.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Things Fall Apart: The first novel (1958) by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (born Albert Chinualumogo, 1930). Its theme is the mutual incomprehension between Ibo tribal communities and white officials in the 1890s. The title comes from the poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1921) by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939):
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A volume of memoirs (1970) by the African-American writer, singer, and actress Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Angelou borrowed her title—a metaphor for the African-American experience—from the US writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906):
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Paul Lawrence Dunbar: ‘Sympathy,’ in The Complete Poems (1895)
Dunbar may have been inspired by an earlier line:
When caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.
John Webster: The White Devil (1612), V.iv
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
[The beautiful Dunbar Apartments in Harlem are named for Paul Laurence Dunbar. Let me mention editorially that I am mildly uncomfortable with this entry’s association of Dunbar with Thomas Nelson Page. Dunbar, in my own view, was sui generis as a poet. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia has a tendency–especially in older entries like this one–to discount the originality of African-American writers.]
“Paul Laurence Dunbar: (1872-1906) American poet. Dunbar is noted for his highly skilled use of black themes and dialect. Writing at a time when literary regionalism was in vogue, he was undoubtedly influenced by Thomas Nelson Page. Dunbar was the son of a slave, but became the most famous African-American poet of his time. He exercised a great influence on later writers. Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896) is his most famous collection. It was followed by Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899), Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1903), and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow. He also wrote novels, including The Uncalled (1898) and The Sport of the Gods (1902).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, poetry, united states history
“Heart of Darkness: A tale or short novel by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), published in 1902. The story is told by Marlow, who captains a river boat in the Congo and slowly sails upriver into the ‘heart of darkness,’ which is both Africa, the ‘dark continent,’ and the heart of evil. Marlow’s mission is to reach Kurtz, the most successful of the company’s agents. He finds that the charismatic Kurtz, once a man of culture and civilization, has turned himself into an omnipotent ruler by the use of unimaginable cruelty, hinted at by the row of heads impaled beside his compound. Kurtz’s dying words are ‘The horror! The horror!’ The story ends:
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
When he was a child in Poland, Conrad had jabbed his finger at the centre of a map of Africa and declared that one day he would go there. In 1890 he did, when he took command of a river boat in the Congo Free State. The Congo was then the private fiefdom of the Belgian king, Leopold II, and was exploited with the utmost barbarity. Eventually, in 1908, international outrage led the Belgian government to take over the colony.
Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, and the words ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’ follow the title of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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