Preview

african american lit

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
308 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
african american lit
African American Lit. 2650/102 Discuss the conflict “the mother” The conflict in Gwendolyn Brooks “the mother” is very sad and painful experience of abortions. It is about a mother who has deled with many abortions and is being regretful about the situation. In conflict of internal that takes place within the narrator minds is “Abortion will not let you forgot” (line1). She talks about the termination of a pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus. It touches a mother that goes through the experience of losing a child that is unborn. For example,” You will never wind up the sucking thumb”(7) Thus using internal conflict to expressed a feeling of an unborn child that is dead.at this will hunt the mother “Or scuttle off ghost that come”(8). Also “You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sign. It stays with the mother for life. The narrator also expressed “My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck”(13). The small amount light there is no hope.
What really hurt her she realized ”Since anyhow you are dead/ You were never made”(24,26). The external between the mother and her environment she experience the things around her. “The singers and workers that never handled the air/You will never wind up the sucking-thumb”(4,7) as mother accept the baby never born to experience the world. Also, “Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye”(11) swallowed up from mother’s eye sight. The last few lines “You were born, you had a body, you died/It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried./Believe me, I know you , though faintly, and I loved, I loved you”(29-30,32). Mother to unborn is gone even though I picture the unborn fetus with love and care. Still I love my unborn children that didn’t survived.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Brooks’ poetry, so rich in personal detail and authenticity, often does not have to justify the moral side of issues like other poems usually do. Her work, for me, seems less confessional and more like realistic humanity, a difficult feat to accomplish when so much of the material speaks of inner turmoil, lost loves, and wistful sadness. Honest in tone and filled with common and often disturbing themes, the poems were ones I was able to connect with. “The Mother” and “The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith” are two poems that speak to me in terms of universal longing and pain. I have never had an abortion, but I know several people who have. In fact, last year I had an 11th-grade student who was pregnant, and I told her that I would gladly adopt the baby. She said she would consider it, but she ended up having the abortion. For a couple weeks after she got back, I kept wondering what that child would have been like; but then, I had to force myself to put it out of my mind. “The Mother” brought back all the joys of having a child and all the disappointments of not having a second one.…

    • 2505 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Blake/Plath Essay

    • 612 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The speakers in “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath and “Infant Sorrow” by William Blake express their attitudes towards infancy. They do this through the use of imagery and language in each poem. There is a range of emotions that are expressed by the speakers, who are both providing perspectives of childbirth from the parent’s point of view. The vivid images that are created by these poems reveal the attitudes of the speakers toward infancy.…

    • 612 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sethe's Breastmilk

    • 115 Words
    • 1 Page

    The protagonist in the novel, Sethe, is deprived of her femininity by being denied motherhood. Infants born into slavery are typically removed from their mothers to disallow any chance to form emotional attachment, making it easier to debase women as human beings by denying them the natural desire to mother their children. The idea of motherhood and a mother’s identity was not just seen in the physical separation between a mother and her child. In an attempt to save her children, Sethe sacrifices herself. In a very abusive and animalistic fashion, Sethe loses the essence of motherhood, her breastmilk. Throughout the novel, Sethe focuses on her breast milk, the life-force she is naturally supplied…

    • 115 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “She makes me want to throw up sometimes," she complained to her friends”(Paragraph, 4). A child who wishes their mother dead has very strong dislike towards them. She feels her mother wishes are annoying and uncalled for, which causes tension between their relationships. Another example where she thinks of her mother less is, “Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so much” (Paragraph, 11). Connie thought it was easy getting away with being the idealist child of that time period because her mother was too simple to identify or approach her about her actions.…

    • 535 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poet demonstrates the reality of motherhood through metaphorical representation. This is evident through ‘someone she loved once passes by- too late’. This is a metaphorical representation of her past and it has changed from being lively in love to developing depressing thoughts within the park. As her ex-lover passes by, it is evident through metaphor 'From his neat head unquestionably rises a small balloon', this visually portrays that it is very clear that he left her, after seeing her being no longer young and fashionable, instead, contrastingly captured in the complex consequences as a result of motherhood. In her final statement to her ex-lover "its so nice to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive", it is proved that she continuously rehearsed this saying to tell herself falsehoods to remind herself that life is not monotonous and torturous instead their is some hope in motherhood that the change experienced can be…

    • 963 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    American Lit.

    • 881 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Pay attention to content (such as setting and plot, the type of narrator and the narrator’s stance, and character development) and writing style (for example, the author’s word choice, tone, sentence structure, and use or nonuse of figurative language).…

    • 881 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Poem Analysis: The Mother

    • 1137 Words
    • 5 Pages

    In this poem “The Mother” it was this mother that had many abortions. This speaker was having an emotional breakdown. For example, “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children” (Brooks 1940). When reading ‘’The Mother’’ the speaker talked about her and focused on the children she aborted. But the speaker never mentioned a father. So, after realizing she did not mention a father this question came to an understanding. Why do people have different emotional and physical feelings after abortions? When asking that question by people it means men and women. There is evidence of when it comes to abortions, many people do not think about the men withdrawals. Abortions, which are the discontinuation of a pregnancy before…

    • 1137 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sorrow Florens In A Mercy

    • 892 Words
    • 4 Pages

    But this immoral transaction was a gift in disguise in the eyes of Florens’ mother. “It was a mercy. Offered by a human.” (195) Florens’ mother saw an opportunity for Florens to escape an environment that was rapidly becoming more dangerous for her. Her mother notes that Florens had begun to catch the unwanted attention of Senor, but also realized that the tall man saw her “As a human child, not pieces of eight.” (195) But Florens was too young to understand the complex social hierarchies surrounding her, only comprehending that her mother was giving her up as a substitution for her brother. “because mothers nursing greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes go when they choose.” (9) Her words offer a glimpse into the twisted reality grown from a seed of abandonment-where a mother’s love is easily stolen by the touch of a baby boy.…

    • 892 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    African-American Studies

    • 1946 Words
    • 8 Pages

    The aspect of African-American Studies is key to the lives of African-Americans and those involved with the welfare of the race. African-American Studies is the systematic and critical study of the multidimensional aspects of Black thought and practice in their current and historical unfolding (Karenga, 21). African-American Studies exposes students to the experiences of African-American people and others of African descent. It allows the promotion and sharing of the African-American culture. However, the concept of African-American Studies, like many other studies that focus on a specific group, gender, and/or creed, poses problems. Therefore, African-American Studies must overcome the obstacles in order to improve the state of being for African-Americans.…

    • 1946 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    African American History

    • 480 Words
    • 2 Pages

    1. Based on your reading of this chapter, do you believe racial prejudice among British settlers in the Chesapeake led them to enslave Africans? Or did the unfree condition of the first Africans to arrive at Jamestown lead to racial prejudice among settlers?…

    • 480 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Support or refute the contention that Booker T. Washington refuses to verify slavery as a brutal and evil institution.…

    • 1082 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    African-American History

    • 459 Words
    • 2 Pages

    African-American history is the part of American history that particularly talks about the African-American or Black American cultural gatherings in the United States. Most African Americans are the relatives of black African slaves persuasively bring to and detained hostage in the United States from 1555 to 1865 (Franklin, V. P. 1992). Blacks from the Caribbean whose progenitors immigrated, or who immigrated to the U.S., additionally customarily have been viewed as African-American, as they divide a typical history of dominatingly West African or Central African roots, the Middle Passage and slavery (Franklin, V. P. 1992).…

    • 459 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the first stanza she explains what happened in a harsh way, she uses very powerful words: she is talking about ‘dropping the baby into the waters’, as if she thinks that at the time she thought about it as something she had to get rid of, something without any value running ‘with the sewage’. Then she uses the idea of drowning and being drowned as if it was a murder. Through all this choices of vocabulary we can guess that she regrets what she did, she is questioning herself and accusing herself.…

    • 1304 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The setting of a piece of literature gives the reader a proper understanding of the roots of a story. The setting is an especially important in African American literature, because it shows readers many of the conditions African Americans had to face, unlike caucasians. Works such as Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, and “Equal Opportunity” by Walter Mosey, show different settings, which allows for different points of view on how the typical African American lived. The setting plays a role in the African American experience by where the story takes place, how people fit into the setting, and the overall mood of the setting.…

    • 1522 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    African American History

    • 3538 Words
    • 15 Pages

    Goodman, D. (2010). The fourteenth amendment 's effect on article IV, section 2, clause 1 of the…

    • 3538 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Powerful Essays

Related Topics