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"This is America", America, Between the World and Me, Black Body, Black Male Body as commodity, Black Men, Black Sexuality, Black-face, Childish Gambino, DAMN, Film, film review, Gun-Violence, Kendrick Lamar, Mandingo myth, Mass Shooting, Minstrel Show, music, N.W.A., Pulitzer Prize, race, Random Violence, Rap, Rock and Roll, Satire, Ta-Nehisi Coates, White Privilege, Woke, Writing, Wu-Tang Clan, XXX
It’s not a place
This country is to be a sound of drum and bass
You close your eyes to look around
—XXX, Kendrick Lamar & Bono
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
-America, Allen Ginsberg
He guns down the choir a machine gun and says “This is America.” It’s a moment that hits me in my gut because it’s stylized violence before I remember that it’s actually happened.
I really do in fact, despite my claims, have several friends. I know that as a writer and an introvert I’m supposed to say that I have no friends, but I do in fact have people in my life that I care a lot about. True many of them are coworkers, but they’re also people I have a lot in common with. Some are queer like me, almost all of them are readers, and almost all of them enjoy music of some sort. And outside of work I have a gathering of people who, while they no longer live in my home town of Tyler, I’m still close to. One of these friends is my brother Josh Grijalva.
He’s not a biological brother, but this motherfucker and I am joined at the hip. When you wrap your arms around somebody for dear life at a Slipknot concert that’s fucking family. I met Josh several years ago as I was just starting college, and I didn’t know his actual first name for close to a year, when I found out he was also called Josh I felt like a dumbass. It didn’t matter thought because over the next few years the pair of us bonded over Heavy Metal, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Creative Writing (he was the mad-poet genius and I was the cold souls prose-ist). Josh taught me a lot about life, and after his mother died I tried to be there for him as much as I could, and it’s one of the great fucking tragedies of my life that the guy lives up in Dallas, but we still talk off and on and this relationship has, in it’s way, still been one of the best relationships in my life partly because Josh Introduced me to Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino.
Rap wasn’t a genre of music that was played in my house growing up. My parents were teenagers of the late seventies and early seventies so I grew up on Aerosmith, Blondie, AC/DC, Boston, Madonna, and the Eurythmics. Along with this there was plenty of Rat Pack: Louie Prima, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzegerald, and of course Frank Sinatra. It wasn’t that my parents kept me from Rap growing up, it just wasn’t part of their world, and because parents tend to raise their children according to their own values and interests and aesthetics, I grew up being bottle fed by the Rock-Gods rather than the
Rap pioneers. I don’t hold my parents at fault for
this, but this absence of rap also seemed to follow the pattern of “whiteness” that was my upbringing.
There weren’t many black people around growing up. I attended a private christian school where there was only one African American student in my class, and by the time I graduated there was only two. The only black people I ever interacted with were the janitors and custodians of the school or our church that dad worked with (he’s an exterminator so he tended to work with the staff). My social life was pretty much
nonexistent and I was an introvert who preferred staying home playing video games and reading comics. This is just a long way of saying that I lived in what some would refer to as a “lily-white” world or privilege and so approaching an essay about two rap songs is a difficult proposition because before I’ve even begun I have to address my whiteness and my privilege.
Josh Grijalva has steadily introduced me, over time, to great rappers like N.W.A., Wu-Tang Clan, Kendrick Lamarr, and Childish Gambino. Each of these people or groups has opened me to a new world of music and now I know the important truth that Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nuthin’ to fuck with. And that I need to “fight the powers that be.” Josh was a great teacher because he offered me suggestions for music, and in my effort to understand my white privilidge and consider the experience of the African American community I’ve discovered a lot of incredible artists I never would have encountered in my childhood.
I never grew up around the threat of gun violence, and so watching Childish Gambino shoot a man through the back of the head and declare that this is America is at first shocking and jarring, but the last few years are a quick counter to this.
This is America is a song that has become a new discourse largely because of the video, and as I discussed the short film with one of my fellow co-workers, who for the record taught me the word “woke,” we both agreed that the song is great but the video is work of art that manages to convey far more than the lyrics. If the reader looks at the first start of the song they might not observe too much significance. Childish Gambino has just shot a man, who at the start of the video was simply playing the guitar, through the back of the head and the song starts:
This is America (skrrt, skrrt, woo)
Don’t catch you slippin’ now (ayy)
Look at how I’m livin’ now
Police be trippin’ now (woo)
Yeah, this is America (woo, ayy)
Guns in my area (word, my area)
I got the strap (ayy, ayy)
I gotta carry ’em
A rapper singing about the need to carry guns for the sake of his own protection in the neighborhood he loves in isn’t anything new. In fact groups like N.W.A. pretty much made it an industry standard. What makes the words so powerful is the way in which Childish Gambino presents it. Throughout the entire video the man is shirtless, wearing just a pair of pants, and while he is not out of shape by any means, as he dances about the man is never presented as a kind of sexual ideal. In fact throughout the video one
gets a sense of the man’s vulnerability.
This is America follows Childish Gambino as he sings and dances through a large warehouse that is populated by him, a group of dancing African American school children, and then humans that are always moving about in the background usually fighting, looting, burning the many parked cars, or else attacking the few clearly African American characters in the background. Gambino becomes this surreal figure as cars are burning, people are looting and burning, and the man is smiling and dancing about.
And this very act has led some to observe that one of the most striking aspect of the video
are the implications of blackface performance tropes. Gambino is constantly dancing through the film, making jerking motions and contortion his face randomly. The bent elbows, the erratic facial twists, and the near cakewalk on top of the car near the end of the video all call back to minstrel shows where white performers would done black face paint and behave in cartoonish representations of African Americans. I’m not the first person to observe this similarity, in fact many of the people who watched this film have observed how Childish Gambino uses a pseudo-minstrel-show persona throughout the video to distract the viewer from the violence and mayhem taking place in the background behind him. This reference to a morbid form of entertainment continues the body narrative because ultimately the black man’s body is observed
in objectified ways to the point of being a commodity. While the world behind him burns Gambino is a mock-minstrel reminding the viewer that black men like himself have been used and destroyed, while a shallow cartoon has distracted people from
seeing the real travesties that plague American society. Why see the violent conflict that afflicts real people in our society when there is, in Gambino’s own words, a “fitted” and “pretty” person “on Gucci.” Why bother to see the violence in the haze when there’s a funny cartoon dancing right in front of you? Isn’t that far more entertaining?
It’s when the man shoots the quoir with the AK-47 that the video seems to take the turn that it does. Gambino appears through a door and dances to the quoit singing the lines:
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
You gon’ tell somebody
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (get your money)
Get your money, Black man (get your money)
Get your money, Black man (get your—Black man)
Get your money, Black man (get your—Black man)
Black man
And at once Gambino produces the rifle and guns the choir down. It’s a quick act, not drawn and not dramatized. In fact if you blink you’ll almost miss it. The gun fires and the bodies drop and once again Gambino declares This is America. The dramatic quickness of the act, and the way it changes the tone of the music instantly the reader is left wondering what the fuck just happened.
I’m not the only blogger who has commented on the dramatic violence of This is America, in fact the internet seems to have become, since the video dropped, just one long discourse about what the violence means, what the popularity of the film suggests, and whether or not Gambino was right to even create it. In the face of all this discourse I run the risk of becoming just another voice in the white haze, and in fact I probably will. What more can be said when so much has been said? As per usual I turn my focus back to myself and see what the video means for me, or what I focus on and that in fact is not the violence but the very end of the film.
Gambino is seen running through the warehouse in the dark and Young Thug, one of the collaborators for the song begins singing gently:
You just a black man in this world
You just a barcode, ayy
You just a black man in this world
Drivin’ expensive foreigns, ayy
You just a big dawg, yeah
I kenneled him in the backyard
No probably ain’t life to a dog
For a big dog
As throughout the film Gambino reveals a real vulnerability, specifically his body. He’s a black man being chased through the dark by white shadows as the world declares that he’s just a barcode.
It’s not violent like the early scenes. There’s no cop cars burning. There’s no acts of random violence. Instead there is just the vulnerability of the man’s body, and the look of terror in his eyes as he has to flee. It’s clear if they catch him they’ll destroy his body, and on some level it’s implied that the destruction will take more than that. Over the course of the video Gambino has tried to make his body into something more. A black man’s body is something painfully relevant and important because it’s something that’s vulnerable; it’s something than can be destroyed or stolen or appropriated.
Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks about this in his usual magnificent way in his book Between the World and Me when he address his young son:
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random mangling, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no pride anthems, nor old Negro Spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and the brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul and body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
It had to be blood. (103-4).
Many people online have pointed out the symbolism of almost every aspect of the video. Whether it’s the references to Minstrel shows, the implication of viral violence, the ignoring of violence that is all too apparent, the references to actual gin violence in america, of the references to the “sunken-place” from Get Out This is America
promisesso much opportunity to explore violence and the problems facing the black body in American Society.
I’ve watched This is America at least ten times, and each time I see more and more of this symbolism, but more and more all I can really observe is the vulnerability on display. The body is something that is exposed to all of this violence, and while Gambino manages to escape this destruction around him, the implication at the end is that no one is truly free from it.
Which of course brings me to XXX and DAMN.
There was an ambition that really was a dream in the early years of my training as a writer. I wanted to win a Pulitzer. The writers I admired had won that award:
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. And so my young brain interpreted the winning of that award not as something that meant one had really said something with their art but just a real recognition that your art was legitimate and culturally recognized. I’ve since abandoned the ambition that I will ever win a Pulitzer because I’m a realist and some dude with a blog, but I still follow the award and it’s winners because the books that win it do tend to say something significant about the culture and the zeitgeist. It was too my great joy when I heard that Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN had won the award because I love the song XXX.
DAMN is an album I downloaded as soon as the library bought a copy and I’ve inhaled it ever since. It’s not just that it’s unlike any rap album I’ve bought to date, it’s just a truly exceptional album for the way that it feels of it’s time and place while also making something that will last as a true cultural document. DAMN is the first rap album ever to win the P{ulitzer and listening to XXX it’s not too difficult to understand why. The song digs into the problems of gun violence in the United States, while also digging into Lamar’s self.
He sets up the story as a friend informs of the death of his son:
Yesterday I got a call like from my dog like 101
Said they killed his only son because of insufficient funds
He was sobbin’, he was mobbin’, way belligerent and drunk
Talkin’ out his head, philosphin’ on what the Lord had done
He said: “K-Dot, can you pray for me?
It’s been a fucked up day for me
I know that you anointed, show me how to overcome.”
He was lookin’ for some closure
Hopin’ I could bring him closer
To the spiritual, my spirit do no better, but I told him
“I can’t sugarcoat the answer for you, this is how I feel:
If somebody kill my son, that mean somebody gettin’ killed.”
Tell me what you do for love, loyalty, and passion of
All the memories collected, moments you could never touch
And after Bono sings his haunting chorus that feels like something out of a Jazz-room
bar, Kendrick continues reflecting his pain outward and trying to understand it in the larger cultural context:
Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph
The great American flag
Is wrapped and dragged with explosives
Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters
Barricaded blocks and borders
Look what you taught us!
It’s murder on my street, your street, back streets
Wall Street, corporate offices
Banks, employees, and bosses with
Homicidal thoughts; Donald Trump’s in office
We lost Barack and promised to never doubt him again
But is America honest, or do we bask in sin?
Pass the gin, I mix it with American blood
Then bash him in, you Crippin’ or you married to blood?
I’ll ask again-oops-accident
It’s nasty when you set us up
Then roll the dice, then bet us up
You overnight the big rifles, then tell Fox to be scared of us
Gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera
America’s reflections of me, that’s what a mirror does
I can never understand fully the realities of being a black man, and the trials and pain and cultural weight that comes with it. I’ve observed this repeatedly here on this site
and in these essays, and while it feels repetitive to keep acknowledging my whiteness I do not believe that the sentiment loses any of its significance. I am not a black a man, I am a white man who lives in a state of real privilege. It’s not just that I’ve had economic advantages that have helped me live a comfortable life, I’ve also had educational advantages, and the privilege of living in a world that wasn’t plagued by violence. I had the privilege to grow up not having to worry about what people thought about my body, or at least in a way where I didn’t have to worry about whether my body was perceived as a threat.
Privilege as a word has fallen into a precarious position because there is so much debate about what the word actually is. Privilege is not about absence of pain, misfortune, or absolvence. Privilege is only and ever the reality in which an individual has some advantage that others do not. The time and space to write these essays is a privilege, one that many people in this world would love to have. The ability to not have to worry
about how one is going to get to work is a privilege. The freedom to not have to worry about finding money for a child’s school payments is a privilege. And now having to worry about whether your body is going to be objectified in positive or negative ways is a privilege.
That reality, living that reality, is a privilege. This is America and DAMN shook me because they both reveal how much of a privilege that reality is.
Looking at myself in relation to these cultural events is the best way I have to write something that feels relevant about them. Rather than just observing the symbolism contained therein, these are works of art and therefore it’s vital to understand their
relevance to the self. What kind of man am I if I observe that there’s gun violence in my country and leave the observation at that? What kind of citizen am I if I ignore the very real threat of violence against a portion of the population simply for the sake of my own comfort? Art, when it is created with a concern for aesthetic and message can impact human beings in incredible ways. Every time I watch This is America I have to wonder how much I agree?
The death of the choir is so dramatic and spontaneous. The people didn’t even see it coming because the person who performed the act was someone right by them, dancing along to the music. And in a moment their lives were gone. It’s a disturbing, almost absurd reality that’s easy to dismiss as just a video. But all too quickly the reader can check their phone or laptop and be reminded that such events have unfortunately become rather common.
The man dances on, the world burns behind him, and we all miss the violence for death riding by with a police escort.
*Writer’s Note*
All quotes cited from This is America came from genius.com. All quotes cited from XXX were sourced from azlyricks.com.
**Writer’s Note**
This video is too important to miss. If the reader hasn’t seen it yet take the time to watch it.
***Writer’s Notes***
I’ve also included some links to articles about This is America and Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer win.
https://www.buzzworthy.com/references-from-childish-gambino-this-is-america/
memoir The Beautiful Struggle. All of these books eventually came through the book drop at the library, and each time that they did I would scramble to pick them up and read them.
has been compared to numerous times and fittingly so.
shouting out into the infinite white noise that is the internet is that any argument which bothers to actually dig into the actual discourse that is history is worth consideration. And Coates’s article does just that.
educations.
Reagan beating the Soviet Union using only his wit and his Iron Man technology which he built with his bare hands. In hindsight I’m pretty sure my dad was over-emphasizing Reagan’s engineering skills. But the stories of World War II were always stories about heroes, and young men overcoming great odds to defeat the forces of real evil. It seems fitting that a narrative built on “othering” should blow up in my face and reveal, not a “Greatest Generation,” but a generation of people who benefitted economically at the expense of others.
beacon what happens when government works, yet Coates article, along with mountains of historical discourse have largely revealed the New Deal to be one lord line of fuck-ups and FDR to be an adulterous egomaniac.
slavery, and so I was given the general outline of the travesties that blacks my home country have been subjected to, but the nuances and details were largely ignored. And this negation of details leads me to a deeper conclusion about my country, which is that there is an unwillingness to really atone for what has been done.
The perception of perfection or moral superiority is a dangerous concept for a people to internalize because it allows for the possibility of “othering” other people. When any group believes themselves naturally superior and drafts a cultural rhetoric which justifies atrocity, or worse, freedom from responsibility then tragedy is soon to follow.
could probably spend an entire page listing out the offenses of the United States this list is meant only to affirm one central point: the United States is not an innocent nation. There is blood on our hands, and for some reason no one really wants to acknowledge it and offer some kind of atonement. There is more an impulse to argue, “yes it happened, let’s move on,” which in itself is yet another form of denial of the issue.
the question of what kind of democracy is it when that same group negates the reality that their success is coming at the expense of others? The Case for Reparations is not about arguing for a simple pay-off the African-American community, because money is an empty gesture. The health of a democracy is measure by the maturity of it’s populace to understand what a real equality is, and so looking at The Case for Reparations I observe not just a beautifully written essay about the differing economic levels of blacks and whites, but a real call for Americans to recognize their past and deepen their emotional understanding of their culture’s past.
at first while I intend to explore this notion of privilege, the larger concern for the health of a democracy seems far more, if not equally, relevant. I’ve watched in just the last few months how my country has become more and more divided over the issues of the past and race, and it seems, at first, like any kind of hope for a healthy and reasonable conversation is next to impossible.
right, who were laughing. I just remember that family laughing because most of the rest of the theater were white people who gave me nasty looks as I was walked out of the theater. I just couldn’t help it. There’s something about watching a group of white men complain about not being able to see through their hoods that’s just pathetic and hilarious.
I suppose I understand. There’s a lot of dialogue which surrounds the film Django Unchained and a lot of it has to do with history.
appearance on the “Fuck Tarantino” program, and people on Facebook got into really nasty arguments about who’s allowed to use the word “nigger” and when and in what context and then someone said “reverse racism” and everybody who liked their brain left the room before that bullshit polluted their frontal lobes. And when the issue of Slavery and historical accuracy was thrown down, I like most people tuned out. Not because there wasn’t an argument to be made, but because I had already assured myself that this interpretation was the best reason to enjoy the film. I enjoy Tarantino movies period and will regularly defend the man’s work. But since I’ve seen the film around ten times since it came out I’ve realized more and more than this argument can only go so far. Tarantino movies tend to be hyperbolic in terms of violence and persona and sometimes plot structure, and within the film there is another, and I’d argue far more interesting, analysis that few people really discussed.
In the course of these struggles the hero frequently forms a bond with another man—sometimes his rival, more often a comrade—a bond that is more important than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged with homoeroticism. There is very little free expression of the emotions. The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action—usually fighting. And when death occurs it is never at home in bed but always sudden death, usually murder. (38-9).
-tale, myth, of Siegfried. Fairy-tales, much like myth, are stories that are purposefully hyperbolic in order to explain phenomena in the world. Zeus and Thor are non-scientific means explain lightning, and likewise the story of Siegfried is designed to explain the absurd state of being in love. One of the best examples of the fairy-tale is George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm which, when it first published, had the subtitle of “A Modern Fairy Tale.” In Animal Farm Orwell was using the structure of the fairy tale to tell a modern story about the terrors of Stalinism, but also of political corruption in general.
Nuclear Arsenal Diplomacy on the international stage. The problem with the library, like almost every library I’m sure, is funding. Because only the city of Tyler’s taxes go to fund us, people who live within the county but not the city have to pay a membership fee. My reader may be wondering what this has to do with my mother or Trevor Noah’s wonderful autobiography Born a Crime. I’m sorry, I like to talk, but I’m getting to it.
The Daily Show and people were looking to disrupt the institution at this supposed moment of weakness. Stewart left, Noah began, I stopped watching for a while. It wasn’t that he wasn’t funny, it just that he was new and I’m one of those obnoxious people who has to settle into things slowly. Still I enjoy The Daily Show and Noah himself has begun to really demonstrate that he’s made The Daily Show into his own and so I’ve become a regular watcher again, and in fact, in the last few months I’ve come to adore Trevor Noah as a comedian, and even more as a writer and Born a Crime is largely responsible.
criminality. The only time I could be with my father was indoors. If we left the house, he’d half to walk across the street from us. My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time. It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens a zoo, a giant chess-board with human-sized pieces that people would play. My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” People started. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him. (27).
Revolutionary Life by Jo Lee Anderson comes next, Jim Henson: A Life by Brian Jay Jones (Also look up his George Lucas), Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, and recently I’ve begun Life by Keith Richards. This list may seem to contradict my statement before about the scarcity of truly great biographies but in fact it only reinforces it. These books are products of a careful craft (pardon the alliteration) that tries to leave the reader with a real sense of the person under discussion, and rather than try to chronicle every detail of a person’s existence, it instead tries to offer the heart and personality in all its beauty and flaws.
After that she never raised her hand to her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped Abel had started. (262).
of Batman Vs Superman. But mothers are important for a young man’s development because she becomes the first relationship. Mothers, the good ones anyway, teach their sons emotional strength and then eventually how to interact with the world. They teach them the proper ways to speak and act towards women. They teach them about the importance of family. They teach their sons love, and what that word really means against the supposed images and representations of it that crowd the media. This last lesson is important, the most important, because as Noah’s biography demonstrates that love is what helps develop people into the individuals they are and instills in them their ideals and moral constructions.
who went ten minutes over the required time. While mostly reading about the films Jurassic Park and JAWS, which tended to interest me far more than any of Spielberg’s other movies, there was a brief mention of the film The Color Purple. That was it for a few years until eventually I arrived in eleventh grade and got into American Literature. It was there that the book made another passing appearance because we read Alice Walker’s short story Everyday Use. Somewhere during the lessons on the short story there was a brief biography of Alice Walker and mention that she had published a book which was banned. When asked why the book was my teacher carefully explained that the book was about, or contained, lesbianism. Given the fact I was a teenage boy that should have been enough for me, but again, 
for whatever reason Miss Walker’s book remained background noise to real concerns like memorizing every episode of Family Guy and beating my friend at Smash Bros. For the record I achieved only ever the first task.
stop laughin.
Neither did Elizabeth Bennet. Neither did Jo March. And neither did Hermoine Granger. I understand that each of these women were working with different times and paradigms governing women’s body’s in literature, but looking at the literary tradition I was raised on what becomes obviously missing from it to the point of being galling is sexuality. Specifically, exploring sexuality in order to become a more well-rounded person.
navigate them. Because of this, boys eventually develop into men who are able to master their sexual exploration far easier than women. Put it simply, I never as a boy had to worry about whether I had anything down there because I had been using mine since before I could walk.
ersonalities, they’re all, for the most part, sexless creatures.
a feeling that they have read a beautiful passage about self-discovery. When I finished The Color Purple I realized that I had finished a beautifully written novel, but I had also read one of the few fictional works that was willing to honestly and unashamedly portray a woman’s personal discovery that her sexuality was not simply a procreative act, it could be, in the worlds of the nameless philosopher, “a bit of fun.”
romanticisms.
destroyed. This is a story I had heard before, on numerous occasions, even once in Reading Lolita in Tehran, and so I was rather surprised when Battles points out that this story is rooted mostly in folklore. He writes:
simply educate the reader and tell the story of how libraries have changed and altered over the course of their existence, while also highlighting how the society that entertains them and establishes them comes to think of them. It may seem strange to observe that, but the way a society views libraries matters a great deal to how they operate.
where Patrick’s head is accidently replaced with brain coral and he becomes hyper-intelligent. While these are both cartoon examples they still feel terribly relevant as I look over Battles’s book, and this small passage from Douglass’s memoir. Moving past the cartoon reality towards our own the lesson does remain valid. Reading regularly makes one aware of the world and how it operates. It’s unfortunate but true that when one educates oneself, one begins to learn that people in society can cruel, apathetic, and lazy in general. That knowledge can sometimes make one feel isolated, and isolation is one of the roads to depression.
amply furnished with libraries, public accommodations of blacks was nearly nonexistent. George for instance, had fifty-three libraries in 1936, only five of which served blacks; out of forty-four public libraries in Florida, blacks could use four. (183).
Digital texts have followed the same deeply grooved arc of other forms of writing. […] Already we call our databases and online catalogs “digital objects”—a reflection, perhaps, of our nostalgia for the dusty physicality of our books[…]. (211)
Smith Family Christmas. Being a young kid I asked who the elderly lady was who was narrating and Mom, or Dad, told me her name was Maya Angelou and that she was a poet.
and like so many of the amazingly selfless actions she’s made in her life, actually bought it for me. The book was finally mine, but I had grad school and cats and work to worry about, and a novel by Faulkner which wasn’t going to finish itself and so I passed on the book to Mom who started it first. I admit this part with great shame however, I eventually took the book back from her because that songbird had sung for too long.
I did manage to read Their Eyes Were Watching God as part of the curriculum and I’ll forever thank Ms. Wilson for giving me that wonderful book, but something that has bothered me about my education, and by extension the education of millions of American students, is the pronounced lack of “minority” voices in the texts we read. Part of this is simply the reality facing many teachers. By the time a person leaves High School they’re supposed to have read at least a few of the “classics” so that they can be prepared as citizens. This would not be so much of a problem were it not for the fact that American literary products are steadily diminished by curriculums and British authors, who typically tend to be white, receive favor or precedence by teachers and administrators. Growing up in a predominantly white environment, and going to a mostly white school also tended to keep me in a bubble where the realities of black people were either nonexistent, or else an abstract cartoon painted harshly by conservative voices and pathetically by liberal voices.
returns for Angelou and her brother Bailey and they all move to California where her mother works as a singer and actress. Her boyfriend, a man by the name of Mr. Burnham watches over the children while their mother is at work, however Burnham assumes a malevolent significance in Angelou’s life for the novel describes the rape she suffered by him. Burnham is eventually found out, but the remainder of the novel deals with Angelou overcoming this trauma and deciding she will never speak again.
off the list because it describes and presents the act so plainly and vividly. I’d like to think that this is the main reason why the book has been banned, but the problem is stories like The Fall of the House of Usher and To Kill a Mockingbird both deal frankly with the topic of rape and those books, apart from being authored by white writers, are required reading in schools. As so often happens the reasons for lifting a book from course curriculum comes not from teachers who are just trying to introduce students to topic and issues about the real world in the safe environment of the classroom, it’s the parents who are terrified that their child will be exposed to shocking or harmful material, most of it material they have already learned about through television.
presentation of rape, however it should be noted that it has also been banned for the frank presentations of sexuality, and while this is never on the list, for the honest presentation of the thoughts and feelings of many young black women.
Angelou was a poet first, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings demonstrates that in the way she describes how important language became to her. After she was raped and Mr. Burnham met his fate Angelou sequestered herself in her own mind, refusing to talk to anyone but her brother until she encounters a woman named Mrs. Flowers who teaches her the value of language. Mrs. Flowers says:
