A Course Reflection on Readings

Reflection: Poem, Short Story, Nonfiction

One poem that has had a great impact upon me was Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1963 poem entitled “We Real Cool.” The poem was so memorable because it was written in ordinary language and packs such a tremendous emotional punch at the end, despite only being a few lines long. “We real cool. We/ Left school. We/ Lurk late” (1-3). I loved the ways in which Brooks used ordinary English, even though some of the slang was very old-fashioned to my ear. She used these rhetorical techniques give voice in the language of young people to a collective generation who would, in the words of the final chilling lines of the poem, “die soon” (8). The poem is articulate, yet gives a voice to people who might be regarded as inarticulate, by outsiders.

The self-awareness of the characters that young death was always on the horizon, even though they were having fun drinking and enjoying music, underlines the possibility of using language to express a deeper truth than might be evident on the surface of their actions. It reminded me of how people often look at the younger generation, thinking they do not care when they are having fun. Often that fun is very desperate. I think this is also true of my generation. All of this is conveyed through the sophisticated and nuanced use of language, without telling the reader this fact directly in a clunky or straightforward fashion.

A short story I really enjoyed was Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat.” This was a very moving short story about an abused washerwoman. Like Brooks’ poem, it gave a voice and great dignity to a Black, working-class character who might otherwise be ignored or misunderstood. Hurston’s short story is about a victim of domestic violence, a relevant topic today. Quite often, people question why abused women stay with their attackers. The story shows how the woman uses her faith to give her strength through seeming unconquerable suffering, but ultimately, she emerges victorious through apparently supernatural intervention.

However, even though the justice is supernatural in the form of a mighty and terrifying snake, the inner strength which the protagonist reveals is clear even beforehand: “Delia’s habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf. She was on her feet; her poor little body, her bare knuckly hands bravely defying the strapping hulk before her” (Hurston). Like Brooks’ poem, this short story uses language and dialogue in the voice of the characters, using the type of slang and dialect they might use in real life, to give people a voice and a sense of dignity and being worthy of representation in fiction. Reading the story makes the reader feel as if he or she is living the story along with the characters, cheering on the protagonist. There is nothing pretentious or literary about it, despite the final symbolic image of the snake.

Finally, a work of nonfiction I read during the semester which had a significant impact upon the way in which I viewed literature and my reading was that of the nonfiction work Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifying: The Language of Black America. Smitherman examines the different ways in which language has been viewed as acceptable or unacceptable in formal English speech. She argues the fact that slang and dialect has been marginalized in literature is not rooted in grammar but in prejudice.

As seen in Brooks and Hurston, dialect can be a very useful way of writing, to show how ordinary people’s speech functions. Smitherman argues that rather than “sloppy and unsystematic” dialect is just a linguistic difference (Smitherman 191). Smitherman’s book made me look at language very differently from how I was taught when I was learning proper grammar in school. Instead of seeing certain English as wrong or right, it was much more helpful to see different word choices as just that, choices, rather than something that proved someone was intelligent or an inherently good writer.