Poetry exploring themes of struggle and adversity

Poetry about struggle: The African-American experience

Poetry is a medium which naturally lends itself to dealing with the topic of oppression. It enables members of historically-marginalized groups, such as African-Americans, to express themselves in covert ways that challenge the dominant paradigms of the societies in which they live. Through the use of the techniques of metaphor and simile, symbolism, and other literary methods, authors such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the author of "We Wear the Mask: and Langston Hughes, the author of "A Dream Deferred" could speak the unspoken truths about the racial obstacles which they were forced to deal with on a daily basis. The modern African-American poet Rita Dove's work is more elliptical and less explicitly referential to politics in her works like "Persephone, Falling -- " than that of Dunbar's and Hughes' but still touches on common themes of struggle, namely how one 'fall' from purity can result in the ruin of a human being, particularly an African-American whose sexuality is demonized by society.

In Dunbar's poem "We wear the mask," Dunbar contrasts the inner torment of African-Americans living in a prejudiced society with that of the social facade they are forced to wear living with whites. "WE wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -- / This debt we pay to human guile; / With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, / And mouth with myriad subtleties." The smile is both a figurative and a literal mask. During the age in which Dunbar wrote -- in the post-Reconstruction Era but before the Harlem Renaissance -- most of the available jobs for African-Americans were in occupations such as bellhops and maids. Black workers were forced to wear a mask of smiling servitude as whites patronized them, a mask that belied the anguish that African-Americans felt at their inferior social position.

Dunbar is frustrated because African-Americans must wear such a mask, thus confirming the worst stereotypes that blacks were 'happy' in their inferior places. But if they do not, they face rejection and persecution, if they reveal what is truly in their hearts. The poem is structured in terms of a comparison and contrast of outer and inner selves. "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" Similarly, African-American religiosity should also not be seen as a statement of contentment, says Dunbar. "We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries / To thee from tortured souls arise." Religion is not so much a comfort as it is the sad acknowledgement that God alone hears the tortured cries of the struggling and oppressed people of the world. Dunbar speaks in the voice of 'we,' collectively taking on the voice of his people in the first person plural. Dunbar suggests that as diverse as the experience of African-Americans may be, this common sense of concealment of the truth is a thread that connects them all." We sing, but oh the clay is vile / Beneath our feet, and long the mile." The poem ends on a downward note, with no clear vision of African-Americans being able to overcome the obstacles which they face.

Langston Hughes wrote later than Dunbar, during the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance when African-Americans were reasserting their literary voice. However, once again the futile struggle against racism is suggested in his series of metaphors forming the famous poem "Harlem." The poem famously opens with a rhetorical question: "What happens to a dream deferred?" Then it lists various possibilities for the deferred dream. Although it is not specifically stated that the poem is about the African-American experience in the text of the poem, the title of the poem makes it clear.

Various striking images are used to characterize African-American's deferred dreams in the Hughes poem. "Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?" Implicit in the image of the dried, beaten-down raisin in the sun is that of a slave working in the cotton fields, drying up. The slave metaphor is further reinforced by the question. "Or [Does it] fester like a sore -- / And then run?" This refers to the attempts of slaves to run away North (and possibly black men and women who migrated Northward after the end of slavery to cities like Chicago in search of greater opportunities).

The reference to covering over the misery of oppression with sweetness is referred to in the question: "Does it stink like rotten meat? / Or crust and sugar over -- / like a syrupy sweet? " The masking behavior referred to by Dunbar would seem to be a kind of 'crusting over' like a syrupy sweet. Finally, the poem raises the specter of angry violence after so many years of being beaten down and forced to smile. "Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?" Hughes' reference to exploding could sound potentially threatening, but because it is expressed in a metaphor, it sounds more poignant. Also, by pairing it against the heavy load that metaphorically suggests how African-Americans are forced to bear so much literal and metaphorical weight in their servile occupations, Hughes explains why and how the explosion is likely to occur.