Category Archives: Poetry

District Six

District Six was established adjacent to the downtown core in 1867 as the “Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town” – a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants. Over the next century the modest area grew into a cosmopolitan melting pot boasting a rich jazz scene. Later, as the dark years of apartheid clamped down on the city, it became a haven for musicians, writers and politicians looking for a moment of escape. In the words of legendary South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, District Six was a “fantastic city within a city. Where you felt the fist of apartheid, it was the valve to release some of that pressure.”

 

However, by the mid sixties the government had the community in its sights. In 1966, after allowing the area’s infrastructure to crumble for years, the government classified District Six a slum and declared it a ‘whites only’ area under the infamous Groups Area Act. Forced removals began two years later and by 1982 sixty thousand people had been relocated to the Cape Flats township some 25 kilometres away. District Six was razed to the ground and, despite having once been home to a tenth of Cape Town’s population, the area remains barren wasteland to this day.

 

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

‘The Ballad Of Rudolph Reed’ by Gwendolyn Brooks tells the story of an African -American man and his family who move into an all white neighbourhood.  As a result he loses his life and jeopardises the safety of his family. The poem shows the will of African- Americans to create a better life for their themselves and families regardless of the sacrifices and possible consequences.

The poem is a very compelling one, it uses the traditional ballad form to tell a heroic and finally tragic story of human struggle against the  forces of discrimination and hate.  Brooks’ poem is powerful and unrelenting in its cry for social justice, and it holds only a small hope for redemption for its characters. The story is told in sixteen ballad stanzas of regular structure, broken roughly into three sections. The first five stanzas describe the players in the story and their dreams.Ruldolph Reed is a new type of folk hero, he is a man who choses human life over property values. Reed moves to a home “in a street of bitter white” and only moves to action after the rocks, “big as two fists” that are thrown at his house and hit his daughter. He then “ran like a mad thing into the night. And the words in his mouth were stinking/By the time he had hurt his first white man/He was no longer thinking.”

Read the poem here.

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1902 to 1967) was an African-American poet, novelist, and playwright, who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial relationships in the United States. Influenced by the Bible, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walt Whitman, Hughes depicted realistically the ordinary lives of black people. Many of his poems, written in rhythmical language, have been set to music. Hughes’s poems were meant ‘to be read aloud, crooned, shouted and sung‘.

The Ballad of Harry Moore was written by Langston Hughes in 1952. He read it at a memorial for Harry T Moore in New York City that was held by the NAACP.

Who was Harry Moore?

In 1951, after celebrating Christmas Day, civil rights activist Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette went to bed – ten minutes later, a bomb shattered their house and ended their lives. This event  shattered any hope that the South was ready to give up centuries of white supremacy for a new era of racial equality.

Harry T. Moore was a distinguished school teacher and Executive Director of the Florida chapter of the NAACP. He ran a passionate crusade for equal rights and he could not be discouraged  from his fight – either by the white power structure or the more cautious factions of his own movement. Although Moore’s assassination was a big event internationally in 1951, it was overshadowed by later events in the Civil Rights movement and eventually almost forgotten.

Moore paved the way for the ’60s Civil Rights movement. He was a tireless organiser and an dedicated champion of equal pay for black teachers and voter registration; during his tenure in the Florida NAACP he raised the number of Florida’s black voters to twice that of any other Southern state. He was also an eloquent and prolific letter writer, constantly petitioning government officials to right the many injustices committed against his people, including numerous instances of lynching and police brutality. It was his outspoken fervour about one of these cases, the notorious case of the Groveland Four – black youths accused, under murky circumstances, of raping a white woman – that many believe finally pushed the local Klan to silence him once and for all.

Gwendolyn Brooks and The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Some of you in Year 12 should be revising your work on Afro-American poetry and in this post I will point you to some information on ‘The Ballad of Rudolph Reed’ by Gwendolyn Brooks. The poem is about a man who has wanted to improve his family’s environment moves into a previously all-white neighborhood.  His neighbours are horrified by this intrusion.  There is violence, and he is killed. The main feature of the poem is the great yearning of man existing in misery for betterment, and his eventual irresistible reach for it. Here is a little about the poet:

A powerful voice of black consciousness and social protest in mid-century America, Gwendolyn Brooks is among the most distinguished African-American poets of the twentieth century. With the publication of her second volume of poetry, Annie Allen (1949), she became the first black American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. Noted for her mastery of traditional forms and poignant evocation of urban black experience, Brooks emerged as a leading black literary figure during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing upon both European models and African-American folk tradition, her lyrical poetry addresses racial injustice, poverty, and the private struggles of young black women with exceptional precision, psychological depth, and authenticity.

“Brooks, Gwendolyn (Vol. 125) – Introduction.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 125. Gale Cengage, 2000

Go here to find the text of ‘The Ballad of Rudolph Reed’. For some ideas about the poem go  here .

Looking at identity and belonging in poetry

As we have seen in the poems we have studied this year, culture is linked to our sense of identity and belonging. In Ferlinghetti’s ‘Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes’ we see two pairs of American citizens who couldn’t be further apart. Their lifestyles are so different that their paths would never normally cross. However, the poems also show us that all of us share the same human emotions, we learn the ways in which we are the same. For instance, love is a universal emotion.We see this in ‘Night of the Scorpion’ the setting might be rural India but it explores universal emotions such as love and fear. It helps us to understand  those emotions as it also looks at ideas relating to superstition, ignorance and religion.

Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes

The poem describes four people stuck at traffic lights – two are garbage collectors and two are an elegant couple in a Mercedes. The poem is about the contrast between these people and the divisions between rich and poor that exist in American society. The description of the couple as “Beautiful People” is perhaps ironic as the term was first used to describe those had held countercultural ideals during the 1960s. The poem questions whether America can be called a democracy given the disparities in wealth between the two people.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poet Laureate

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco by Mayor Willie Brown in August 1998. His inaugural speech,was delivered to an enthusiastic, full house at the San Francisco Main Library. Lawrence Ferlinghetti  is the author of fourteen books of poems, as well as fiction, translations, plays, and essays. He is also a committed painter, a renowned publisher, and co-proprietor of the  City Lights Bookstore, which he co-founded in 1953.

Here are some extracts from his speech that will help you to understand his poetry:

I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, “How could I refuse?” I’d rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic centre, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world. But we are in danger of losing it; in fact, we are in danger of losing much more than that. All that made this City so unique in the first place seems to be going down the tube at an alarming rate.

This week’s Bay Guardian has the results of a survey that “reveals a city undergoing a radical transformation from a diverse metropolis that welcomed immigrants and refugees from around the world to a homogeneous, wealthy enclave.”

The gap between the rich and the poor in San Francisco increased more than 40 percent in just two years recently. “San Francisco may soon become the first fully gentrified city in America, the urban equivalent of a gated bedroom community,” says Daniel Zoll in the Guardian. “Now it’s becoming almost impossible for a lot of the people who have made this such a world-class city people who have been the heart and soul of the city for decades from the fishers and pasta makers and blue-collar workers to the jazz musicians to the beat poets to the hippies to the punks and so many others to exist here anymore. And when you’ve lost that part of the city, you’ve lost San Francisco.”