African/African-american Poetry Analysis of Baraka Essay

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These differing attitudes come into clearer focus in their more autobiographical poems. Baraka's "Leroy" shows his yearning for the black heritage that he sees being passed down to him through his mother and through him to the next generation of African-Americans. The poem is far more intimate than "Fresh Zombies." The title, Baraka's given name, announces the poem as a self-study, and the use of the first person voice makes the reader feel as if he is privy to a private thought. Baraka sees his mother "carrying life from [his] ancestors" (4) and, with it, knowledge -- not just any knowledge, but "the strong nigger feeling" (5). He is not describing the human connection to the human past, but the black connection to the black past, one that has been infected with "bullshit rotten white parts" that need to be expunged (14).

Soyinka, on the other hand, offers in "Civilian and Soldier" a different shared heritage, one that transcends blackness and reaches for human nature in general. The poem describes his meeting with a soldier, and his pleading for mercy because of his status as a civilian.

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Soyinka recognizes in the soldier the "fright" (3) and "confusion" (14) that he must also have exhibited himself, and that instant allows him to recognize in the soldier a shared humanity with himself: "[a]ll of you became clear to me" (16). Where Baraka's poem ends on the bitter implication that he has been invaded by otherness, Soyinka's ends with a literal onslaught on inclusion in which he threatens to "shoot [the soldier] clean and fair / With meat and bread, a gourd of wine" (22-23).

The overarching sense of forgiveness and tenderness that characterizes Soyinka's poetry as opposed to the anger and heat of Baraka's poetry points to a crucial difference between the black experience in Africa and the black experience in America. In the America of the Civil Rights Movement, the enemy was clear and the moral imperative was loud, whereas the black struggle in Africa is a struggle with internal demons that shift,….....

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