WO RLD S WI TH I N WO RDS
The Black Arts Movement BY BEATRIZ FIORE ILLUSTRATED BY GODI PANZOUT
How is poetry a vehicle of protest? Show how Baraka and/or any other poet associated with the Black Arts Movement developed a poetics of black identity and protest.
A
n extensive reading of black poems from the early twentieth century until the post-civil rights era can offer a perception of how African Americans dealt and reacted against the crippling discriminations they faced daily. This, indeed, was an era which produced some of the most powerful and memorable protest poems in American literary history; a literary movement which stemmed from the bountiful creativity of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s and culminated in the poignant and dynamic Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 70s. Taking into consideration some of the most prominent poems of the movement, (we will see that the analysis of these poems is inseparable from the biographies and political activism of their authors) this essay will attempt to construct, along with written manifestos on black art, what the exponents of the movement really proposed to do with their art and how they went beyond writing mere protest poems towards a creation of a new cultural history, language, identity and aesthetics for the black people of America. Early poetry such as Claude Mckay’s “If We Must Die” and Sterling A. Brown’s “Strong Men” portray the horrors of the slavery and abuse black men and women have been subjected to through generations. These examples are protest poems as, by depicting the horrors of the history they have been made to live through, white imperialism is
107
