Melvin Tolson’s poem Libretto for the Republic of Liberia was very difficult to read and comprehend. From what I understood, the poem was about a history of African peoples and their story that is untold. Almost like Tolson is filling in the blanks left by the white man in the official story. I thought it was very interesting that Tolson chose to use the solfège scale to separate the verse paragraphs. At first, I did not realize what it was until I continued to the rest of the poem. Continue reading “Week 2 Response”
“You Are Here”- What Does This Mean?
During Monday’s class discussion we questioned N. K. Jemisin’s use of alternating second person with third person when changing point of view. She starts The Fifth Season with the sentence “you are here,” simultaneously placing us in her world and creating the character of Essun. When She created two more points of view, Damaya and Syenite, that were seemingly unknowing of each other, the class grew more confused.
Why does Jemisin start here? How do these three characters piece together? The timelines are jumbled. Why?
As I think about this, I’m drawn toward the conclusion that these characters are more closely related than immediately thought. All of them are orogenes, rock moving people who control this ability with their emotions. Damaya is being sent to the same place as where Syenite lives, the Fulcrum. When Syenite is talking to Alabaster, an advanced orogene, he tells her that he is jealous of the fact that she didn’t have to have the same name all her life. Could Syenite be the same girl as Damaya? Could the use of the second person point of view point towards Essun being the same girl in present tense? The only way to find out is to keep reading.
Tolsons “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia”
One quote that I believed was helpful in understanding Afrofuturism was when Tolson wrote “Before Liberia was, Songhai was: before America set the raw foundling on Africa’s Doorstep, before the Genoese diced west, Burnt warriors and watermen of Songhai Tore into Bizarreries the uniforms of Portugal And sewed an imperial quilt of tribes.”. This quote displays to me how devastating the colonization of Africa was to its people. I had to look up what Genoese meant to discover that these were the wealthy Italians who were also rolling into Africa with imperialistic ideals. This portrays the everlasting effect that westerners have on African American culture, and having the ability to understand that is what helps others learn how to improve relations and heal tensions with them.
One quote that I struggled to understand in the poem was not necessarily one quote but rather an entire page of repetition in the poem. On lines 641 through 710, there is a repetition of words at the beginning of each stanza. It starts off by Tolson writing about all of the wrong doing the United Nations had done, however following that he goes on to talk about “The Bula Matadi” and the “Le Premiere des Noirs” which I had no clue what those two things were. After a lot of research I many different things about “The Bula Matadi” however nothing to determine exactly what it was. Most of what I had read relates to a seaport in the Congo. After researching “Le Premiere des Noirs” almost everything I discovered was related to Toussaint L’ouverture whom I was familiar with from my social studies classes in the past. One of the great leaders of the Haitian revolution.
Function of Second Person Chapters
In The Fifth Season, Jemisin uses the unusual literary technique of second person point of view in her chapters focusing on Essun. Essun is an orogene on a journey to find her daughter, who has been kidnapped by her husband after he murders her son. At first, I found the second person point of view to be off-putting: the only other time I can remember encountering it was when reading the Choose Your Own Adventure series when I was in middle school, and I never enjoyed those books. However, after the first few pages of the first chapter I began to appreciate the use of a second person narrator. I think the obvious function of the “you” is to emphasize Essun’s dissociation from herself after the trauma of finding her son’s dead body and realization that her daughter is missing. The chapter begins with “You are she. She is you. You are Essun. Remember? The woman whose son is dead” (Jemisin 15). With this opening line, the reader immediately feels Essun’s disconnection with her own body, while at the same time forming a connection with Essun’s feelings. The use of “you” in a sense places the reader in Essun’s body while she is detached from her own. The reader feels Essun’s trancelike, traumatized state as Jemisin writes, “You sleep a long time. At one point you wake… You puzzle over this, then feel the imminence of thought and have to fight, fight, fight, to stay in the soft warm silence of thoughtlessness” (18). In the days following her son’s death, Essun is capable of doing little more than sleeping and suppressing her thoughts. Jemisin’s use of second person becomes a powerful tool to allow the reader to experience and empathize with her suffering. Continue reading “Function of Second Person Chapters”
On Tolson’s “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia”
Towards the end of the poem, Tolson starts to write of Le Premier des Noirs of Pan-African Airways. Contrasting with the beginning of the poem, this section begins to illustrate not the history of Africa, but where the people of Africa are heading, and more specifically Liberia . The plane “whirs beyong the copper cordilleran climaxes of glass skyscrapers on pavonine Cape Mesurado.”. He is calling for us to not look at Africa as it has been historically by the European, but for what it is and what it will be. Snead also mentions that Hegel mentions that the African people are “there” and the European people are “headed there”. Africa is already wonderful in its own right without a report card from Europe that grades Africa as uncivilized because the values differ. Continue reading “On Tolson’s “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia””
Blue Eyes as a Bad Omen
In The Fifth Season, Jemison creates an alternate reality where Father Earth is desperately trying to purge himself of humanity through the use of people with geological powers. Something that I found interesting about this reality is that light blue eyes are a bad omen. Damaya, a young girl who discovers she has these abilities after using them on a classmate who threatened her. Her parents hide her and submit her to the guardians. When she first meets her guardian she reflects that, “she heard of eyes like these, which are called icewhite in stories and stonelore. They’re rare, and always an ill omen.” (29). This is interesting detail for several reasons. First being that today, light eyes—specifically blue eyes– are perceived as desirable. Transforming them into a bad omen defamiliarizes their desirability to the reader. When putting this detail into a historical context, it makes more sense to see blue eyes as a bad omen. Europeans are more likely to have light eyes, and are known for colonizing most of the world. Did the people colonized by Europeans see blue eyes as a bad omen? Blue eyes are also a bad omen when referencing the Holocaust because they were an identifying factor of the aryan race. Hitler viewed light eyes as superior to dark eyes, and many people who did not have this attribute were slaughtered. This leads to me think that Jemison made light eyes an “ill omen” purposefully to shine light on this history. Today, light eyes exist both as an unattainable beauty standard and a painful reminder of colonization for the non-European world.
Blog Post Week 2
Tolson’s Libretto for Liberia is a poem in which he views the history of Liberia and portrays a future for the country. It includes the past, present and future. Every section of the poem is represented by a note from the solfège scale. Continue reading “Blog Post Week 2”
Occam’s Principle Analysis
Amos Nur quotes F. Heylighen’s definition of Occam’s Principle as the practice of applying only the minimum amount of assumptions when considering possibilities. This idea is called the principle of parsimony. Ultimately it suggests that out of a given set of models for the occurrence of a phenomenon a person should choose the simplest one to draw a final conclusion. According to Nur, this principle is most commonly applied to scientific study to draw hypothesis. Continue reading “Occam’s Principle Analysis”
tolson
These poem excerpts were hard reads but this is what I grasped from Tolsons writings. There was one quote that stuck out to me that I believed I immediately understood. “Europe bartered Arica crucifixes for red ivory, Gewgaws for black pearls, pierres d’aigl’is for green gold:
Soon the rivers and roads became clog almanacs! “. I think this quote specifically relates to the direct pillaging of not only Africas resources, but also the art and culture associated with different African cultures. Continue reading “tolson”
BLKS 188 Blog Post 2
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
One moment that helps me think about Afrofuturism in this text began at line 59 (Before America…) to line 65 (…tribes), which describes the history of Liberia and Songhai, and represents the pride of their country before the Westerners came upon them. They had history with Portugal, but enough power to remember it with pride. The arrival of Westerners in Liberia robbed them from the possibility of that in the future. It relates to our course by showing the upheaval of life Africans had to endure, and why they suffered at the expense of foreigners interests.
I found a good amount of the reading to be a little hard to understand because it used a lot of culture-specific vocabulary that I may just not be acclimated with. However, it’s evident that one of the readings main purposes is to outline the life of Liberians and the state of the Republic before the influence of Westerners arrived. By outlining what the people were like, it can serve as guide point for the future of the country as they hope for a more Afrocentric future.