Saturday, August 10, 2019

To What Extent Do Postcolonial Writers Articulate a Coherent a Useful Essay

To What Extent Do Postcolonial Writers Articulate a Coherent a Useful Notion of Home - Essay Example The home in which the natives came from have disappeared. Most of the original literature and the oral culture of the native Caribbean’s were not preserved; hence no cultural mark had been passed over to the following generations. The fact that the African-Caribbean people were enforced to reject their own heritage caused them not to have a traditional culture and an image to identify with. This has caused the natives to constantly adapt to the modern culture, thus not being able to grasp their own in whole. The poem Alpha is divided into three parts, which are ‘Mother Poem’, ‘Sun Poem and X/Self. Smaller divisions of Ancestor comprise of individual poems. The framework in which the poem is structured is in accordance with the context of universality, while being able to form a personal interaction through engaging the readers intimately. The association between the three voices in the Ancestor personifies the father, the mother and the son or the narrator, in relation to their Motherland. The poem captures the essence of familial integration and separation. The first verse is ambiguous. The subject of mother can be referred to as the author's mother whom he misses, or most likely, the author's motherland, as can be seen in the following lines, â€Å"the ancient watercourses of my island/ echo of rver. Trickle. Worn stone/ the sunken voice of glitter iching its pattern to the sea/ memory of foam. Fossil. Erased beaches high above the eaten†.5 The poem started with descriptions of an environment in which the author longs for, as personified in a form of a mother. The author misses his homeland and wishes to go back to his native land to comfort his female parent. The second verse is a description of the Americans or the West Indians. The author hints that his family has migrated to the United States of America, as deduced from the lines "the world Columbus found" and "the world Raleigh raided". 6The statements are symbolized by the following lines in the second part of the poem, â€Å"& my father swims through the noise / Through the blankets of jute on his lungs / & he is Caesar again at the Hellespont†. As for the references to the plantations, the setting in which the author's family migrated to is in New Orleans, it is where most black slaves have migrated to in the previous decades. In a nutshell, the second part is the author's description of his life as his family moved to New Orleans, where sugar plantations are abound. The second part of the poem also implies that the author's parents worked at the plantations in New Orleans. This fact has been deduced from the lines "through the blankets of jute on his lungs" and "maker of chalk dust".7 The line "she waits with her back slowly curving to mountain" represents her mother who have waited in patience and have gotten old, who lived her life in despair from working and waiting for his husband.8 This emotion is evident in the last part of the second division of the poem, â€Å"She waits for his return with her gold rings of love / Wl the miners tr ove that binds her to his world / She waits w/ her back slowly curving to mountain†.9 The last part of the

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