AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY

African American Poetry

African American Poetry

“Margaret Walker's For My People”, Written in 1939, but published in 1942, when Margaret Walker was just 22 years old, “For My People” was “rejected three times before winning the Yale Younger Poets competition” (Graham, 1999, p. 37). Walker came into writing on the tail end of the era known as the Harlem Renaissance. A period in history from 1919 through the mid 1930's, that turned out a lot of writing from the Harlem district of New York, predominantly populated by African American's. “For My People,” was Walker's first work in a lifetime of great accomplishments? It was with this poem that she began her theme of civil non-violent organization and action for her people. Born in Alabama, Walker knew of the struggles of the African American people. She was one of them and wrote “For My People” from the perspective of member, observer and omniscient being to her people. She could see where they were headed as a culture if they did not heed her challenge. “Let a race of men now rise and take control,” (Walker, 2001, p. 135).

Literary Devices

Walker's father was a Methodist minister and an influence on her style of writing. Written in a free verse style, “For My People,” invokes the writing styles of folk narrative and lyrical sonnet. Verse after verse begins with an anaphoric declarative “For my…,” often “people,” but includes “playmates,” “cramped bewildered years,” and “boys and girls,” Walker's poem reads like a song who's strength is in its repetition (Walker, 2001, p. 134). Walker drives home her point utilizing these devices that her “people” need to come together and rise as a coherent cultural group taking a stand in society; otherwise they will continue to be ignored.

“When we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;” The free verse style of no set metrical pattern gives strength to this poem with its chanting prose of repetition. “…washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging…” (Walker, 2001, p. 134).

The verse is stated without comma's, without hesitation, without any iambic pentameter's. “For My People's,” language style and word choices depict a specific image in the readers mind. The image is an exhausted African American cooking and cleaning without hesitation or commas in their lives. Even the choice of the word “dirges” for example is used in the first stanza and the last to conjure an image in the readers mind. “their dirges, and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;” and “let the dirges disappear” (Walker, 2001, p. 135).

A “dirge” is “a funeral song or tune, or one expressing mourning in commemoration of the dead” (dirges, Collins English Dictionary, 2011). The reader imagines the African American's in a group praying over the death of one of its ...