Black literature

Black literature

Africa is on the rise, and because of the rich culture and traditions that crisscross across the continent, there has been an emergence of black literature. The need to tell the story of Africa and the African people has found a place in the literature world, with many authors popping from all over Africa. Sensitization about the daily lives and the challenges that face Africa has been the engine to many scholars and authors who choose to explore the social, political, and economic factors in Africa and how it has shaped the current state of the continent. However, literature in Africa takes a unique perspective because the means of communication up until colonialism was only orally. Today, literature makes a massive impact in telling African stories and traditions to the rest of the world, playing a primary key in the development and transformation of Africa. Africa is made up of many nations and languages which translate to varied customs and culture which are hugely impacted by religion. Black literature has been able to tackle the complexities of these traditions and customs and engage varied social experiences, canons, literary traditions, racial and cultural politics.

Interaction and sense of belonging play an integral part in the social, political, and economic sphere, and literature has been able to tap into this extensively. The complexities are catalyzed by the fact that “The continent is home to more than a billion Africans speaking one or more of over two thousand languages, nearly a third of the world’s tongues” (Grosz- Ngaté et al. 2). The black literature faces challenges of covering all this information across the continent because the diversity is too deep, and it will not make sense to assume that people who live in a particular country practice the same traditions or are affiliated to the same religion. The diversity, as covered in black literature, contains a more recent composition of the social experiences most around the time of slavery and colonialism. These two factors completely re-organized the social, economic, and political experiences that existed in the Africa continent. The social make-up was misaligned through family separation and the massive killings inflicted by the colonialist.

The outside interactions ensured that the sturdy familial and brotherhood bond was broken, and the vast empires across the continent were weakened for more natural colonization and minimal resistance. Slave trade was one of the horrific times the continent faced because “The trade endured more than three hundred years” (Grosz- Ngaté et al. 13). According to the authors, the social configurations of the African culture was for a long time disfigured and altered so much that it was impossible to point out the real experiences each African community faced. The idea of the “blacks” being considered inferior continues to be a negative factor embedded in the western countries, which continues to affect African cultural dynamics. He black literature has extensively majored the African experiences during the time of slave trade and colonialism in an attempt to picture the horror the African people went through in the hands of their ruthless white masters.

The social experiences are mainly stored in the form of literature with a vastly growing number of prominent writers telling t5he story of their traditions in their languages. However, the black literature faces complexity in highlighting social experiences because most of the essential traditions are passed from one generation to another orally through provers, rhetorical forms, and riddles.

Many blacks authors have been receiving worldwide recognition for their great canons piece of literature. Case in point, there has been a vast number of literature professors that originate in African, such as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Mazisi Kunene, who have written great poems, novels, and plays that have been renowned and translated to English (Ojiade 441). According to the author, it is critical to the point that a literate can be considered African if it is written Africans who share the same cultural experiences. Black literature canons vary in terms of the subject they choose to focus on, and in most cases, the most successful novels tend to revolve around the theme of colonialism and politics. One of the most prominent writers, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o work such as Weep Not Child and A grain of Wheat, makes it “Impossible to talk about Ngugi’s fiction without talking about politics” (Clark). The black literature crisscrosses even to the African American writers who focus their works on the themes of the struggles the black people had to go through in the hands of the Europeans.

The passing of important traditions from one generation to another plays as an integral purpose that makes the authors of the black literature enthusiastic about telling their stories. Literary traditions are embedded in the African cultures, which make it complicated for non-African or non-blacks to comprehend or interpret these particular sacred traditions fully. Black literature faces complexities mainly due to cultural heritage and sacred rites that are performed inside a specific tribe belief and way of life, which might be challenging to understand. According to Meyer and Witte, “Heritage formation is a complicated, contested political–aesthetic process that requires detailed scholarly explorations and comparative analysis” (276). This statement introduces religion as another the daily social, economic, and political life of the black people. Religion and spirituality have always been a huge factor in explaining more about the culture and traditions of Africans. Calling to attention these facts will help deal with the interpretation and the social experiences contained in the black literature. Christianity and Islam are the most popular religions practiced by black people, and each of these religions affects how a particular community views and opinions are shaped, making it hard for literary work to assume the customs and traditions of Africa collectively.

The racial and cultural politics can be considered as the fuel that drives the black literate as it seeks to tell the horror and challenges the African s have gone through for centuries. Literature provides the space that the black people were denied, and this is what has triggered the emergence of great African writers who use words to fight oppression and racial discrimination. Black literature provides an arena where it can tell the story behind the racial and cultural politics and how it affects the black communities. The idea behind the complexity in defining race and culture is because the African-Americans do not experience the same way of life with the Africans and the black people in the Caribbean. Religion affects how the cultural politics is configured in Africa and the missionaries when they first arrived in Africa they found it was impossible to understand traditionalism because there were no written works as most African were illiterate (Azevedo 538). The black literature faces these significant complexities in trying to tell the black people history and thus making it hard to enframe black’s traditions and customs in one definition.

Section B

The issue of racism has, for many years, shaped the history of the black people who had to suffer from racial discrimination for centuries in the Europeans countries. Going To Meet The Man by James Baldwin and Sometimes, A Motherless Child by James Clarke provides an insight into how racial profiling has not changed much even in the modern world. After the abolition of the slave trade, the black community continued to face oppression from the white racists, such as Mr. Jesse, who abused their authority to harass and kill blacks. In Going To Meet The Man, we can see how the whites perceive black people where Jesse describes them as ugly and “they were no better than animals”(Baldwin 231). According to the author, the white people saw the blacks as lesser people who did not deserve any formality, and they were only meant to serve and suffer because of their skin color. Jesse calls himself a “God-fearing” man but goes ahead to exploit and maim the black community. The issue of racism has crisscrossed over the centuries, and this is evident in Sometimes, A Motherless Child, where Clarke explores the life of BJ, who is a black student in Toronto. Bj’s mother is always\ worried about the whereabouts of her son because she knows that the slightest mistake can leave her motherless. According to Clarke, she felt safe that Bj does not own a car because that would guarantee his death as a black man in the street of Toronto (25). This statement showed that in the modern era, the black community continued to be racially profiled by police, and they were easy targets if they were seen in an expensive car or clothes. The white man considered blacks as lesser human beings who did not deserve to own anything valuable. The two works unify the idea of continuous racial discrimination of the African-American communities and the challenges they continue to face.

Going To Meet The Man by Baldwin explores the issue of family in the sense of loneliness and unloving where Jesse does not seem to enjoy being intimate with his wife, Grace, thoroughly. He was always cruel to the black women, but “the image of a black girl caused a distant excitement in him like a far-away light” (Balwin 229). According to the author, Jesse was fond of engaging sexual interactions with black girls behind his wife’s knowledge but refused to admit it even to himself. The family of Jesse was a family that was more concerned with inflicting pain on the black communities who resided in the town, and his father enjoyed executing black men. According to Steiker and Steiker. “it is the South’s distinctive history concerning the death penalty that eventually prompted the Supreme Court’s consti­tutional scrutiny of capital punishment” (2016). This shows how the issue of the death penalty by lynching was predominant in the south after the abolition of slavery. Jesse explains how his family and friends participated in the lynching of a black man by cutting his private parts off and “drenched his body with kerosene” (Baldwin 11). However, w can see a similar approach to police brutality that continued to affect the black commu7nity in the Sometimes, A motherless Child by Clarke, where police shot BJ for demanding for his human rights. His family lives in fear of the white brutal white police who are out to kill them. Mrs. J always has a feeling that the black man is still innocent, and the white police are out to harass any black men they see only by anticipating he was going to commit a crime. The family set up was different because most of the black community was separated, or a member was maybe locked up or killed by the white police.

Violence has played a massive part in both Going to Meet the Man and Sometimes, a Motherless Child in showcasing the correlation of intensity based on racial discrimination. Mr. Jesse is a law enforcer who is out to use his authority to attack the black community activists mercilessly violently. He was glad that he would not ever witness the blood the blacks blood ooze down (Baldwin 231), which proved that the violence that was being exercised on the blacks was imaginable. The act of lynching was the epitome of violence that was being done under the watch of the authority Bj experiences violence when they are arrested together with Marco for no apparent reasons, and they are clobbered without any evidence of a traffic violation. Violence has, for a decade, been used as an excuse for security to target the black communities.

Throughout the era of slavery, black-men masculinity has been correlated with the experiences they have gone through, which make up their approach to different issues in the society. The historical traumas put forward a question of whether the black men are submissive, the abiding, or the hardworking. Contemporary rap and liberation movements are some of the things that black men have retained as a way of showing their masculinity. Going to Meet the Man explores the experiences of black men as horrific and brutal, where their bodies were torn and drenched (Baldwin 11), which continues to haunt how the African men view masculinity more prominently by turning to violence. After abolition, the black man was weak and was exploited and denied fundamental human rights, but coming to Sometimes, A Motherless Child, we can see Bj standing up against police brutality because he is well educated. The two phases show the masculinity of a black man is more anchored in fighting for his rights and equality in a racial society.