Intercultural Workshop Afro-American Poetry

Francisca Ramrez Saavedra Carla Pinto Pastn Professor: Andrs Ferrada

Constellation

1.

Alone and Touched by an angel: love

The constellation between Alone, Touched by an angel is related with love. The first one suggests that no human being can live on their own in this world. They need some other person to share their life with. Even if someone has billions of money, it is worthless if he/she does not have a companion. The second one is showing the power of love. It states how we need courage to go forward and even though love may be a frightening thing, we can learn to use love in our favour. It means that love is a strong foundation and even though sometimes it might crumble beneath our feet it can build itself right back up again. Touched by an Angel, reflects exactly how we feel when we are alone or suffering. At the beginning the mood of the poem is lonely and sad but then brightens up when love comes. And this is exactly what happed in our real life; at first we are sad but when loves comes our mood changes and our sadness disappears. I believe that one of the object that the author wanted to reach with this poem, is that the readers reflection about how important is the love in our life, maybe with the intention that through this feeling we can become a better world, without discrimination in any sense. 2.Alone and I know why the caged bird sings: discrimination and racism Although at the first constellation we talked about love like an individual concept one person needs another- we believe that Alone also has another way to analyse that concept: as a whole the people needs to the people-. This mean that if you have a great life with a great family you still need to exists in the company of humanity. That is why we think the author mentions that the human race is suffering and she hears it moaning from the pain of racism and separation due to other prejudice. No race or culture or religious organization can live in isolation from the rest of humanity. Thus, the constellation with I know why the caged bird sings, is about discrimination and segregation. This poem states that there are two birds, one trapped in a cage, and the other in free and flying in the sky. We can deducted that the trapped bird is an African

American who is always suffering of discrimination, while the free bird is a white man or woman that has never suffered the same of the Afro American. In both poems the idea of love ones neighbour and discrimination are present. After reading all this poems we believed that we have created a major awareness about the problems of discrimination both in our country and abroad. But one of the most important is that through these poems, and reading about the author, we learned about Afro American culture.