Words with wings assignment

Background Information

Alice Walkers, renown for her Pulitzer Award-winning novel, majorly explores extensively on the social and political environments. Additionally, she exhaustively discusses the sexual harassment and violence that significantly affects black women and proposes integral solutions to successfully curb the vices in daily life. On the other hand, William Johnson has seen to have several challenges all through his art as his artistic work, a factor that pushed him for resignation in Eton. He has won several awards, including the Chancellors Medal for an English poem on Plato in the year 1843… His artistic work in, “Harriet Tubman” brings a lot of awareness to society regarding the oppression around.

Analysis

Alice Walker’s "Women” is a single stanza poem. This poem is seen to make use of short sentence structure, and its lines are less than four words long. The use of extended metaphors to bring the comparison between the generals in the battlefield and the generation of mothers makes it more of a free-verse poem. The other poetic device employed by Alice Walker in the poem “Women” is imagery. This imagery is mainly used to show the struggles the women are facing and also portrays their braveness in the period. The Paintings shows an image of a black woman in an American flag. Meaning that the location is probably in America. The woman is also carrying a bag with a cross, probably to show on her religion, which might be Christian. The sun is seen to set, a clear indication that there are oppression and some sort of problems being faced by the women in the image. The other image is of a lady covered with yellow cloth on her head. This color might show a coward person in the sense that oppression is seen from the other images.

The work majorly embraces the African- American heritage and the author exhaustively addresses black women facing discrimination and their continuum efforts devoted to overcoming the adverse challenges as evidenced through their consistent triumph in the field of poetry. Alice, ideally, through her poem advocated for the government to enact measures to curb racism and liberate black women from social injustices which include social injustices. Campaign through the Civil Rights movement has been enacted majorly to advocate for the freedom of the black women and the dismal treatment by the white counterparts.

Connection to African American

Alice Walker’s “women” poem connects to the African American history in that the statement “with fists as well as hands”. This is clear from the statement that the women were exposed to a lot of work, making their fists not comparable with the hands. Notably, through life, Alice Walker demonstrates the continuum of the African heritage that is depicted the discrimination from social welfare as shown in the sharecropping community. This significantly affected her poetry career and yielded vast success as depicted in the awards won through her works. Also, the civil rights movement integrated essential tools that have a substantial impact on her work and her devotion to addressing the injustices endured by black women.

The element of African Continuum

In Alice’s “Women”, the element of the African continuum is that a woman is caring about the future of the society through wanting her child to get an education despite the challenges she is passing to raise them. In the African context, women have a very big role in raising their children. Failure for the child is mainly seen to be from the mother, hence this requires her to be active so that she may not be blamed for the child’s failure. Moreover, the fact that the painting of black people portrays the element of African Continuum.

Reason for Pairing

The main reason for painting the work together is that both the painting by William Johnson and the poem have the same theme. Both works have the figure of an African American woman. These works have a different specific focus, but they seem to have the same theme. Both women are seen to have a common goal toward condemning the oppression and also uprising the women in the society that are always working hard to see their children have a better life. This point is driven out clearly because the artists are all African Americans hence focusing on a similar context.

Conclusion

Alice Walker plays an integral role in enacting the African-heritage through their works by assimilating them into the poem. Oppressive treatment affecting the black African not only the women but also children have been significantly confronted in their work. The message is seen to be passed across very well as the mother is showing deep interest as well as showing the urge for fulfilling their dream n their children. This will lead to the finishing of racism as well as discrimination.

Works Cited

"Women and Literature: Alice Walker." 22 Apr. 2013, blog.oup.com/2006/09/women_and_liter-2/.