LITR 4332 American Minority Literature UHCL 2004 student poetry presentation

1c. “To observe alternative identities and literary strategies developed by minority cultures and writers to gain voice and choice: . . . ”

4b. “To distinguish the ideology of American racialism—which sees race as pure, separate, and permanent identities—from American practice, which always involves hybridity (or mixing) and change.

Currently, he is the “executive director of the Guild Complex, an award winning multicultural literary arts center” (Unsettling America, 400). Warr also has a book of poetry entitled We Are All the Black Boy, in which “Brain on Ice: The El Train Poem” first appeared. Notably, he has also won the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award. All in all, he is an extremely skilled writer.

This poem functions on two levels: the literal and metaphoric. On the literal, one finds an African American man sitting beside an empty seat on the elevated train in Milwaukee. The seat is available, clean, and adjacent to the door – which is a steal on any vehicle of mass transportation. However, no one will take the seat, because they are afraid or unwilling to sit next to the African American speaker. Notably, the persons who rush by are from “Ukranian Village,/Or maybe Warsaw,” (lines 5-6), meaning they are new immigrants, rather than assimilated natives. In response to their fear, the speaker identifies himself in their minds as the combined product of African Americans in film, referring to the Color Purple, Bigger Thomas, Nat Turner, Mandingo, Super Fly, and Malcolm X. Despite the avoidance of the seat, the train stops at the same destination for them all.

Before considering the metaphoric level of this poem, one should consider the literary term for this presentation. I chose “allusion” from the online Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms.

“Allusion A brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature. Allusions conjure up biblical authority, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, historic figures, wars, great love stories, and anything else that might enrich an author’s work. Allusions imply reading and cultural experiences shared by the writer and reader, functioning as a kind of shorthand whereby the recalling of something outside the work supplies an emotional or intellectual context, such as a poem about current racial struggles calling up the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

Allusions are the key to understanding the metaphoric level of the poem. After all, Warr does not merely say the foreigners avoid him for being African American, despite his obvious accoutrements of education and accomplishments. Instead, he alludes to several negative or violent representations of African American men.

These allusions overpower the images nice clothing, the Book Review, the laptop, because that is what the immigrants see in him. However, as Megan Yeates noted in 2002, “the train ultimately arrives at the same destination for everyone, meaning ‘We’re all in this together despite our pasts and skin colors.’” Since these are immigrants, their fears really will impair them from advancing in contemporary America.

1. Why does the author select almost all of his allusions from films, notably almost all very bad ones?

2: The speaker refers to his job as "the deco-art marble plantation / In which we all / Are hourly enslaved." What do you feel enslaves these passengers? Is it their obsession with a color code, their own foreignness, or something else entirely?

3) Do we still produce and release unfair representations of African Americans in international film and media? Before considering a piece like Barbershop or Bringing Down the House, what about artists like 50 Cent?