LITR 4332: American Minority Literature

 Student Poetry Presentation 2004

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 “Failure of an Invention”

By Safiya Henderson-Holmes

Unsetting America, Page 60  

Biographical Information:

            Safiya Henderson-Holmes was a mother, grandmother, poet, writer, and educator.  Safiya died from a long battle with cancer at the age of 50.  She was born on December 30, 1950 as Sharon E. Henderson and lived in the Bronx with her parents.  In the early 1970s, she earned a B.S. from New York University.  She worked as a Physical Therapist for several years at Harlem Hospital.  At the City College of New York she got an MFA in Creative Writing.  She worked on her writing and her poetry until her illness prevented her from doing so.  She was a professor at Syracuse University until she had to take medical leave for her cancer.

Term:

Tone: The attitude of the author towards the reader or the subject matter of a literacy work.  An author’s tone may be serious, playful, mocking, angry, commanding, and so forth. Pg 482 The Bedford Glossary

Literary Objectives:

3a.) African American alternative narrative: “The Dream”

            The setbacks that African Americans go through when trying to achieve the American Dream.

4.) The minority dilemma do they assimilate or resist to the dominant culture.

5a.) Discover the power of poetry and fiction to help hear the minority voice and the minority experience.

Interpretation:

            Charidy from the UHCL class of 2002 said “the title Failure of an Invention, expresses the loss of accomplishing something great.”

  • Safiya will not pretend to be someone she is not just because the American people want her to change.

  • Even when she tries to appear the way that American people want her to be she cannot keep the false “faces.”  Every bad name that the American people have called her have not affected her inside even though she so tired of hearing them.

  • She has ignored all of the bad names the dominant culture has put on to her and tried to be one of the white people.

  • Safiya is an African American woman who wants to fit in but does not want to change who she is and what she stands for.

  • She has tried to be in accepted by white people by changing how she looks and acts. She even says that the American people and ever herself have tried to change the color of her skin, meaning that they have tired to get her to act and think like a white person.  She refers to this as a cancer.

  • The more that she tries to be a part of the American people, the more she is losing who she is and she does not want this to happen.  Safiya says that she can no longer bear any of what the dominant culture wants her to be.

Question:

What do you think they poem is about?  I have told you what I think about the poem.

Safiya Henderson-Holmes poem is in all lower cases. Why do you think she did this? Do you think poem is better because it is in all lower cases? More powerful?

I think that this poem is very powerful and I think that she does this by having the whole poem in lower case.