Friday, November 12, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
Blog #9
Use of The Speaker in Nikki Giovanni's "All Eyez on U"
The speaker of this poem is a person in mourning soon after the death of Tupac Shakur. The speaker is distraught over how Tupac, like so many of the black community's "brightest", were "cut down". The poem is written in the first person with frequent references to "I", but, though it is possible, the reader should no automatically assume this is Nikki Giovanni herself directly speaking. I see it as Nikki speaking on behalf of a community that feels many of it important members have been unfairly killed before there time. She gives voice to all those who feel Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Emmit Till and Tupac were killed before they were given the opportunity to complete the work they had been sent here to do. She even breaks this into a generational divide saying, "This generation mourns Tupac as my generation mourned Till as we all mourn Malcolm". In this line, Giovanni seperates herself from the group mourning for Tupac, so it could be argued that she is representing the younger generation through her poem. This would make the younger generation the speaker.
There is also a greater political message in the poem that shows the speaker spans and supercedes any generation. In the more political lines, the speaker stands for the collective wisdom and thoughts of oppressed non-whites throughout history. Giovanni writes, "If those who lived by the sword died by the sword there would be no white men on earth/ If those who lived on hatred died on hatred there would be no KKK". If the first line, the speaker stands up against the hippocracy of white people saying Tupac, who rapped about guns and murder, got what he deserved, when for the last thousand years white have conquered, pillaged and enslaved foreign cultures across the globe. This speaker, with knowledge of world history and American history (with the reference to the KKK), is not simply representing the generation of Tupac fans. The speaker speaks for all oppressed people who have seen injustice that they cannot change.
The speaker of this poem is a person in mourning soon after the death of Tupac Shakur. The speaker is distraught over how Tupac, like so many of the black community's "brightest", were "cut down". The poem is written in the first person with frequent references to "I", but, though it is possible, the reader should no automatically assume this is Nikki Giovanni herself directly speaking. I see it as Nikki speaking on behalf of a community that feels many of it important members have been unfairly killed before there time. She gives voice to all those who feel Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Emmit Till and Tupac were killed before they were given the opportunity to complete the work they had been sent here to do. She even breaks this into a generational divide saying, "This generation mourns Tupac as my generation mourned Till as we all mourn Malcolm". In this line, Giovanni seperates herself from the group mourning for Tupac, so it could be argued that she is representing the younger generation through her poem. This would make the younger generation the speaker.
There is also a greater political message in the poem that shows the speaker spans and supercedes any generation. In the more political lines, the speaker stands for the collective wisdom and thoughts of oppressed non-whites throughout history. Giovanni writes, "If those who lived by the sword died by the sword there would be no white men on earth/ If those who lived on hatred died on hatred there would be no KKK". If the first line, the speaker stands up against the hippocracy of white people saying Tupac, who rapped about guns and murder, got what he deserved, when for the last thousand years white have conquered, pillaged and enslaved foreign cultures across the globe. This speaker, with knowledge of world history and American history (with the reference to the KKK), is not simply representing the generation of Tupac fans. The speaker speaks for all oppressed people who have seen injustice that they cannot change.
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