Amiri Baraka

Notes for a Speech

Notes for a Speech - meaning Summary

Alienation from Ancestral Ties

The poem depicts a speaker who feels estranged from Africa and from the people he is expected to share. He confronts a split identity: racial belonging is questioned while intimacy and desire complicate his relations with both blackness and whiteness. Images of sand, dead souls, and newspapers signal dislocation and cultural distance. The voice moves between accusation and self-reproach, ending with a resigned assertion of being simply another sad American.

Read Complete Analyses

African blues does not know me. Their steps, in sands of their own land. A country in black & white, newspapers blown down pavements of the world. Does not feel what I am. Strength in the dream, an oblique suckling of nerve, the wind throws up sand, eyes are something locked in hate, of hate, of hate, to walk abroad, they conduct their deaths apart from my own. Those heads, I call my 'people.' (And who are they. People. To concern myself, ugly man. Who you, to concern the white flat stomachs of maidens, inside houses dying. Black. Peeled moon light on my fingers move under her clothes. Where is her husband. Black words throw up sand to eyes, fingers of their private dead. Whose soul, eyes, in sand. My color is not theirs. Lighter, white man talk. They shy away. My own dead souls, my, so called people. Africa is a foreign place. You are as any other sad man here american.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0