Reflections on the Role of the Writer: Pieces that Stick with Me

I should have written more of these reflections as the course was progressing, but life sometimes gets busy, and I find I am left with a few to do at the end of the term. However, this gives me an opportunity that writing earlier entries wouldn’t have—I get to reflect on all the pieces we have read this term. The great thing about this is that I can gauge the impact of the various writings over time. It’s immediately apparent that some works have stayed with me more than others. This leads to the natural question to ponder of “why?”.

       The works that have really stuck with me are “This Is America” (the music video by Childish Gambino aka Donald Glover), “The Song my Paddle Sings” (Emily Pauline Johnson), and “Battle Royal” (Ralph Ellison). These are quite different works and, at first glance, bear little in common. Johnson’s poem is quite a traditional poetic form, with rhyming and meter. Ellison’s work is a short narrative. Glover’s piece is very colloquial song lyrics with a variety of dance forms and musical elements. Yet under this there are three common threads that I believe draw me to these works.

       The first is the use of quite ordinary and common language. “Battle Royal” may be the most ‘educated’ sounding, with the use of words such as “emphatically” (“I was warned emphatically to forget what he had said…”), “oration” (“On my graduation day I delivered an oration…”), and “anarchy” (“Everyone fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy.”), but even these words are not so uncommon. “The Song my Paddle Sings” fits in the middle, with quite plain and straightforward language (such as “The river rolls in its rocky bed; / My paddle is plying its way ahead; /Dip, Dip, / While the waters flip / In foam as over the breast we slip.”), even if it’s used to great affect. “This Is America” contains the most common (“Yeah, yeah, I’m so cold like yeah / I’m so dope like yeah / We gon’ blow like yeah”), in that it’s very much a reflection of the current popular music scene, particularly genre’s like rap. For me, this makes these works easily accessible, and I don’t have to spend lots of time looking up words to find out what they mean.

       The second thing in common is that each of these pieces are works by minority voices. Each of them, in their own way, speaks to things pertinent to their culture and place. As part of the dominant Caucasian population in North America, these works connect me to different viewpoints. Johnson’s was one I could identify with, as I have canoed, yet I haven’t done so through rapids, and I found her description very exhilarating (“And forward far the rapids roar, / Fretting their margin for evermore. / Dash, dash, / With a mighty crash, / They seethe, and boil, and bound, and splash.”). When Ellison writes

I stumbled about like a baby or drunken man. The smoke had become thicker and with each new blow it seemed to sear and further restrict my lungs. My saliva became like hot bitter glue. … Streaks of blue light filled the black world behind the blindfold.

I could feel his exertion, and pain. I felt the panic of someone, educated like myself, being forced to fight. The lines “You just a big dawg, yeah / I kenneled him in the backyard / No proper life to a dog / For a big dog” in “This Is America” really hit home for me that for a person of colour in the States, no matter how successful they become, they are still kept trapped by racism and violence.

       Lastly, I think these three pieces stick with me because of how they use language. They paint very vivid pictures for me, and make me feel, in a more diluted way, the emotions of the subjects in the works. The examples above show this quite well, but Ellison's piece, as the longest, contains other great examples such as “She seemed like a fair bird-girl girdled in veils calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea.” Other great uses of language in Johnson’s poem are exemplified with “The river slips through its silent bed. / Sway, sway, / As the bubbles spray / and fall in tinkling tunes away.”  Not only can I feel the canoe, but I can hear the water fall from the paddle and the small bubbles that break in the paddles wake. When Glover sings “Guns in my area / I got the strap / I gotta carry ‘em / Yeah, yeah, I’ma go into this / Yeah, yeah, this is guerilla” I can picture the young black man with his rap gangster style (whether it’s just for show or with actual violent intent).

       I guess what draws me and sticks with me are depictions of life outside the confines of my own, especially if they use language I can readily consume, and do so in a way that makes me see and feel, even if only partially, what the subjects in the works do.