Poetry Project Journal

1. I think that my readings of the poem were the most successful in my presentation. I really made sure I knew what the poem was talking about so that I could give the most accurate and emotional reading of the poem and make sure that the meaning came through. I think that my articulation of my analysis could have been a lot better than it was. I knew what I wanted to say but completely disregarded my notes and I think that I ended up not being as clear as I could have been. I liked that a reading of a poem was required as a part of the project because I think that poetry can really only be experienced well out loud. However, I think that the parameters of the project were too vague. A list of easily recognizable poets from the anthology might have been better to choose from, instead of the whole anthology, because I found that with my poet there wasn't that much information to be found on him and his poems were all very similar in terms of motif and theme. It also wasn't immediately clear what we were supposed to be talking about, which made the project a lot harder to execute.

2. In my presentation, I focused mainly on the motifs of Tchicaya U Tam'si's poetry. A blanket term for them would be dichotomies, because he seems to pair ideas that are two sides of the same coin; fire and water, earth/metal and flesh/blood, and death and resurrection. Almost all of his poems have to do with death/rebirth and the single motif of flesh/blood. In"Brush Fire", this is shown in the line, "the feet the hands" (line 3); in the first of Four poems from Épitomé, this is shown in line four, "in your black blood". This idea is subtly addressed in "The Scorner" as it deals with a relationship with Jesus, who's last supper came the idea of communion; the partaking in the body and blood of Christ. Nature is in almost all of his poems as well, with words such as "water", "salt", "fire", "river", "sand", "flames", and "bronze". I think that he deals with the connection of flesh/blood and nature because he was very influenced by the Négritude movement, which came about as a way to restore black self-worth in the waste of French post-colonialism. The colonies in Africa have a long history with slavery, and by using the ideas that constitute slavery (the passage of flesh over bodies of water), he is helping to reconcile their past and build their future, economically (possibly through sea trade) and culturally.

3. Similarities can be drawn between my poet, Tchicaya U Tam'si from Congo-Brazzaville) and Matt Bentley's poet, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo from Madagascar. On the surface, both were from former French colonies, and both were influenced by Surrealism and wrote their pieces in French, and in some cases used similar structure. Textually however, the similarities continue. To me, Rabéarivelo's poem "18" is very similar to U Tam'si's poem "A Mat to Weave". Both tell the plight of a man who is not just a man and who people are trying to muzzle and suppress. The poems have similar word choices, as shown in the lines, "why crystals in his blood/why globules in his laughter" ("A Mat to Weave" lines 3-4) and "A thousand particles of glass/fall from his hands" ("18" lines 9-10). They both concern hard and luminescent things that are formed at great pressure ("crystals" "glass") being in close contact and/or stemming from delicate parts of the body ("hands" "blood"). This idea can be extrapolated to post-colonial Africa in that the people have been hardened from being colonized but that this hardness comes from the pressure that has grown inside them from the French assimilation tactics and the degradation of their race through colonization. Rabéarivelo's poem "14" is also similar in content to U Tam'si's poem "Brush Fire". Both concern the ocean and natural bodies of water, and the idea of the people being tied to the water. The line "my race/it flows here and there a river" ("Brush Fire" lines 7-8) and "and we shall only see/her hair spread by the wind" ("14" lines 12-13) both convey the idea that the African people have been spread and pushed and pulled by the currents and tides of nature, but that this diaspora has been forced and universal.