Countee Cullen Poem

She criticizes both racist opinions of colored people and colored people’s beliefs that they are predestined to be looked down upon. She defies the stereotypical image of black people, not in Germany but, everywhere by calling for the betterment of the self, a call first made by Washington and later adopted by Hughes in his poetry and prose. Unlike many black poets who wanted to pass from Black into White such as Countee Cullen, she like Hughes, is proud of her blackness and defends it using the language of the racist. However, in “afro-german II” she criticized German history: “German history isn’t something one/ Can really be proud of, is it. / And you’not that black anyway, you know” (Ayim, Blues in Black and White 16-17). “She loved her mother tongue, as biased and hostile as it is toward People of Color. She masterfully turned the tables, swung her pen as a sword, her humor as a shield, weighed every letter of the alphabet carefully, decided when to mold or discard it” (Gerlind). Ayim’s “darkness" discusses parents’ union and separation after having a child. It is based on the biblical allusion to a line in John 1:1(King James Version): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". She equates darkness to the

She even does not feel the care of God since the word was just a word: her mama 's. Her creation starts with a physical union where genetic evolution takes place and later on cultural-genetic co-evolutionary forces change her situation in the world. The beginning disappears with her newly acquired disparaging identity, an oft-portrayed image in literature. The song of Ten Little Negros depicts a stereotypical image of black people (Opitz 128). The same image recurs in “Negro Revolt in Cuba” (Opitz 129). “The Little Moor and the Gold Princess”, a story by Richard von Volkmann-lean-Leander portrays a negative image of an ugly Negro (Opitz