Theme Of On Being Brought From Africa To America

Within Ellis Island by Joseph Bruchac, On Being Brought from Africa to America by Phillis Wheatley, and Europe and America by David Ignatow there are different views of what the American Dream is and what it means to immigrants. Each author writes about their own experience of immigration and life in America, which shapes their view of the American dream. The common theme between the three poems is the variable nature of the American dream and how it has different meanings for each person coinciding with contradictions between leisure and suffering. The experiences of American immigrants is as diverse as the immigrants themselves. Joseph Bruchac’s grandparents were Slovak children who immigrated to Ellis Island. Bruchac, who is half Native American, perceives the mass arrival of immigrants as negative, since they took the land of the Native Americans through violence. He is torn between the immigrant part and the Native American part of himself. In contrast, Phillis Wheatley, who was forced into slavery and brought to America from Africa, sees this forced immigration as a positive. In America, she discovered

Throughout Ignatow’s poem when the speaker speaks of himself there lies a tone of prosperity, as opposed to when speaking of his father surrounded by pain and misery. The perspectives of how each sees the day: “I lie in sun or shade,/ [...] shadows, darkness to him,” while the son feels warmth his father surrounded by agony(10-13, Ignatow). The father with the "emigrant bundle/ of desperation and worn threads" comes from a "small hell," while Ignatow is "bedded upon soft green money." Throughout the poem, Ignatow's violent and bright imagery differentiates the immigrant and American-born point of view. Ignatow throughout his poem refers to his European father and his restless agonizing life, while the son American born lives a life of