Compare And Contrast Sojourner Truth And Lucille Clifton

In the history of America, few, if any, injustices were more cruel and severe than slavery. Millions of people were forced to work and die against their will and without pay. These slaves were viewed as property, not people. This atrocity inspired some of its victims to write or speak out against the injustice. Two such people were Sojourner Truth and Lucille Clifton. Through their unique experiences with the evil of slavery, they both composed literature to inspire others to take action. Both Sojourner Truth and Lucille Clifton used poetic and rhetorical devices, some of which they shared in common, to express their messages in ways that would be effective in creating societal change and dispelling the injustice from the zeitgeist of

The fact that they had similar goals and somewhat similar experiences led them to use some similar poetic and rhetorical devices. For example, both Clifton and Sojourner use the rhetorical strategy of appealing to ethos. Sojourner’s speech is full of ethos. She repeatedly pointed out the immorality of slavery and the contradictions between how women were “supposed to be” treated and how she was treated. This is also somewhat the case in Clifton’s poem. She points out, however indirectly, that the slaves did the “honored” work, although they were not at all recognized for it. This is, as Clifton indirectly points out, not morally right. These pieces of literature are also similar because they both utilize the poetic device of repetition. Clifton repeats the phrase “here lies” four times to create an image of reading tombstones with no names, whereas Truth repeats “Where did your Christ come from?” twice to emphasize the ridiculous fact that people based their claims of the inferiority of women on the fact that Jesus was not a woman. These are a few examples of the similarities between Clifton’s poem and Truth’s