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On Being Brought From Africa To America Summary

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In many stories that are written, some of the poems have a hard problem, that leads them to the good. The poet Louise Erdrich was a writer that wrote in the Post-Modern and Contemporary era and wrote a poem called “I was sleeping where the black oaks move” about a life story of her and her grandfather watching the land of their home be flooded out and destroyed things. Another era was the Age of Reason that Phillis Wheatley wrote about “On Being Brought From Africa to America” which was about Christianity and bringing people to peace and salvation. “On Being Brought From Africa to America” and “I was sleeping where the black oaks move” embody the eras they were written in while emphasizing the idea that hard problems can lead an individual …show more content…

In the story, “I was sleeping where the black oaks move” she stated, “the water wrapped around trees until their life-hold was broken”(Erdrich 5-6). In her poems, she states this because when they were going through the flood, she uses imagery through her poem to show that life was being taken from the trees, getting knocked over because the flood current was so strong. During a flood, the trees are so weak from all the pressure that is going against them, it just snaps the branches in half. This caused them a hard time because the grandfather and the granddaughter saw the house flooding out and the chaotic mess that was appearing. In another story, “On Being Brought From Africa to America”, He stated, “‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand that there’s a god, that there’s a Saviour too:”(Wheatley 1-3). He stated this because this quote demonstrated when god brought her back from Pagan Land, that god taught her to understand her pitifulness and ignorance and to understand that there is a savior too, god. Throughout the poem, the speaker addresses the fact that many people look down on African Americans and any colored person and interpret their dark skin tone as referring to the devil. Wheatley reminds fellow Christians that African Americans or any people of color, with their skin as dark as that of the image of Cain, also to have access to redemption and salvation through

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