Julia de Burgos’ poem, Ay, Ay, Ay of the Kinky- Haired Negress frames her poem by adopting an individual persona “I” which allows her to speak with legitimacy on the self. However, some might argue that she also universalized the poem to include the black exploited slaves to create identity for everyone. The poem not only redefines the role of a black woman but it also redefines the foreign and obscure issues in identity. Ay, ay, ay, that am kinky-haired and pure black kinks in my hair, Kafir in my lips; and my flat nose Mozambiques. In the beginning of the stanza, Julia de Burgos describes her physical traits: “kinky-haired, Kafir lips, and flat nose Mozambiques” embracing the innocence of her black physic. Throughout the poem, Julia …show more content…
She suggest that silence “does not protect” anyone and mute chokes us more than death itself. Besides “transforming language into silence, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism” (42). Julia de Burgos style is prominent to this article when she transforms this poem form silence into language. She reveals history, her identity, and self through a ballad style. While doing so Julia de Burgos’ “sorrow voice that is paradoxically released through the wound…In the complex relation between knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory or traumatic experience precisely meet” (3) that enables her to retract her conscience from political-historical views to her emotions of justice and liberation. Not only does Julia de Burgos role is bold and risky in speaking up against her