THE PIONEER POETS

THE PIONEER POETS

Gladys casely hayford (1904-1950)

Alias Aquah Laluah (11 May)

Was a Sierra Leonean writer, daughter of Adelaide Casely-Hayford.

Rejoice

Rejoice and shout with laughter

Throw all your burdens down,

If God has been so gracious

As to make you black or brown.

For you are a great nation,

A people of great birth

For where would spring the flowers

If God took away the earth?

Rejoice and shout with laughter

       Throw all your burdens down                                                                                                  

Yours is a glorious heritage

If you are black, or brown.

ANALYSIS

In the United States of America, there has been a growth of interest in the creative writing of Gladys Casely-Hayford. Her published work has appeared in recent anthologies. Some readers believe she was part of the great cannon of African-American women writers. Of course, most of the Literary, Language, sociology, anthropology etc. students have heard of Harlem Renaissance in their area of study or research work. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the “New Negro Movement” named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by the Great Migration (African America), of which Harlem was the largest. And Casely was an influential writer in the Harlem Renaissance.

Background of Harlem

Until the end of the civil war, the majority of African-Americans had been enslaved and lived in the south. After the end of slavery, the emancipated African American began to strive of civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. From 1890 to 1908 they proceed to pass legislation that disenfranchised most Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They established White supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the south and one-party block voting behind southern Democrat whites denied African Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante violence as well as by instituting a convict labour system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labour in mines, on plantations, and on public work projects such as roads and levees. Convict labourers were typically subject of brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from unsanitary conditions.

Now, take a critical look at the poem above, without Albert Einstein brain, one can deduct from the title of this poem “Rejoice” the sense of lost and reappraisal, Rejoice is a French word rejoir, from Latin Gaudere, meaning – to feel or show that your happy.

The tone of the Poet shows that the community, society, black people lost something, of which she is refilling their minds with superlative words from her efflorescence pot of poetry.

Line 1: Rejoice and shout with laughter—this type of expression-- a linguistic Mogul can classify it as an illocutionary act, done to achieve a particular behaviour or attitude.

Line 2: Throw all your burdens down—you can picture Israelite in Pharaoh’s land, until Moses’ invasion, Africans and their colonial masters, until independence and African American in United State until Writers, Activist’s interference. Overwork, hard labour, just to make the Blacks feel they are donkeys and bulls. The poet commands them to throw all their burden down, feel free, relief yourself of loads, we are the same with whites.

Line 3-4: Be proud of your colour, if God is so gracious to make you Black or brown, racism comes in here, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Morrison and many more know what it takes to be a black boy walking down the street of united state. The black skin of an African America makes him/her an object of hatred and ridicule. Because Whites assume that their colour of skin is the real concept of beauty. And here the poet speaks like a negritude member, boldly be proud of your skin!

Line 5-7: A great nation like Blacks, people of great birth, the poet asserts that without blacks the whites cannot become what they are. Africa is the soil where the white grows in different areas of life. Ellison illustrates this idea in Liberty paint, where many black chemicals are mixed to form “Optic white”- Invisible Man.

Read the poem aloud you will find that the rhythm of the poem is a brisk, lively, and joyful one- like that of a drum in a brass-band or that of a battle chant or church hymn.