Nevertheless, I must move forward

Claude McKay’s poems “The Barrier” and “December, 1919” may seem to tell different stories at first glance, but they can also be seen as part of one connected narrative. First, examining “The Barrier,” I can see that it is a work that effectively incorporates the woes and sorrows of the Black race, as well as the discrimination experienced due to race. In particular, it describes the power held by whites and the racial discrimination they showed towards Blacks. In this poem, the speaker uses expressions that vivid descriptions of color to explain the differences between races, the discrimination resulting from them, power, and inequality as much as possible. By utilizing contrasts commonly associated with black and white, such as “Dawning,” “Sun-illumined,” “Glowing spark,” and “Dark,” the speaker raises their voice against the discrimination and inequality they face. Additionally, the appearance of “a river reed” suggests that, due to the discrimination and limitations imposed by whites, Blacks must simply flow along with the beautiful voice, like the rustling of reeds in the wind. Furthermore, it is evident that the speaker maximizes poetic expression through various similes.

In “December, 1919,” the speaker emerges as one who misses their mother. Moreover, the speaker desires to cry, but cannot at the moment. It has been ten years since their mother passed away, and like that time, they once again yearn to cry out loud. Here, the speaker emphasizes the continuous flow of tears by depicting them as a fountain, suggesting that their tears keep flowing constantly. But, the speaker cannot cry freely, and the exact reason for this is not explicitly stated in the poem. However, considering “The Barrier” written by the same author, where the speaker fights against racial discrimination and utilizes poetry as a tool to raise awareness of the harms of racial discrimination, one can infer that it is a situation where crying is impossible because of the hardship and hatred towards the world. Nevertheless, tears flow naturally when the faint memory of the mother, who supported and loved them more than anything, comes to mind, making it evident. However, more importantly, considering the current suffering of Black people and their human rights, as well as oppression, I can also understand the speaker’s strong determination, realizing the reason why the speaker cannot shed tears freely. Nevertheless, he must move forward; thus, he cannot shed tears.

Jisoo Jang

Dehumanizing humans

The poem “Second Attempt Crossing”, by Javier Zamora is a beautiful poem that through the use of imagery, describes a traumatic moment in his life. Javier at nine years old had to cross the border to get to his family in the U.S. Yet, this process to cross withholds so many dangers to anyone who crosses it in hopes for a better life. Throughout history in the U.S. people who have migrated here from many other countries have been subjugated to discrimination and dehumanization. They have been dehumanized all for the dream of giving their families a better life. Which in all makes no sense since these lands belong to Native Americans who lived here first, therefore why are these white people deciding who belongs where? Why do they hold the power to place immigrants where they please or deem fitting? Yet, Javier through his poems writes the truth about these “animals” that protect each other when crossing from the gringos who are trying to shoot them. La Migra for years has hunted and abused their power when trying to obey the laws and not let people cross into the states. They do this by shooting, killing, raping, and trafficking these immigrants. They feel the need to dehumanize a person because of where they come from, how they look and speak. In recent news, my blood boiled to hear that in 2023 an eight-year-old little girl was found at the border with 67 DNA inside her from being raped. Yet no further investigation has been continued or outed to the public who rages alongside me. Since most evidence points out that she was raped by border control workers, most of them are filth, scum of the earth. Just as Javier describes his personal experience of being threatened to be shot by a border control worker. He at the same time grieves for his friend Chino who protected him from that shooting.

 Chino was a man who was affiliated with a well-known gang in San Salvador that reached into the states, mainly in the Los Angeles area. Chino being labeled by the rest of the world as a criminal, still risked his life in saving a child with his body as a shield for Javier to live. Yes, he was a criminal, and who knows what he did, which is why I won’t justify or glorify his actions. Yet, Chino still risked his life for a child whom he had never known, and for that, he became a hero for Javier. Therefore, a question that I have for Javier is, who is the audience that you want to reach with your poems? Reading his bibliography, he talks about the identity struggles of being a Mexican American. Yet, these poems switch from Spanish to the English language making it difficult for non-Spanish speakers to understand. Especially when Latino Spanish is not “proper” Spanish to the rest of the world. Therefore, that makes it difficult for English speakers to try to understand the point that he is trying to get across. His point being that immigrants are no less than any other human in this world, given the label that they’ve been put under, they will still overcome any form of discrimination. They surpass this because of the camaraderie and union within our races to help one another. They are humans and even with all the oppression they face, it is up to us, their offspring, to spread awareness. To rise further than the goals that white Americans have for us, surpass them, and bring equality to ALL immigrants from ALL countries.

~ Jeshua Rocha

Window of Hope

“From the window of despair

May sky

there is always tomorrow”

~ NEIJI OZAWA

Imagery has been invoked in haiku poems for centuries, portraying an experience captured by the poet. Imagery invokes a concise and vivid description that appeals to the senses, making the haiku almost audiovisual.  Haiku typically focuses on nature and the changes in seasons. Therefore, the juxtaposition and the choice of diction create powerful visual and sensory images that capture events or emotions. Which creates a mood or tone that invites the readers to engage their imagination to experience the moment that the poet is portraying.

Neiji Ozawa wrote this haiku based on his previous life experiences, mostly being hardships here in America. Since there was some much segregation and discrimination towards Japanese Americans, in healthcare. Pushing Ozawa to open his own pharmacy to help that cause since white physicians were unacceptable due to the language barrier and expensive cost. This haiku was written on the Gila River reservation where Ozawa along with many other citizens were put in due to the executive order being sent out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Further, these reservations detained these citizens, labeling them as a threat to the country. “From the window of despair”, provides the readers with the timeline that this was written at a time of hardships for Japanese citizens. “May sky” can then be symbolized for hope and the promise of a new beginning. May being associated with the arrival of spring, renewal, and growth. Sky in May signifies the transition from the coolness of spring to the warmth of summer. Therefore, this haiku follows the typical structure of focusing on nature and the changes in seasons. Yet, this may sky symbolizes hope for the citizens in this camp, to regain their previous lives and more. “There is always tomorrow” gives this poem the tone of hope, since it describes that tomorrow there is always hope that they will be displaced from those camps. Ultimately creating a visual of Japanese citizens looking up at the May sky and hoping for their freedom to come tomorrow.

~Jeshua Rocha

Long Hours, Bad Conditions, Sweet Relief

The poem Outcast and the poem The Tired Worker by Claude McKay have a distinctive correlation between each other and when read together/side by side the reader can sense that the in the poem Outcast there is representation of speaker in The Tired Worker. During the time period in which these poems were written, 1920s, there was a vast amount of brutal discrimination against minorities in America. These two poem represent the struggles found in this time period especially for those who gas to worker tiring jobs in extremely bad conditions with bad pay and bad hours.

Both of these poems were written by McKay in Shakespearean sonnets with an iambic pentameter. the reason why I think that this structure allowed for a strong deliverance of the poems is because of the iambic pentameter. The iambic pentameter in the poems allows for certain words to be stressed and other to not be stressed. Words like “wretched day” in line 9 of The Tired Worker and lines in Outcast such as “And I must walk the way of life a ghost”(11), are stressed and unstressed due to the meter. The message of despair and wishing to be relived from the horrible work in the poems is further pushed by this rhythm as it creates a strong, almost like marching soldiers, rhythm, emphasizing on the pain of having to live/work in these conditions and the fact that the speaker knows that it will most likely be until the day that they die.

In the poem Outcast line 11 the speaker mentions that they “walk the way of life a ghost” then in The Tired Worker they tell their “weary body” to be “patient” that “too the night will wrap thee gently in her her sable sheet…” I interpret the reference to night as an allusion to death,. As if the nigh were to take all the pain and misery of working away because it’d be the end since the speaker believes that they will working during their entire life, and in the Outcast they reference to walking their life as a ghost. They connect on the lifeless feeling that comes with their current lives.

Guadalupe Lemus

The Pains of the Trapped

I feel a little on the fence about the connection between the two poems The Tired Worker and Outcast by Claude McKay. Both poems show a sense of alienation and affliction to pain between the two speakers: The speaker in The Tired Worker states “Weary my veins, my brain, my life! Have Pity!\ No! Once again the harsh, ugly city” (Lines 13-14), denoting the tired body and mind of the overworked working class man. In Outcast, the pain and alienation of the speaker is also reflected toward the end of the poem in the lines “And I must walk the way of life a ghost\ Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;” (Lines 11-12).

However, the speaker in outcast refers to the pain being due to the isolation created racially, with him being an immigrant and unwanted in the white man’s world that is the west: “For I was born, far from my native clime,\ Under the white man’s menace, out of time.” (Lines 13-14). This is where the disconnect between the two speakers is the most prominent and why I remain unsure about the connection between the two. It is clear that both of the speakers tackle inequity in the west, with the speaker in The Tired Worker finding rest only in sleep as they work all day just to survive for next to nothing while the speaker in Outcast instead reflects on the struggle of surviving in the white man’s world in the west, saying that he must comply to outside forces in the line “While to its alien gods I bend my knee” (Line 8).

There is most certainly overlap between the two speakers, and there most certainly existed people that fit the description of both speakers, with people worked to death to survive while that struggle is only amplified by racial discrimination. However, there are some places where the messaging between the two speakers is focused too heavily on particular ideas, such as working in the city in The Tired Worker or the loss of cultural identity through conformity in Outcast. Both of these poems were certainly written in reflection to McKay’s life and experiences, so there is a clear connection between the two speakers. However, the two speakers reflect on systemic issues that attack different sections of living that are separate but instead collide within individuals. The choice to meet these two systems of inequality into the lens of one individual is largely dependent on the reader’s interpretation of the systems that McKay is critiquing, so I am unsure to fully support that connection or not.

Sky Miller

A Broken Promise

World War II was an extremely unfortunate time to be a Japanese American. Following the attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base on December 7, 1941, the United States government declared war on Japan. This led to discriminatory behavior against Japanese individuals living in America, as even though most were completely loyal, registered citizens, many feared they were traitors sent from Imperial Japan to spy. Shortly after the United States entered the pacific theater, internment camps were set up to isolate Japanese Americans from the rest of the country upon this unfair and racially discriminatory premise. Many Japanese Americans were forced to leave everything behind and surrender themselves to the internment camps. These camps were gruesome and inhumane, and in many ways are very similar to the concentration camps of the Nazi regime. Many innocent Japanese Americans described the horrors of their experiences in artistic forms, such as the traditional Haiku poem.

One poem which stood out to me more than some of the others was “At daybreak / the stars disappear / where do I discard my dreams?”. At first this poem seemed a little bit ambiguous, as the only imagery to be explained seems to be the way the stars disappear at sunrise. I was about to move on to another example, when an image of a sunrise filled my mind’s eye. A bright sun sits a little bit above the horizon, it’s polarizing rays beaming through the sky and burning away the night. This is when I remembered that the Imperial Japanese flag depicts a rising sun, bright red with rays that overtake the scene. Following the same train of thought, the top right corner of the United States’ flag depicts a dark blue background spotted with white stars, very similar to a night sky speckled with distant suns. It seems as if the artist was trying to use the imagery of the two flags in their Haiku. It is my theory that the sunrise is a metaphor for the Imperial Japanese forces coming to power attempting to conquer the United States. The fading of the stars represents the liberty and justice that the US promised towards their Japanese American citizens, being scorched away by the rays of the ‘rising sun’ “at daybreak” (Ln. 1). The resulting treatment, including harsh discrimination and relocation to interment camps, very much leaves the dreams and aspirations of Japanese Americans in shambles. This is captured in the last line of the Haiku, “where do I discard my dreams?” (Ln. 3). Additionally, when Japanese individuals were forcefully relocated, they had no choice but to leave their communities, businesses, and homes, and were unable to bring anything with them. It may be the case that “where do I discard my dreams?” (Ln. 3) represents the internal monologue of a Japanese American citizen, wondering what they will do with all of their belongings, friends, and hopes when they are forced to leave it all and succumb to imprisonment. 

Hayden Namgostar

Get Through It

Get Through It (Lyrics)

By Diane Tarabay

About to tell you something I don’t know where to begin 

been silent all my life and I’m just tired of holding in 

you don’t see my bruises you don’t see the pain with in 

all you know is how to judge the color of my skin 

See I don’t wanna be here I didn’t want to leave my home 

running through the desert was afraid and all alone 

see let me tell you something 

let me tell you loud and clear 

I’m done with all this bullshit  I no longer want to fear

left my family behind 

their everything that I had 

ma look into my eyes I don’t wanna see you sad 

this is how life goes 

this is how life always goes 

people come and go and their hate always seems to grow 

This a story bout my pain this a story about my

struggle I didn’t come here on a plane I came here

through a smuggle 

what’d you f**kin do?

tell me what’d f**kin do?

I was only 9 years old and I didn’t have a clue 

mama why you crying mama? 

why you always crying? 

I know I’m only 9 years old 

but I know when you are lying 

(2×)I’m just trying to help you out

I’m just trying to make things better 

always be here for you when you feel under the weather 

I have to find a better life 

how do I do it?

I heard about the desert I think I can get through it 

see this is why we do it

Review:

Dear Mr. Zamora,

After reading and hearing your performance of the poem, “To President-Elect”, I was reminded why I have a love for poetry. The emotion that you put into that poem was astonishing. I could feel the frustration radiating from each line and the words you used were extremely vivid to the point in which I felt like I was that nine-year old. Your poem was short and simple and I think that’s the best way to tell a story. There was no rhyme or any deeper thoughts that had to be over analyzed. It was simply a story about the struggle that many illegal immigrants have to experience in order to come to the United States. 

Your poem inspired me to write something of my own. I imitated your poem through a rap song because I knew it would be the best medium to attract a contemporary audience. I completely changed most of the form of your poem but I made sure to maintain the same tone, theme, vivid language and freestyle. Your poem consisted of 16 short lines yet it perfectly captured a whole experience. I felt that I wanted to expand more on the topic of your poem. My main focus was to humanize the illegal immigrant story. 

The rap song is addressed to people who discriminate against illegal immigrants. I want them to understand the reasons why many decide to face the dangers of crossing through a desert inorder to arrive to the “land of opportunity”. Just like in your poem, I talk about crossing through a dessert all alone. I knew that writing my rap song for others to read would not suffice so I performed it through a recording. Through my performance, you can hear the tone that I want my audience to feel. I was able to express those feelings of frustration and anger. The first four lines of the rap song end with words that rhyme. I did this on purpose in order to make it sound poetic. There are many instances throughout the rap in which I do the same thing. I also repeat certain lines in order to underline key point that I want to make clear to my audience. 

Writing this rap song was not an easy thing. I had to keep the beat in mind in order for the song to flow. I tried to not go too overboard with the rhyming but I got carried away in some sections. Thankfully, It all came together in the end. My goal was to express the anger and frustration that illegal immigrants experience due to situations that they have to encounter like crossing desserts to come to a country that discriminates against them. I hope that you enjoyed my recreation of your poem.

Sincerely,

Diane Tarabay

“Two different Poems”

By: Randy Hernandez

The poem “To President-Elect” by Javior Zomora is a poem in which touches on the speakers current issues with president Trump. The title of the poem emphasizes the poem to be directed towards the current president of America. The speaker wants the reader to understand this and makes it obvious to the reader to show a deeper meaning of writing this poem and its purpose. The reader sees how the speaker holds no respect towards the president as he doesn’t include his name and replaces it with “President Elect”. The imagery in the poem is portraying the speakers poet experience as he crossed the border. In the poem spoken orally I would say the diction and the extra lines added in the oral poem performed changes the poem significantly. There’s this stronger sense of sarcasm, taunting the president,  pauses are more prominent, and provides the reader how the speaker wants no sympathy.

For instance, Zomora poem performed orally is just amplified in how taunting is included as the speaker says “if you call us aliens, your equally fucked”. This new addition to the poem shows how the speaker is fed up with the stereotyped names which the president has called immigrants. It helps show the reader how the speaker is not tolerating any racism from the current president. This taunting is also shown at the start of the poem when the speaker states “congratulations, you heard there’s no fence, there’s a tunnel, a hole in the wall…”. The speaker is telling the president congratulation on noticing the obvious this use of sarcasm is just more noticeable in the poem it gives it a more powerful impact on the poem as it shows the frustration almost anger the speaker holds towards the president. 

 When listing to the poem orally, Zomora tone of voice and pauses only help make the poem more meaningful towards the audience. The audience of the poem can be directed towards people who are anti Trump or people who support Trump as to illustrates the effects Trump has on immigrants. It catches one’s attention and helps the listener understand the speaker and helps connect with what the speaker is experiencing as an immigrant in the era of trump. The tone helps show this frustration of having to deal with someone is in power who say ridiculous things all the time. What else is more prominent when the poem is spoken orally is the last section of the poem.

Another difference is the real life danger immigrants face and are forced to migrate out of the country. This ties in with the sympathy we see in the poem but when the orally poem is spoken the speaker wants no sympathy whatsoever. The speaker makes this obvious at the speaker says “ don’t feel sorry for me”. The speaker does this to show why immigrants come to America. It’s not because they want to but it’s a way to survive for many immigrants. They leave their country for many reasons such as war, jobs, poverty and many other reasons that can be life threatening. The speaker shows the reader to not feel sorry for immigrants as they come here to better their lives and to survive there no room to for sympathy as the speaker makes it very clear.