Movement Background: Slam poetry was one of the most vital and energetic movement in poetry during the 1990's. Slam poetry subject draws upon economic, racial and gender injustices. This poetry stimulated interest in poetry performance, a slam is a poetry competition in which parts perform work alone or in groups in front of an audiences. These audience serves as a judge and the work is judged on energy and enthusiasm of the performance.
Poetry Analysis: The poem Black Wars the writer talks about how blacks target each other because of their different skin tones. The text states, "Light skin versus dark skin built our society on a platform of hate and disdain despising dusky dark tones of skin." This shows that our society is breaking up because of our different skin tones. The poem also states that light skin tones were treated better than darker skin tones as they refer back to history, "Keeping our darks dark in hot fields under the blistering sun and our lights light in cool houses as back breaking servants." This explains that the lights were treated better than darks even back in history. The writer chooses to use "embedded" and "conquer" to show how serious this issue is. When the author mentions, "Instead we fight each other like militant soldiers." this writer uses like to compare us fighting to soldiers fighting each other and when soldiers fight each other there is not but bloodshed.
Literary Devices: In the poem Black Wars there are several literary devices. The two devices I will like to discuss is oxymoron and allusion. I'm going to start with the oxymoron when the author states, "We ally ourselves with fluorescent enemies". When you think of something that is fluorescent you think of something that is beautiful and when you think of enemies you think of bad but they put the two together to give one idea. Then the author uses allusion to better illustrate what he/she is talking about. The author states, "Keeping our darks dark in hot fields under the blistering sun and our lights light in cool houses as back breaking servants." The author refers back in history to better get a central idea of the point he/she is trying to get across.
Resource Mrs.Byrd in the library.