Let’s talk about American literature today. It is one of my favorite subjects. American literature has several aspects. It forms complicated but valid points of view. Several breeds are described but it is not possible to study only one of them. There are whites, Irish, British and Jews. All of them are born and acquired in different ways. They are rarely connected. Among them, African Americans stand out a bit apart. Those black Americans are not the only slaves. They all emigrated from Jamaica, the Caribbean, either North Africa or the Americas. They all came from the same complex. It was named as the ‘DARK CONTINENT’. Some immigrants were Senegalese and Ethiopian. Talking about race is not that simple, if you know what I mean. There is always a big question mark over skin color. You can’t hide it or you can’t change it. Violence is everywhere. it is predatory. It comes in the form of racism, sexual abuse across and between the race with gender inequality. A multiple combination of horror is what I can call it. That is why reading American literature became so fascinating and mysterious to read.
The rebuilding of the South caused black Americans to leave the southern plantations. It was a painful time as states like Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, etc. they faced the worst. The hardest-hit areas were in Kentucky and Virginia. These places suffered from a bad history of slavery. Inhuman treatment and trafficking were the main forces applied to human beings. In the 1920s, 10 million African Americans lived in the city. About 2 million lived in the New York City of Harlem. In those days, the South Side of Chicago was extremely poor and unsanitary with slums. Horrible areas witnessed the poverty of man and his miserable situation. These things are vividly depicted in books like “A RAISIN IN THE SUN.” A man like Walter-lee is desperate to make money the easy way, so he tries to imagine his lifestyle by throwing a quilt of imaginary domination over his family. He taunts and insults his wife in the first act by saying that things don’t get done without paying a small amount of dollars to the person. He refers to the bribery. He thinks it’s all running on bribery even though his wife refuses to believe it and his family refuses to believe it. The system itself is dark. He takes all the frustration out on his younger wife Ruth by saying that she doesn’t support him for asking her mother about investing in liquor for the money her mother had inherited.
The situation portrayed is very insidious as he is clearly trying to get ahead of her. He literally starts coaching her with graphic demonstrations of her making her understand that things don’t work unless you pay some bribe. The leading figure in the play is Lena Younger, her mother, who makes all the decisions, but in the end she hands over the house to Walter only to witness the destruction. She may also discover gender inequality as her husband, through her frustration, easily blames Ruth. It was easy enough for him, as he thought that women have nothing to do with helping a man succeed. It all went like a bang at first, as he was using his wife as a scapegoat to make things easier for him.
At this point, what we see is that women of color were of no importance in their own home. Ruth is the perfect portrait. Women of color were not seen as dream lifters no matter how hard they tried. Ruth was absolutely right about the money, but Walter’s masculine pressure crushed her. She was tired, helpless and she didn’t know what to do. She was running out of diplomacy for her husband, but she had a reason for it.
We still have Beneatha Younger, the carefree young woman who has revolutionary ideas unlike her family. Travis, her 11-year-old son who was curious about everything; and Lena, the youngest, the loving and domineering mother who witnesses her family fall to pieces, but saves them in the end. We will see them in the next part. Until then, explore more American literary history and you’ll explore the shadows of the dark past.
