Student Question
Are Baldwin's "A Letter to My Nephew" and Lorde's "A Litany for Survival" optimistic, pessimistic or motivational?
Quick answer:
"A Letter to My Nephew" and "A Litany for Survival" straddle the line between optimism and pessimism. Both Baldwin and Lorde impart a message that seeks to overturn a dysfunctional situation. At the same time, they acknowledge the difficulty of changing the status quo but are quietly certain that their efforts will be successful.
In "My Dungeon Shook," James Baldwin addresses his nephew with a message that recognizes the terrible burden of racial oppression he knows the younger man will have to deal with. In the sense of laying out a problem as it is and saying that it's inescapable, Baldwin is not necessarily a pessimist, but a realist. Yet a deep melancholy suffuses not only this essay, but his work as a whole. There is a recognition of the evil that exists in the world in the starkest terms a writer can express it:
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.
But if Baldwin did not have hope that things would change, he wouldn't have written the piece. It's part of the power of his writing that he is able to give the most unequivocally harsh and realistic...
Unlock
This Answer NowStart your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
picture of the world as it is but is still able to assure the younger James:
But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word "integration" means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it.
Audre Lorde's poem is a far less direct and far more equivocal statement of what it means to be different and how to deal with it. Yet her message is similar to Baldwin's. There are oppressors, and they seek to destroy:
for by this weaponthis illusion of some safety to be foundthe heavy-footed hoped to silence us.
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.