My Dungeon Shook

by James Baldwin

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Are Baldwin's "A Letter to My Nephew" and Lorde's "A Litany for Survival" optimistic, pessimistic or motivational?

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"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.

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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...

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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 weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us.
Yet her theme is that "we" cannot and will not be silenced. Though the penultimate stanza of "Litany" appears to reiterate a feeling of hopelessness, in the context of the poem as a whole, the despair is negated. The paradox is expressed in the closing line:
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
The fact of observing that "it is better to speak," in any context, is in fact a dismissal of the hopelessness of seeing oneself as a member of an oppressed group. It is, however, a subdued dismissal. By comparison with Baldwin's direct and forceful injunctions to his brother's son, Lorde is quietly hopeful—if hope is not too strong a word to characterize her tone. Both the essay and the poem are motivational, in the sense that they are addressed to someone who may not understand or have a clearly objective awareness of the situation they must confront. They encapsulate both realism and a force that seeks to break through the current reality and substitute something in its place, along with the recognition that although the task might seem at first to be insurmountable, it's still within the realm of the possible.
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