Amiri Baraka’s poem, “An Agony, As Now” is about a self inside another self, a consciousness inside a body which is despised by the outside world and which the consciousness itself comes to suspect. Think of Iron Man and Tony Stark inside the suit. Stark and Iron Man are very different personas and it’s easy to imagine what each one thinks of the other. Read Baraka’s poem again now keeping in mind the idea of the poem’s speaker (remember in a poem the speaker is like the narrator in a story or novel) as a person trapped or living or confined inside some other person who is also them.
Now, think about “Coal” by Audre Lorde. This is a poem with a similar idea: one thing emerging from another, borne of something else, but it’s more like transformation than entrapment. Coal from earth. Read the poem again with this in mind and with an eye toward how it matches this rhetorical move with Baraka’s.
Post a short paragraph, 5 sentences at least, about how both poems show us different ways of thinking about identity, whether it is black identity or otherwise, and why they are considered important literature of the civil rights era, when writers of color strive to create and name new ways of self-identification for themselves and minority groups.
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