Outcast Poem Written by Claude McKay
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Belonging is a feeling connecting people to other people, places or groups. We gain a sense of identity through the people and place we connect with and this is present in my two chosen texts OUTCAST by claude mckay and RAINBOW”S END by jane harrison.
OUTCAST is a poem written by Claude Mckay. This poem was based on the composers his fellow (black) peoples life. The moment Claude McKay arrived in United States in 1912, he struggled to find a place for himself in America. Claude McKay was aware of how to keep his name in his culture by writing for that audience. The audience for this poem was the Black american people who were going through alienation, discrimination and segregation. Those audience were back in his time, now the poem is read by many and specially students from age 13-18 years old. In the first quatrain of Outcast, the speaker expresses an intense desire and wish to rekindle his ties with his cultural heritage.
“My spirit bondaged by the body, longs”
The assonance in this line most significantly emphasises his great desire, as it is through the repetition of the o vowel sound that the audience is able to aurally hear the poets feelings of immense sorrow and despair. Furthermore McKay uses metaphor as his spirit being figuratively bondaged to suggest how being separated from the romanticized dim regions of his ancestral home has forced him to now feel as though his soul is now entrapped.
For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
In the third quatrain the personas feelings of his cultural alienation and sense of anxiety of compromising his African-American identity in order to fit in within a predominately white society is shown. He has conformed to the western world, and an innocence is lost within him that he cannot regain. This is shown in:
Something in me is lost, forever lost
The melancholy tone is used to emphasise his feelings of remorse in negotiating his identity, whilst the repetition of the word lost reinforces the fact that inherent parts of himself must be sacrificed in the cultural trappings of the great western world. Throughout Claude McKays poem Outcast, the persona is expressed to struggle to negotiate his identity- being a black man in a predominately white society. This sense of inner anguish is highlighted in:
My spiritmy soulmy native clime.
Through the repeated use of the personal pronoun of my the poet reveals an awareness of the fact that his inner-self, his identity is inextricably connected with his ancestral home. The speaker therefore