Literary Analysis: The Welcome Table by Alice Walker and what's it like to be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith



Literary Analysis: The Welcome Table by Alice Walker and what's it like to be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith

Introduction

This paper will compare and contrast the theme of the stories, What's It Like To Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith and The Welcome Table by Alice Walker. Each of the stories talks about discrimination of some form. The main character in each is a protagonist black female. Where there is discrimination of all kinds around us it is more pronounced in these stories. Both stories express the determination of two women to survive through all adversity (Bhabha 1995).

Analysis

The main theme of both the poems are based on the racial discrimination or symbolism. Blacks and whites have historically experienced America in fundamentally different ways. For the European ancestors of many whites, America symbolized a land of expansive opportunity and freedom. Conversely, for many ancestors of blacks in the U.S., America was where they lost their freedom through slavery (Heintz 1999).

Although blacks and whites have been equal under the law for several decades, they still view the state of race relations in different ways and are divided despite integration efforts by the government and many blacks and whites. Polls suggest that whites are much less likely than blacks to see racism as a continuing problem in the nation (Heintz 1999). It is possible that Patricia could have experienced the same issues while trying to deal with obstacles that her and her ex husband were going through during her time of being cast out by society. Patricia Smith being isolated from mainstream society because of the problems with fabricating her columns can also be related to why she wrote What it's Like to be Black Girl (For Those Who Aren't). When she states in the poem:

“first of all, it's being 9 years old and

feeling like you're not finished, like your

edges are wild, like there's something,

everything, wrong.” (Clugston 2010, Chap. 12)

Patricia is saying that when you are a black woman in the mainstream, corporate world which is where there is a predominantly white race, it feels as though you are inexperienced like a child; it feels as though you will never be able to catch up with the other people around you and no matter how hard you work or how well you are educated you will never fit in. She is also saying that even if you are good at whatever it is that you do there is always going to either go wrong or be wrong about you (Head 1994).

“it's sweat and Vaseline and bullets, it's growing tall and

wearing a lot of white, it's smelling blood in

your breakfast, it's learning to say fuck with

grace but learning to fuck without it.” (Clugston 2010, Chap. 12)

This means that its torturous being a black woman in a different world and learning to deal with it means to say and do things appropriately even though ...