Poetry
To Estrada (1999), Gaston Neal was an American activist and a poet born in 1934. He was best known for his literary work in the movement of the black power genre as well as social change. Additionally, he was a playwright, a teacher, and a crusader who was against substance abuse. In the 1960s turmoil, Mr. Neal emerged as a very creative force, drawing amens from people when he recited stanzas on political, human, and economic rights of the urban poor people. He rose to the ranks of well-known contemporary poets like Amiri Baraka. Mr. Neal died on 21st October 1999 of lymphatic cancer at his home in Washington (Coates, 1999).
One of his famous poems is “Personal Jihad.” The overall message being passed by this poem is the idea of liberation. In the late 20th Century, Mecca had become a sign of deliverance for black people from Western oppression. It represented the struggle by the blacks for liberation. Therefore, at the time of writing the poem, the embrace of Muslim identities by blacks in the US was a sign of reorientation and salvation, both spiritually and politically. It is therefore the reason for writing this poem by Mr. Neal to spread the theme of Black liberation from White dominance and oppression.
The most interesting line from this poem is “The pain and urgency.” This line shows how blacks have faced a lot of oppression and extreme suffering at the hands of the whites in society. Therefore, there was pressure and the urge to liberate themselves from the shackles of white dominance and set themselves free from the bondage urgently.
In this poem, the black nationalists have been presented as a society that has been suffering under the supremacy of Western culture and ideologies. The blacks have for a long time remained chained in ideological slavery. The community has therefore longed for a day to see the light, where they could liberate themselves and rule themselves ideologically and politically.
Despite this poem being written a long time ago, the ideologies and the message in this literary art is still relevant to our contemporary black people society. For a long time, blacks are being regarded as minority groups in white countries. They suffer the abuse of their rights, unfair treatment, unfair trials, arrests, torture, and even killings (Sule, 2019). As pointed out by Pew Research Center, many blacks in America, for example, believe that the nation needs to make radical changes to ensure that blacks attain equal rights with their white counterparts