How It Feels To Be Colored Me Personification

Zora Neale Hurston, an important voice of the Harlem Renaissance, was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and novelist all-time known for her work, Their Eyes Were Watching God.Sadly, she died in 1960 after suffering fiscal and medical difficulties. In 1973, Alice Walker, some other famous American author, "rediscovered" Hurston and promoted her body of piece of work. In the classic essay, "How It Feels to Exist Colored Me," Hurston explores the thought that all of us have multiple selves, depending upon the context and environments in which we discover ourselves. Hurston's writing has an ebullience, self-assertiveness, and pride that is especially evident in this text. She was a flamboyant and dramatic personality, at times clashing with fellow writers from the Harlem Renaissance, who believed that black Americans should use their art to speak out against racial oppression and the white bulk. Hurston chose not to marshal herself with the political ideologies of other writers from that time menses and instead used her writing to celebrate the rich traditions of her race, as well her personal identity. In this essay, Hurston famously proclaimed, "I exercise non belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal."

In this text, Hurston is playing with the idea of performance, a trope that pervades the essay. Pay attention to any diction and/or metaphors associated with the theater and performance. Hurston is a provocateur, writing sentences that elicit a strong response from the reader. The essay presents the "multiple selves of Zora," structured in a series of vignettes from different time periods in her life--the kid Zora to the cosmic Zora, who "belongs to no race or time." Much of her prose is a masquerade of her real self. I believe the truthful Zora emerges in the final paragraph, which has a vastly unlike tone and mood from all that comes before. In the following paragraph, which appears midway in the essay, Hurston is intentionally provocative and defiant:

Someone is ever at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to annals low with me. Slavery is sixty years in the by. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line! " The Reconstruction said "Go set!" and the generation earlier said "Go! " I am off to a flying commencement and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and cry. Slavery is the cost I paid for civilization, and the choice was non with me. Information technology is a slap-up adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on world ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nix to be lost. It is thrilling to call up--to know that for whatever act of mine, I shall become twice equally much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite heady to hold the center of the national phase, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.

Her tone seems almost annoyed. Someone is e'er reminding her of her slave ancestors. Hurston asserts that the institution of slavery is something that she does not prefer to dwell upon. Using the metaphor of a patient (the "colored" person), she flippantly writes, "and the patient is doing well, thank y'all," as if to imply that she doesn't want to hear any more most the horrible legacy of slavery. Then, utilizing the extended metaphor of a race (discover the implied pun), she writes: "On the line! . . . Get set! . . .Go!" to challenge the notion that slavery was necessarily all bad. She writes, "Slavery is the price I paid for civilization . . . It is a bully adventure and worth all that I take paid through my ancestors for it." The argument is shockingly truculent. The holocaust of slavery, an institution that caused so much death and suffering was "worth it"?! She subverts the expectation of both whites and blacks--the idea that all blacks should exist offended and appalled past slavery, instead declaring that as a result, "I shall become twice as much praise or twice as much blame . . . It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage." Hurston has, in issue, belittled the horrific suffering that and then many slaves endured. She is trying to provoke a response in her audience, and this passage certainly achieves that. One cannot read her words without existence surprised, and perchance outraged, at the manner she cavalierly dismisses this blight of American history.

In the passage below, Hurston agains surprises united states of america with her signal of view. She chooses to write about the perspective of a white human being, fifty-fifty pitying (perhaps condescending) his lack of passion. In a wonderful extended metaphor that compares the jazz band to a wild fauna in the African jungle, she writes how she is figuratively transported dorsum to Africa. Enthralled by the musicians' "narcotic harmonies" she returns to her tribal roots, her face "painted ruddy and yellow" and her body "painted blue." She participates in a hunt with primal fury, shaking her spear above her head, "dancing wildly inside myself." The music of the orchestra makes her want to "slaughter something--give pain, give death" until the music ends and the "veneer" of civilisation supplants her imaginative fierceness, and she notices the passive, deadpan, soulless response of her white neighbor: "Proficient music they accept here," the homo says "sitting motionless," "smoking calmly," "drumming the table with his fingertips." Hurston is juxtaposing the stereotypes of the soulful blackness person with the soulless white person. Again, she purposefully goads, causing the reader to question his/her ain stereotypes, perceptions, and preconceived notions virtually racial differences. "He is then pale with his whiteness and so and I am so colored," she writes.

SOMETIMES It IS the other style effectually. A white person is ready down in our midst, but the contrast is but as abrupt for me. For case, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New Globe Cabaret with a white person, my colour comes. We enter chatting most any footling nothing that we have in mutual and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the sharp way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. Information technology loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets correct down to business. Information technology constricts the thorax and splits the eye with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly within myself; I yell within, I whoop; I milk shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it truthful to the marking yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blueish, My pulse is throbbing like a state of war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. Just the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I pitter-patter dorsum slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and observe the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

"Skilful music they take hither," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and reddish emotion accept not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far abroad and I see him simply dimly beyond the ocean and the continent that take fallen betwixt the states. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

In the final section of the essay, in that location is a dramatic shift in mood and tone. With insouciance and feigned confident indifference, Hurston writes, "How tin can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me." But the paragraph that follows, and ends the essay, achieves the greatness of this text. The authentic Zora emerges. All cockiness and masquerading of conviction has concluded. In i of the almost humble metaphors for a human being existence, Hurston compares herself to a "brown bag of miscellany." With one dramatic transition--"But in the main"--Zora has plummeted from her position in the cosmos, where she belongs to "no race or fourth dimension" and is "the eternal feminine," "a fragment of the Great Soul [God]" to a paper sack "against a wall in the company with other bags [races], white, red and xanthous." Using diction that evokes brokenness, sadness, frailty, and even hopelessness--"small things," "priceless and worthless," "cleaved glass," "crumbled away," "rusty knife,""empty spool," "nail bent," and "dried bloom," Hurston admits that all human being beings, no matter what color, possess insecurities, broken dreams, diminished hopes, and imperfections. At base, she says in this concluding passage, we are still, no matter how nosotros are "colored." All of our figurative insides could be "dumped in a single heap" and refilled into a pocketbook, "without altering the content of any profoundly." It is in this terminal surprising passage, so different in mood than what has come earlier, that Hurston drops her pretense and reveals her authentic self, even ending the essay with a final question mark, as if to suggest that later all, she really has no answers, simply questions. She is simply as unsure and insecure as the rest of humanity about true meaning and identity in a world of such variance.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does non make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It'southward beyond me.

Merely in the main, I feel similar a dark-brown pocketbook of miscellany propped against a wall. Confronting a wall In visitor with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and in that location is discovered a jumble of pocket-size, things priceless and worthless. A kickoff-water diamond, an empty spool $.25 of broken glass, lengths of string, a fundamental to a door long since crumbled abroad, a rusty pocketknife?blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a smash aptitude nether the weight of things also heavy for whatsoever nail, a dried flower or two yet a little fragrant. in your manus is the chocolate-brown bag. On the footing before you is the jumble information technology held?so much like the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might exist dumped in a single heap and the numberless refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored drinking glass more or less would not affair. Perchance that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?

("How It Feels to Exist Colored Me" is fromMules and Men: Ways of Seeing)

Rhetorical Strategies in "How It Feels to Exist Colored Me"

themes, irony, tone, hyperbole, colloquialisms, diction, metaphor, extended metaphor, humor, overstatement, mood, shifts, structure, personification, analogy, implied pun, aphoristic statement, dissimilarity as a rhetorical manner, allusion, trope, motif, onomatopoeia, simile, synesthesia, cadence, sentence length, punctuation, rhythm, rhetorical questions, apply of second person, specificity and option of details