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Monday, 12 November 2012

Victims of Modernization

Doctor d whiz locomote out. Dentist done moved out. Shoe store gone. Ain't slide fastener gonna be left here but niggers killing one another (Wilson, 1992, p. 9).

What these characters don't realize is that 1969 is a mo handstous year for America- and the world. American astronauts land on the moon! That's not of great im custodysity in the diner. They ar babbleing about block-long queues of raft run along up to see the remains of the Prophet Samuel. Kennedy assassinated. Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. And Nixon is the President, to whom desolate minorities don't matter, since they didn't vote for him the year before.

What do these characters know about Woodstock? until now though there were black performers there, like Jimi Hendrix and Ritchie Havens, the 300,000 young people who sat through rain were primarily white. 1969 was the year of the Mets pleasant the world series- not Pittsburgh, and the Stonew all told riots in New York's Greenwich Village, a battle about "gay rights". None of these mattered to the people whose nearness was fast disappearing, and whose lives seemed to have no future.

In this play, Wilson again composes a cast of characters of black men (and one wo while) who represent contrastive sides of the same coin. Wilson himself writes: "reduced to its most fundamental truth, black men be a commodity of flesh and muscle which has doomed its value in the marketplace. We are left over from business relationship" (Belton, 1997, xci).


At the end, when the rally business district ended, and the first fires of black anger torched a drug store, when the men were talking about Hambone and his funeral, and Lutz never giving him the ham, then Wilson creates a pleasurable surprise. Sterling proves he is a decent man of sorts. He comes to the diner, bleeding, with a ham in his hands, and asks the undertaker, West, to bury it with Hambone. Somehow, we are made to feel, through difficulties and even some bloodshed, there are men in our world whose American Dream merits respect.

Pettengill, R. (1999). subject area: Art in America. New York: NT C/Contemporary Books.

www.columbia.edu/~mrg24/wilscontents.html [Available online, 2001.
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accordingly there is Memphis, who worked for what he has- and that is about to be torn d bear. notwithstanding not before he hopes to get his price. He tells the try that "I got a clause, too . . . My clause say they got to bestower me what I want for it" (p. 57). And he gets thirty-five thousand dollars for the diner. If slide fastener else, Memphis' experience shows the possibility of black men getting what they deserve if they challenge the white man's rules.

Wilson also tries to destroy the white man's stereotype. " stack kill me about niggers is lazy. Niggers is the most hard-working people in the world. Worked triad hundred years for free" (p. 34). There is, so it seems, no way for today's black men to escape the wounds of slavery generations earlier. At the same time, Wilson has Memphis provide a stirring soliloquy: "These niggers talk about liberty, justice, and equality and don't know what it mean. You born free. It's up to you to adjudge it. You born with dignity and everything else . . . Freedom is heavy. You gotta put your shoulder to freedom" (p. 42).

There is certainly a hint of a fissiparous movement here. In fact, in an interview (1993) with Richard Pettengill, he hypothesizes that if all of black people had remained in the South, they would have developed their own
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