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Full-Text Articles in Race and Ethnicity
"What Shall I Give My Children?" The Role Of The Mentor In Gloria Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place And Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow, Linda Wells
Explorations in Ethnic Studies
The question Gwendolyn Brooks asks in her poem "What Shall I Give My Children?" is a central question asked by African Americans: how can I who am considered less than perfect by mainstream America give to my children a sense of their own self-worth? In a culture where being poor, black, and female triply marginalizes an individual, what kind of consciousness develops from such marginality? How does such marginality carry over into the next generation and into the community of other women? How does the power of mentoring and affiliation help women to overcome the institutional oppression leveled against them …
Critique [Of "What Shall I Give My Children?" The Role Of The Mentor In Gloria Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place And Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow By Linda Wells], Suzanne Stutman
Explorations in Ethnic Studies
In her article "'What Shall I Give My Children?': The Role of the Mentor in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow," Wells focuses upon the woman's role as mentor in various works of modem African American women writers. In using Gwendolyn Brooks' poem as the cornerstone of her study, she establishes the sense of anguish and frustration faced by the mother who seeks to give to her children a sense of worth and self-esteem in a society which automatically disenfranchises them. She poses an important question -- one that goes beyond the …
Critique [Of "What Shall I Give My Children?" The Role Of The Mentor In Gloria Naylor's The Women Of Brewster Place And Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow By Linda Wells], Sandra E. Bowen
Explorations in Ethnic Studies
In her discussion of Mattie Michael and Avey Johnson as mentors in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Wells uses as a focal point Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "What Shall I Give My Children?" It is a socially and politically institutionalized assignment that becomes cosmic when experienced by African American women. Joanne M. Braxton expresses it: "As Black American women, we are born into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the veil of our blackness and our femaleness …