Black Pride Endeavor Reflected in Margaret Walker’s Selected Poems: ‘Lineage’, ‘I Want to Write’ and ‘The Struggle Staggers Us’

Abstract

This research analyzes Black Pride Endeavor in Margaret Walker’s selected poems through the three poem that include ‘Lineage’, ‘I Want to Write’ and ‘The Struggle Staggers Us’. There are two goals of this research that conclude finding how is the Black Pride Endeavor reflected in Walker’s three selected poems and what is the moral value conveyed in Walker’s three selected poems. The theory used to analyze this research is from Michael Riffaterre in Semiotics of Poetry (1978) as the main theory. The research was conducted using a qualitative approach. The data collected included words, phrases, sentences, and even a whole poem about black pride. The data were devided into primary and secondary data. The primary data were obtained from the the collection of poems by Margaret Walker, This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, and the selected poems are ‘Lineage’, ‘I Want to Write’ and ‘The Struggle Staggers Us’. The secondary data of this research were obtained from articles, essays, critiques, and books related to Black Pride issues. This study utilized Riffaterre's semiotic of poetry to analyze the meaning and significance of the poems using heuristic and hermeneutic reading approaches. In the first reading stage, the researcher used online dictionaries like MerriamWebster and Cambridge Dictionary to determine the poem's literal meaning. Then the ungrammaticalities in the poems were discovered. The second reading stage (hermeneutic reading) involved identifying the hypogram, matrix, and significance of Walker's poetry. The Black Pride endeavor traits in the poems by Margaret Walker could be observed in the first and the second stage of reading. At the same time, the poem’s significance only could be found when the heuristic and the hermeneutic reading were observed. This research found that in Walker’s three selected poems, there was a Black Pride endeavor traits that was conveyed to her reader. Walker is trying to convey her goals through her poems in her book This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. As an activist and a poet in 20th century, Walker tries to encourage an African American to fight for their rights and to realize that they are a beautiful human beings.