Cry Of The Kinky Hair Girl Poem Analysis

Racial pride is the mindset of acceptance and love of one's own race; the opposite, racial shame, rejects and shows contempt. As individuals, we adopt pride or shame for our race based upon the society we live in and its influence on our lives and in the society, there is not just one outlook on racial pride or shame for just as different individuals share separate viewpoints, different groups of individuals share different common viewpoints. In "Cry of the Kinky Haired Girl," de Burgos portrays her Black female pride by breaking down the societal perception that portrays her as an object. She says "...I cry and I laugh at the thrill of being a black statue...my white teeth flash like lightning" (Willis, 2003, p. 45). In these lines de Burgos
The poem exposes the reality that the black skin is independent of the white and is mutually exclusive with it. She begins with "...the orange tree bears blossoms with goodness perfumed...In their untainted beauty...my fingers do not break them nor my voice stain them" (Willis, 2003, p. 27). These lines characterize whiteness as untainted and pure and her, impure. Colon Pellot makes more similar depictions like in the poem, the last being a characterization of whiteness with the sea when she writes, "decked as a bride, I am dressed in scarlet" (Willis, 2003, p. 27). This is the most important consequence of the inferiority complex Colon Pellot has established in herself. She has associated her darker skin with scarlet, a biblical reference to prostitution, adultery and sin. Carmen Colon Pellot sees herself as impure and imperfect due to her inability to achieve the standards of beauty put place by the caste system established by her pure white
While writers who revel in their outer beauty like Julia de Burgos exist, writers like Carmen Colon Pellot are not far and few between, particularly in Spanish Caribbean literature. There exists a "psychological predicament of the black woman because of the social stigma attached to her racial features" (Williams, 2000, p. 107) . Una Marson, another black poet, through her poem "Kinky Hair Blues," shows that she too falls to psychological predicament, where she ponders on why she was given kinky hair given that "nobody loves them" ( Williams, 2000, p. 107). Although the voices of these poets, on their own, seem displaced, they are merely parts of a larger