Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi"
    A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi"
    A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi"
    Ebook40 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi"

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJan 18, 2018
    ISBN9781535845878
    A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi"

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi"

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Henry Dumas's "Son of Msippi" - Gale

      17

      Son of Msippi

      Henry Dumas

      1970

      Introduction

      Though he had only a short career, Henry Dumas proved himself one of the most original, essential, and indispensable African American writers of the 1960s. He has not become a mainstream household name, but he attained a cult following in progressive literary circles and especially the Black Arts movement. With a cosmological view influenced by the likes of otherworldly jazz musician Sun Ra, Dumas wrote awe-inspiring short stories and poems, often in an experimental style embracing the surreal, the supernatural, the mystical, and the allegorical, sometimes all at once.

      Dumas's poem Son of Msippi foregrounds a shifted reality in the very title, where the abbreviated form of the state and river name Mississippi not only reproduces the sound of the word as commonly spoken by some locals but also, in doing so, evokes an alternate conception from the ordinary sense of the word. As far as American literature is concerned, the Mississippi River may belong to Mark Twain, but Dumas claims the Msippi on behalf of the blacks who so long worked the fertile lands surrounding it— and too frequently fell victim to the institution of slavery and the callous whites who perpetuated it. But white people are nowhere to be found in the poem, as the speaker abstractly focuses on his own—and by extension his people's own— rising up from the labor, land, and life of the Deep South. A veritable martyr for his people, the transcendent Dumas, incidentally singling himself out in a subway station late in the Harlem night, was killed by a white policeman's bullet at the age of thirty-three. Son of Msippi was published in 1970 in the posthumous Dumas volume Poetry for My People (1970)—republished as Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974)—and later appeared among the selected poems in Knees of a Natural Man (1989). The poem can also be found in The Oxford Anthology of African- American Poetry (2006).

      Author Biography

      Henry Lee Dumas (usually pronounced doomus— but sometimes du-mah—by the author himself) was born on July 20, 1934, in Sweet Home, Arkansas. The state was racially segregated during his childhood there, and he came to recognize the inescapable sense of oppression under Jim Crow laws. His mother, Appliance Porter, was unmarried and worked as a housekeeper at a hotel in Little Rock, seven miles to the north. During the days, Porter's younger sister, Adella, both worked the family farmland and looked after the young Henry, as did other family members. The boy's father, Henry Dumas Sr., was at best a

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1