Bridge of Silver Wings 2025

When it comes to Modern Literary Studies, the exploration of cultural identity, social justice, and human experience are often paramount themes. Aime Cesaire’s 1939 Return to My Native Land, and Aberjhani’s 1997 “Return to Savannah,” are two exemplary works that delve into these themes, drawing upon historical, philosophical, and biographical insights. This comparative literary analysis examines how these poems resonate with contemporary discourses such as Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, and WOKE theory, while also embodying values significant to humanity as a whole.

Cultural Context and Literary Tradition

In considering the significance of these poems for readers and scholars alike, it becomes evident that they offer invaluable insights into the complexities of modern Black Studies and the broader human experience. Whether studied during National Poetry Month, Education Week, Black History Month, or on World Poetry Day, both works serve as poignant reminders of the enduring power of poetry to provoke thought, inspire empathy, and catalyze change.

Aberjhani, in his 2007 Goodreads review of Cesaire’s book, aptly describes Return to My Native Land as a product of literary fusion, drawing upon the Negritude movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and French surrealism. This amalgamation infuses Cesaire’s work with rich cultural and political nuances, addressing racism, class oppression, and the human condition. The following excerpt provide a small example from Return to My Native Land:

In this inert town, this sorry crowd under the sun, taking part in nothing which expresses, asserts, frees itself in the broad daylight of its own land. Nor in Empress Joséphine of the French dreaming high, high above negridom. Nor in the liberator rigidified in its liberation of whitened stone. Nor in the conquistador. Nor in this contempt, nor in this freedom, nor in this boldness.

At the brink of dawn, this inert city and its far beyond of leprosies, of consumption, of famines, of fears crouching in the ravines of fears, hoisted in the trees of fears, burrowed in the ground, of fears adrift in the sky, of fears piled up and its fumaroles of anguish.

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