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Who Brought From Africa To America By Phillis Wheatley

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Phillis Wheatley tells a compelling story of a young slave girl who was kidnapped from Africa and brought to America. Her extraordinary story speaks volumes to African Americans today. Having been enslaved, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American, and one of the first women, to publish a book of poetry during colonial America. Wheatley’s writing granted her the ability to achieve a great amount of fame despite the spread of slavery and the realities of her colonial times. Often, Wheatley’s poetic works are characterized by a strict adherence to the conventions of neoclassical verse, a reliance on iambic pentameter, and a focus on public and impersonal themes rather than personal self-expression. Despite some literary critics’ concern …show more content…

Wheatley also presented herself as an African who was orphaned by American slavery and sought for freedom amongst the society. Despite the prodigiousness acceptance of slavery through the capture of Africans and the impulsion of eighteenth century colonist to retain black inferiority, Phillis Wheatley still found her identity as an African and expressed it throughout her poetry. Wheatley’s expression of her African identity, which is coherent in her poetry, is an invention of a pagan converted Christian speaking to a community of other Christians. The autobiography of “On Being Brought from Africa to America” recounts Wheatley’s journey from her “Pagan land” to Christianity. This particular poem reminds Wheatley's “fellow Christians of what they might have forgotten about their core belief; every Christian's ultimate goal of securing a place in the "angelic train" transcends natural circumstances like skin color, social placement, and national origin” (Adéeko). The African in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” has left Africa behind and recollections of the past brings security and reassurement in the new location. As a literate, black, Christian speaker, Wheatley ventriloquized the illiterate, enslaved, African’s voice in order to address the institution of slavery to her audience of slave

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