TO THE NEGRO-AMERICAN SOLDIERS

 

Hello!

I am Nidhi Jethava and Student of MK Bhavanagar University. It is our group task for African Literature. After completing any particular unit we have to do #Thinking Activity on that unit. In this blog, I am going to write about talk about the poem ‘ TO THE NEGRO-AMERICAN SOLDIERS’  by Léopold Sedar Senghor. 

About Sedar Senghor:-

Scholar, African traditionalist poet, and Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor was born on October 9, 1906 in Joal, Senegal. His father, Basie Diogoye Senghor, was a Malinké landowner. His mother, Gnilane Bakhoum, came from a Christian Fulani family. They gave Senghor a European name to reflect both the noble Serer culture they identified with, as well as their Catholic faith. Senghor grew up with his father’s four wives and his twenty-four siblings.

At the age of seven, Senghor was sent to a Catholic mission school, where he first learned French. At 13, he decided to enter the Catholic priesthood. He attended Libermann seminary in Dakar but in 1926, dissuaded by the seminary, switched to the secondary school Lycée Van Vollenhoven. He graduated from high school with honors and his classical languages teacher persuaded the colonial administration to grant Senghor a scholarship to pursue literary studies in France. (Anna Micklin)

https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/senghor-leopold-sedar-1906-2001/

Poem:-

TO THE NEGRO-AMERICAN SOLDIERS

………………………………………………………………For Mercer Cook

I did not recognize you in prison under your

………..sad-colored uniform

I did not recognize you under the calabash helmet

………..without style

I did not recognize the whining sound of your

………..iron horses, who drink but do not eat.

And it is no longer the nobility of elephants, it is the

………..the barbaric weight of the prehistoric

………..monsters of the world.

Under your closed face, I did not recognize you.

I only touched the warmth of your brown hand,

………..I called myself “Afrika! ”

And I found once again the lost laughter, I hailed the ancient voices

………..and the roar of Congo waterfalls.

Brothers, I do not know whether you bombed the

………..cathedrals, the pride of Europe,

If you are the lightning of God’s hand that burned

………..Sodom and Gomorrah.

No, you are the messengers of his mercy, the

………..Spring after Winter.

To those who had forgotten how to laugh-only

………..smile obliquely

Who knew nothing but the savory flavor of

………..tears and the vexing stench of blood

You bring the Season of Peace and hope to

………..end of the delay.

And their night is filled with milky sweetness, the blue

………..fields of the sky are covered with flowers, silence sings

………..soothingly.

You bring them the sun. The air beats with whispers

………..liquids and crystalline chirping and beating

………..silky wings

The aerial cities are tepid with nests.

Through the streets joy streamed, the boys play with

………..their dreams

Men dance before of their machines and

………..surprised themselves singing.

Schoolgirls’s eyelids are rose petals, and

………..fruits ripen in the virgins’ breasts

And the women’s hips—Oh, sweetness—

………..grow generously heavy.

Black brothers, warriors whose mouths are flowers that

………..sing

—Oh! the delight to live after Winter—I salute you

………..like messengers of peace.

 

Thank you....