Graduation

Graduation by Maya Angelou

The poem talks about Maya during her eight grade graduation day while she was resided at Stamps, Arkansas. The poem stands as a contrast between the school for blacks and the school for whites. The amount of oppression by powerful whites.

I connect with this poem because there is many times in my life where expectations and reality didn't match up. For example, my graduation, I expected it to be a big gathering and very exciting and what not but all of that was just in my mind because of reality. The reality was the world issues, now being the coronavirus. It all went downhill but obviously there was a way to overcome, and it's just to become more cautious of myself and my surrounding by wearing masks out in public and stuff like that.

I wanted to connect the text to the real world again but now more into the context of the poem. Race. Which was the main topic of this poem. Some quotes that I picked from the text shows how harsh it is just to be a colored skin tone, it shows how discriminated this group of people were and how the whites didn't care at all.

"It was awful to be a Negro and have no control over my life"

"It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance if defense"

This comes to show the real world. We never learn for the better, history is always going to repeat itself but in different forms no matter how much we learn of our past we never fix out present or future for the better.