Hannah Hecht's Blog

This past week, I attended the Sigma Tau Delta Spoken Word Slam as one of my campus events. It ended up being a great chance to listen to a lot of really talented writers on campus. Many of the poems read dealt with injustice of some form, which is one of the things that many of our capstone readings seem to have in common. For example, one of the poems read by the winning competitor dealt with feminism. He emphasized the importance of the male feminist, something that many of our female authors back in the early 20th century wouldn’t have been very familiar with. Many of our texts (I’m especially thinking of Bread Givers, since I just finished it) feature heroines who wouldn’t be able to imagine that a young man would get up on stage to talk about the injustices that women have to go through. Another poem, one read in between the competition sessions, emphasized the importance of women’s bodies in our modern society. She talked about how appearance is perceived as more important than ideas, something that Mashah definitely recognizes and uses to her advantage (at least at the beginning of the novel). A lot of the poems pointed out that though we have come a long way in terms of race and gender relations since the era of the literature we study, there is still a long way to go.