El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) by Robert Hayden

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) by Robert Hayden(Malcolm X) by Robert Hayden

O masks and metamorphoses of Ahab, Native Son

I

The icy evil that struck his father down
and ravished his mother into madness
trapped him in violence of a punished self
struggling to break free.

As Home Boy, as Dee-troit Red,
he fled his name, became the quarry of
his own obsessed pursuit.

He conked his hair and Lindy-hopped,
zoot-suited jiver, swinging those chicks
in the hot rose and reefer glow.

His injured childhood bullied him.
He skirmished in the Upas trees
and cannibal flowers of the American Dream--

but could not hurt the enemy
powered against him there.

COMMENTARY: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz is about Malcom X's life, discriminated/ criticized, trauma, and his dream.Robert Hayden looms as one of the most technically gifted and conceptually expansive poets in American and African American letters. Attending to the specificities of race and culture, Hayden's poetry takes up the sobering concerns of African American social and political plight; yet his poetry posits race as a means through which one contemplates the expansive possibilities of language, and the transformational power of art. The theme of this poem was to tell the reader about struggles of  Malcolm X being lost and confused in this work and himself and changing his life around to help others. Also it show that Malcolm X changed his way of life around and he started living a better life and helping people. He compared the evil that struck his father down to ice because the evil was so cold and un-human like. The structure of this poem was free verse, there was no rhyming in the poem. There are one or two ending thats that rhyme in the stanzas but they had very little effect on the poem. I would say that the tone in this poem is very solid and stern when Robert Hayden explains the undergoing Malcolm X went through and how his character was lost as a black man in this world