Analytical Reading of Nikky Finney’s Rice Writing Assignment

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November 22, 2018
Analytical Reading of Nikky Finney’s Rice
The main focus of this article is the idea of pride amidst oppression in Nikky Finney’s poem Rice and The Afterbirth. Specifically, it would answer the question, “how does Finney portray the slave population, who were definitely oppressed, in a positive light in her poems?” To explain this, the first question lies in understanding how oppression is portrayed in the poems. While it is generally known in history that slaves are oppressed, the severity of their experiences is sometimes underestimated. Finney’s portrayal emphasizes this harsh reality and piques the readers’ interests to undertake a deeper reflection. Additionally, Finney’s works should also be credited with portraying the slave population with pride. A race that withstood the tests of time and the oppression brought about by the same society that they feed. These two themes would be the focus of analysis in the succeeding sections.
In Finney’s poem entitled the Afterbirth, the readers could clearly see a snapshot of the experiences and the plight of the slaves during the 1930s. Through a poem presented narratively, she compared the experiences of her mother and father to the happenings during those days. In the Afterbirth, the narrator describes the slaves as people who ‘threw soil and not salt’ (65). It is well-known that the idea of throwing salt behind one’s back is linked to driving away bad luck. However, slaves those days experiences those days are always persecuted by their masters, by forcing them to cultivate the land. In other words, the slaves back then had been in a perpetual state of bad luck, that throwing salt becomes a trivial matter. It was also said in the same poem that they were “quite aware of night riders… and men with politicious smiles, cologne with kerosene and match” (65). It is known during those times, how oppression of the slaves entail violence. Thousands, if not millions, of them, were killed due to the lynching and other executions that were done without any basis. In turn, most of them have adapted by becoming more vigilant about their sur...