Analysis of The Afterbirth, 1931 by Nikky Finney

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Analysis of "The Afterbirth, 1931" by Nikky Finney
Nikky Finney is an American author born in South Carolina in 1957 to Ernest Finney, a lawyer and Frances Davenport Finney, a schoolteacher. She is an exceptional professor of creative writing in English at the University of Kentucky an addressee of the Kentucky foundation for women artists’ fellowship award. In the poem "The Afterbirth, 1931" of 1995, Finney maintains that something was not right… she describes the plight of black people in the American society during the 1930s. She reveals happenings that relate to the birth of the author’s father and the death of her mother as well. In many ways, the poem is nothing short of a revelation of plight and tragedies that black people encountered as slaves in the United States during earlier times. It goes ahead to depict those instances of suffering that are complex in nature; not to be clearly or easily understood as mere matters of good and evil but as harsh realities of the irrevocable past involving the flawed nature of human beings.
It is no doubt that the taut writing of Finney and "The Afterbirth 1931" in particular, involves elements of resistance to general social order that she witnessed in the United States as she grew up. No wonder she has borrowed much from writers like James Baldwin and others of the same caliber. In this poem, Finney demonstrates a unique use of language by making use of syntactical parallelism all through the poem to demonstrate a harmonious but melancholic theme. The poem can be describes as being a little dry for it tackles on the subject matter directly and does not contain many figures of s...