Throughout the collection of Montage of a Dream Deferred we see three poems that seem to take place as a rather one sided conversation between father and son. Each poem begins with "Good morning daddy!" as the son greets his father and begins the poem. The three poems in question are "Dream Boogie", "Good Morning", and "Island".
We discussed the first poem in class, but I wanted to revisit it briefly as it is part of this narrative. In "Dream Boogie" we get a feel for the musical tones that are spread throughout the poems in the book, but we also get the beginning of a conversation between two very distinct generations of Harlem natives. The main speaker is obviously a younger man, growing up in Harlem during the 1940's and 50's who has a connection to the growing Jazz and Blues influence of the time as well as the idea of "a dream deferred". The second speaker, italics, is the father or older man in question. The father in the poem seems to be less concerned with the "dream" than the son as he asks if the beat is happy and ignores the son trying to explain or feel the undertones of depression and hardship. The son, being respectful, moves on without much prompting. To me this poem shows the difference in generational thinking on how to get your dreams recognized when you are the one being deferred. The father, being older, is stuck in the do-what-they-so-and-eventually-it-will-come mindset similar to Booker T. Washington, while the son seems to be more interested in how to get what he needs for his dream now.
The second poem "Good Morning" gives us a wider view of the father's life. We get to see that he is old enough to have seen the large migration of African Americans that took place in 1904 due to tough economic and real estate situations for the black population. Because of his age the father has been able to see his neighborhood turn from new to run down and he is beginning to realize that there might be something to what the son was saying about "the dream deferred" in "Dream Boogie". We see, through the son's retelling, that the father knew that the situation for these new arrivals. and even those already living there, was becoming more and more dire, but now the older generation is opening its eyes to what the younger generation has been saying throughout the poem collection. In this poem we get to see the father ask the son a question that many would think that a younger would ask of an older for advice on, "What happens/ to a dread deferred?" (26-7). We do not get to see the son's full explanation, but we do see that the son has been at least following the poems in the collection because he has heard and understands what happens to a dream deferred, while the father is just now opening his eyes.
The final poem that fits into this trio is "Island". We see this poem ending in the same way that the others began. We do not begin with this conversation, or the son trying to get his father to understand, but instead we see the son having his own reflection on Harlem and their situation. The son does not seem to have a bad connotation of his town, even if his dream has been deferred, he still finds things to be not too overbearingly awful and seems to have hope for Harlem at least. Here we see the father speaking about the dream deferred and the son answers him, almost as though the son was in a daze as the father walked into the room speaking.
And that leads me to my discussion questions:
Q. What do you think the father means when he says, "Dream within a dream,/ Our dream deferred." Do you think this speaks to his own dream being that of his son's, but in a different voice, which has also been deferred or is there something else behind it?
Q. Do you think that these poems are connected in the way I have connected them? Is there a conversation about the generation gap and the conflict resolution tactics of each?
Q. Do these poems make you feel as though the narrator is witnessing or reading the other poems of the book and trying to get his father to open his eyes to them?
I think the father is speaking to everything you suggest. I think he is talking about his dream, pushed onto his child, who is then trying to defer his dad's dream to pursue his own, and then has his dream deferred because of his place in life, unfortunately. It could also mean the dream as a whole, a societal whole, which relates to your second question.
ReplyDeleteThe two could be connected. I think younger people are considered more independent, or more self-dependent, than the older generation, who are more community-oriented.