Incident by Countee Cullen

Explorations of the Text

The nature of the interaction between the two boys.

I defined it as a common conversation between two boys who did not know each other but it turns out to an unpleasant situation and made the changes of expression when the bigger boy started to call the other boy as a Nigger.

Why does the speaker remember nothing more than the incident, even though he stayed in Baltimore from “May until December”?

As for me, he was only remember about the incident because when someone called him as a nigger, he considered it as his bad experience with immature person and of course, he felt annoyed and insulted with that statement.

The reading/Writing Connection

In a paragraph, compare your experience of prejudice with the persona in the poem.

I was a student from SMA. Based on my own experience, during my secondary school, sometimes some people judge me as close-minded person. They considered me as a person who do not have social life and cannot communicate well with the outsiders. For me, that is a common phenomenon happened to any SMA’s student. Furthermore, our appearance also does make sense. They always assumed that people like us will spend time at the mosque most of the time. We will labelled as reading person and have lots of rules in our life. But for me, the boy in the incident had the worse experience rather than me. Obviously, it is a rude action when someone called someone else a nigger.

Ideas for Writing

The form for this poem is free style and the rhyme add to this poem is ABCB.

The power of language in terms of literary text is to make the using of words more meaningful  and bombastic for those who read the poem. For example, the words of “Heart-filled and head-filled with glee” meaning that happy feeling and joy. The effects of the use of the term nigger is it can cause racism among us. For instance, the dark skin boy feels offence when someone called him nigger. The word of nigger itself shows how certain people judge others people and make them angry. Furthermore, it can to bad relationship between each other. “Nigger” also is the most lethal insult in America.