Religion and Civilization

Despite the poem’s repeated references to African flora and fauna, its concern primarily revolves around describing the poet’s connection to African civilizations. This idea is introduced as early as the third verse with the reference to a “jungle track” (1). The pathway through a jungle is a faint marker of a civilizational imprint. The final line of the poem, “They and I are civilized” ties together earlier these referents and demonstrates that the primary non-human images associated with African in the Euro-American imaginary are beguiling because they occlude recognition of African civilizations (7). As the speaker describes in his confliction over having been conditioned to worship an image of a white Jesus, religion is a carrier of civilization. That Christianity in the Americas so often was employed to disconnect Afro-Americas from their ancestral civilizations is beyond dispute. The speaker reflects this with belittling and...