My Mother By Claude Mckay, The Mother, And The Negro Mother

Barbara Kingsolver once said, â€Å"Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.† This is true and can be seen in the way that motherhood is portrayed in the poems, My Mother by Claude McKay, the mother by Gwendolyn Brooks, and The Negro Mother by Langston Hughes. Claude McKay was born in Jamaica in September of 1889. After publishing his first books, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, he moved to Harlem, New York. Here, He established himself as a literary voice for social injustice during the Harlem Renaissance. He is well known for his poems, essays, and novels, including If We Must Die. His poem My Mother is about expresses his love for his mom and how her death devastated him to the core, but he understands that†¦show more content†¦Being a mother is something that is embedded within all women. Some scholars assert that mothering is not an innate character trait, that it is a trait taught by society, media, and older traditions. While thi s may be true in select cases, there have been studies that show that all throughout the animal kingdom - humans included - females biological make-up provides for the mothering instinct. In a study done by Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the National Institute of Mental Health, they found that A human female s tendency to care appears to begin early. It showed that girls showed more sympathy than boys for crying babies. Boys would hold back while girls would pat the babies on the head. Weather they actually have the child or not, as seen in my mother by Gwendolyn Brooks, women are made with the ability to nurture and care for children as well as the people connected to them. The poems My Mother by Claude McKay, the mother by Gwendolyn Brooks, and The Negro Mother by Langston Hughes provide a literary and poetic view on motherhood from three different angles. These three poems all explore motherhood in a personal, political, and cultural light. 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