Peer Draft

Evan Corson

Lit Engagements

3/13/2018

The Alternative canon

              

I believe Tupac and his poem “Life Through My Eyes” should be added to the alternative canon of literature. The experiences and events he has been through that he describes is what a lot of people have had to go through, not everyone has a good childhood and I think that’s the people he is connecting with in this poem. Tupac began his music career as a rebel with a cause to articulate the injustices endured by many African-Americans. His skill in doing so made him a spokesperson not just for his own generations but for the people who continue to face the same struggle for equality.

               The point of the alternative canon is to include works of writing that show different points of view, the truth about the wretched. In Georg M. Gugelberg’s ‘Decolonizing the Canon: Considerations of Third World Literature’ he says: “The issue then is not to integrate Third World literary works into the canon but to identify with "the wretched of the earth" and to learn from them--to learn from the Third World writer how to look into what is really going on in the world and why it has been going on and thus to learn about our own limitations”. I believe Tupac did just this with his “Life Through My Eyes” poem when he writes:

“Life through my bloodshot eyes

would scare a square 2 death

 poverty,murder,violence

and never a moment 2 rest”

he’s writing to the people who haven’t experienced what he has had to go through and wants the same equality as everyone else. I think this because of the first two lines, “Life through my bloodshot eyes would scare a square 2 death”. I looked up what he meant by referring to people as “squares” and it was described as “a person considered to be old-fashioned or boringly conventional”. Tupac isn’t only writing about his experiences, he is writing about the experiences the African-American culture in a whole has had to endure.