African Heritage
The poet incorporates African-American vernaculars and other forms like haiku into his poems. This signified an important transition in Black Arts when poets were no longer limited by their language barriers, finally free to explore their creativity as they see fit. Knight pays a lot of tribute to African ancestors through philosophical and aesthetic poetry that embodies the African culture. His work has a lot of accurate representation of Africa that Knight’s poems are regarded as key texts in the detailed account of the African-American heritage.
Incarceration
Through the poems, Knight transports the reader into life in prison. The speaker contemplates using his future freedom for the betterment of society. As he lays down to sleep behind prison walls, he brings the reader into his shoes as he grows restless and desperate for freedom. The author also highlighted the slave mentality that has been nurtured in the prison system. Knight concludes that the ultimate prison is that specifically designed laws that are meant to keep black people in check and censor powerful black voices forever trapping them in an inescapable system of racism and oppression.
Freedom
Probably the most important thing in Knight’s poems is his affinity for freedom. Through the carefully crafted tributes to Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, Knight shines a light on the value of freedom. It’s not enough to be physically free, we need free ourselves mentally from predilections that were deliberately incorporated into black lives to control and mitigate them. The conscious mind is the freest aspect of the human condition and it needs to remain like that if we have any hope of achieving true freedom.
