Response to City Eclogue

    It took me a while to get into this book, City Eclogue by Ed Roberson. A lot of the material did not make much sense to me. In fact, it took about half of the book to really understand, at least what I think is understanding, what this book is all about. The bad grammar threw me through a lot of loops and it made for a more difficult read for something that should be quick and simple. I found myself going back and rereading a lot of the pages because something either didn't seem right or I just read over it too quickly to the point that the ending made no sense at all. So, for a while, it was a pretty difficult read just because of misunderstanding. It wasn't until page 52 that I thought I got my first glimpse of what this book was about.

    For me, page 52 stood out to me because it was written more like every other book I have read, no weird spaces in between words, no jumping all over the place, just straight forward, left to right. Well, there were some weird spaces; however, they didn't throw me off like they had been throughout the rest of the book. It was really from page 52 to page 56 that I felt like I was inside the head of someone for once in this book. I read it from a POV that wasn't my own. I think when it starts off with, "I'm awakened..." I get a whole new sense of the story. It's almost like a new beginning. Maybe that's why I felt like I understood the few pages more than the rest of the book. The use of the N-word in these pages was what really put it into perspective for me. I got the feeling that this book was about a black man, or black people in Africa back when slavery was more popular. 

    Coming off my new mindset for the book, I found another interesting example that basically jumped off the page at me while I was reading. On page 88, Open/Back Up (breadth of field), a whole stanza stands out, "...Black people get stopped regularly to show they have university I.D...." It is very clear now that this book is about racism and the struggle of black people during and before the Civil Rights movement. This one example really hit me hard though because I feel that black people still face a similar kind of struggle in today's world and it makes me question, why? If we've come so far from the beginning of this book to where we are now, in today's world, why do people still struggle like this? It opened my eyes to racism a bit more and really made me question some of the actions in the world we live in.