Inner Thoughts

 For this blog on Sweat I chose the prompt regarding the career of Lynn Nottage based on "making invisible people visible".     To begin with, throughout Sweat we can see the contrast between two different worlds. One on a global scale and one within Reading (the setting for the play). This contrast can be seen before every scene. For example, in Scene 1 of Act 1, it is stated that the "Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 776.68 points"(5).This is contrasted with the people of Reading celebrating at the "Annual Fall Festival" at a farm (5). For the people of Reading, the outside world is "invisible" and vice versa. While the world is undergoing massive change, many citizens are oblivious to it. The changes to the world are quite literally "invisible" to the people of Reading. Even though the world itself is invisible, the effects are not. The effects of NAFTA for example, have influenced all areas. Even in Reading, people are being laid

     For this blog, I chose to analyze the poem "As I Grew Older" by Langston Hughes.       In the poem "As I Grew Older", Langston Hughes uses specific word choice to convey his message on how it is increasingly difficult for black people to achieve their dream in a racist world and the only way to move past this is to take matters into their own hands.      To begin with, Langston references the hopes of the marginalized people as a "dream" and how it is a "forgotten" one. A dream is typically referred to something that people yearn for but usually is difficult or not possible to achieve. This immediately sets up the idea that the freedom that the people are yearning for is something far out of reach and "forgotten" by the people due to the oppression. This idea is further cemented when Hughes mentions how a "wall rose" between his dream and himself. A wall so "thick" and high that it dimmed the light of his dream.