Tag Archives: Bushra Rehman

How Does a Poet Teach Persuasive Writing?

It’s not as hard as it seems.  For who is more adept at the art of persuasion than poets and revolutionaries?  When I think of who convinced me to drop my fears and limitations, my boundaries, to pick up my anger or to set it down again, to love or to know when to cut love off, to stand for life even when it meant injury, I think of the poetic revolutionaries: Alice Walker, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.

For one of my first lessons for a persuasive writing residency at a high school, I shared SojournerTruth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech given during the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.  A debate was raging about whether women “deserved” the right to vote.  After a male critic stated women were too physically, thus mentally, weak to vote, Sojourner stepped to the podium and spoke: “The man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or give me any best place! And aint’ I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” (more...)