The tears of our ancestorsEach journey of our ancestors circulates in our lives a bit like the blood in our veins, like the water of a river. However, it is impossible to improve if we do not identify the past that shapes our future. It is by recognizing these moments in our past that we transcend to a destination worthy of the golden light of mortality. It is thus that I attempt in the following paragraphs to assess what is the impact of our heritage which survives us, and how our links with our ancestors can be enriched with an example focused on the poem by Langston Hughes “Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Through the experiences of hardship and oppression within my own family and their descendants, I discover that I can also find a connection to the injustice inherent in slavery that the writer attempted to convey in his poem . As a reader, I am compelled to delve into Langston Hughes' Poem on Rivers. When rain falls on the earth and is soaked, it forms the basis of life; our bodies are 65% water, and Langston Hughes presents the symbolism of water as representative of the continuing spirit of life; Hughes begins the poem by talking about how rivers are "old as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins." Thus, from Hughes' point of view, it seems obvious that human life seems temporary, whereas water is eternal and is a continuation of what remains. “My soul grew deep like rivers” allegorically emphasizes that his soul will become deeper, representing the accumulation of knowledge from his ancestors. If we were to use anthropology as a means of measuring human development over a long period of time, for example, the histo...... middle of paper ...... through the literary devices of the poem, we would be able to create a text from what was collected. As the poem takes the reader on a journey across the African continent, condensing and connecting his ancestors to his contemporary times; his generation and many before him were still indelibly haunted by the injustices of slavery. Thus, Hughes perhaps felt that he needed to pass on the memories of the generations of African Americans who had preceded him, in order to preserve their legacy for posterity. Otherwise, over time, who would remember the legacy of slavery, if it had not been written to cultivate its tragedy and horror through the re-symbolism conveyed to objectively incite the reader to examine their own objections to texts and why certain symbolism appears in their first impressions of the text itself.