19 pages • 38 minutes read
Amanda GormanThe Hill We Climb
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical and Social Context
Gorman’s poem and career are direct responses to a number of social factors, including the Black Lives Matter movement, the #MeToo movement, and the presidency of Donald Trump. Much of Gorman’s poetry focuses on issues facing women and Black people in America during the 2010s and throughout American history. She writes about the injustices of society against the oppressed, and her activism focuses on bettering the lives of those whom America has traditionally kept at the bottom.
For activists on the political left, Donald Trump’s presidency represented a return to xenophobia, racism, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia. When he ran for President in 2016, Trump campaigned on the deportation of Hispanic people and the outlawing of Muslim immigrants. During the campaign, multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct; he used sexist and demeaning rhetoric to divide his followers from the rest of the country. When he became President, Trump did not change his rhetorical approach, pushed policies that many people saw as regressive, and created a culture of antagonism.
Early in Trump’s presidency, the #MeToo movement—a reckoning with sexism, sexual harassment, and misogyny—took off, igniting a cultural shift in the way people saw gender. Feminist activists saw Trump, a believer in traditional gender roles, as an example of a patriarchal society that oppressed women.
Around the same time, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, focusing on the treatment of Black people by police, was also gaining steam. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 galvanized the movement, setting off nation-wide protests that sometimes escalated into violence. Donald Trump’s reaction to Floyd’s murder and his comments about the protestors, which equated their activism with the actions of violent White supremacists during the Charlottesville protests in 2017, marked the former president as an enemy for those pushing for social justice.
Gorman came of age during all of this, and the impact of the events of the Trump presidency permeate her poetry. She has been vocal about her opposition to Trump and the political right, and her poetry echoes that political position.
Activist Art
There is a long history of artists using their art as political activism, creating everything from pro-government propaganda to anti-government and anti-war literature and art. Famous 20th century examples in the visual arts include Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), an anti-Nazi and anti-war painting. In literature, playwrights like Arthur Miller, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, and poets like Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes railed against social inequalities and brought attention to oppression they experienced.
Gorman joins a long list of artists who have pushed political ideologies as the central message of their art, and she falls in neatly with some of the political art produced in the late 2010s. Particularly, her poetry connects with the protest and activist art of the BLM movement.
While there is a long history of activist art, there is also a risk in it. Because activist art takes a firm political position, it can alienate large sections of potential readership. Gorman’s poem tries to avoid this by including all readers and audience members into the poem’s collective first-person plural speaker. Though Gorman has her share of political detractors, she writes at a time of great cultural introspection; the social movements of the late 2010s have elevated voices that society has traditionally silenced or ignored. Gorman’s poetry has found a readership in the growing section of the population that is eager for change and progress.
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By Amanda Gorman
