Sweet Flypaper of Life - Xiongyue Yu Journal Entry 3 02/01/2023

 The Sweet Flypaper of Life offers a vivid
glimpse of the everyday lives of people in Harlem during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Artist Roy DeCarava and author Langston Hughes have created a seamless integration of images and text with this creative collaboration. Their work extends beyond providing observations and enhances our understanding of what is seen, heard, and felt in Harlem’s black community. The description is given through the perspective of a grandmother, who guides the audience through the sights and sounds of the city. Photographs taken by DeCarava illustrate the poverty in the Harlem community through filthy, broken sidewalks, as well as the optimism and hope for the future found in newly constructed housing projects. By providing an intimate reflection of the complex lives of black Americans during a historic time of change, this collaboration provides an underlying critique of the stereotypical, traditional, and often reductive portrayals of black Americans in mainstream media. 

A photograph (pp.68) that especially stood out to me was a woman standing in her white dress. The scene is sharply divided between sunlight and darkness. The woman stands in the sunlight while across from her is a dark lot that is strewn with trash and rubble. As I see it, the image conveyed a compelling message and had a deeper significance during this period of transition in history. The woman represents the people of Harlem who are waiting for promises, such as desegregation, and holding on to hope for the future yet standing on the edge of uncertainty.




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