Chris Abani's The New Religion

Chris Abani’s poem, “The New Religion,” suggest that with the inherent presences of religion there becomes a sense of lack of enjoyment of the flesh, of worldly pleasures, thus causing an unintentional avoidance of pleasing yourself to ensure a concept of everlasting freedom after life. Through the use of dueling connotations, mood, and idiom, Abani is able to create a cynical theme of the universal movement to worldly pleasures leading mankind astray to an altered reality based on religious context to falsify ones’ identity. Abani’s use of the speakers’ dueling connotation in concern of this new-found religion sets up a satirical platform in analyzing a global abandonment from religious ideology to placing materialistic pleasures and gain …show more content…
The poet uses this device, much like the first one, as a satirical piece to poem in order to argue that worldly pleasures are comparable to that of being “in an unguarded moment of sun” (11) as if to imply that when exposed to joys of the flesh mankind is taken out of the shadows and allowed to be themselves, to gloat in their accomplishments much like how “God’s desire to smell his own armpit” (16-17) was through creating Christ in admiration of himself. However, though the audience is left thinking that worldly pleasures are goof for mankind, Abani ends on the note that God is to respond to us by saying “next time I will send you down as a dog to taste this pure hunger” (19-21) to express that if all we seek is to be pleased in life without any heavenly gain then we ought to be turned to pets to seek the admiration and simple attention we crave as a …show more content…
In particular Smith uses the character, Clara Bowden Jones, to show a notion of spiraling from her identity to become someone she sought to be in order to please society, or rather in the beginning, Ryan Topps. In doing so Clara abandons her cultural roots, being an immigrant from Jamaica and raised a strict Jehovah’s Witness, on the notion that narrator points out that there was a “half-conceived hope that Ryan Topps would save her?”(20) This notion leads to Clara wanting a different life, to experience the pleasures of the flesh, to enjoy life without fear of the ever-preceding doom of an apocalypse to fall on mankind. In abandoning all that roots her down to her identity Smith creates a metaphorical and physical loss for the character to show her abandonment when “Clara fell, knocking the teeth out of the top her mouth… Ryan it was because God had chosen Ryan as one of the saved and Clara as one of the unsaved” (Smith 37) as she is no longer tied to what makes her, her. From this point on Clara finds herself running, running from her past and hoping to find a new future, a future where she could stay true to herself rather than true to religion. This then creates a connection to Abani’s claim on abandoning religious premises to be destructive in nature, as