The way they take a phrase as the ‘theme’ of a segment of rhetoric, but instead of saying it at the start of each stanza, they say it at the end and then leave a pause. Martin Luther King did it constantly in his most famous speeches, including “I have a dream”:
The phrase ‘I have a dream’ was clearly the start of each sentence, but instead he says it at the end of the previous one and then leaves a pause. He used the same device with ‘If I had sneezed:’ in his famous mountaintop speech. Gil Scott-Heron uses essentially the same device in the Revolution Will Not Be Televised. I think it’s really effective at creating a powerful rhythm to the rhetoric - it’s almost overpowering in some of MLK’s speeches, the audience starts whooping and hollering in each pause - but it’s something I’ve only ever noticed black rhetoricians doing. I’d be interested to hear other examples if there are any.
Other than MLK, I’ve rarely heard this, so I wouldn’t say it was something unique to African American speech. If anything, I think this is more a preacher thing than a black thing.
What other examples are there? Who else does it? Is there a poetic term for it?
As a note: I didn’t mean to suggest it’s a general African-American thing, I meant it’s something I’ve only ever heard used by African-American orators (like preachers and spoken word artists).
That famous “Yes We Can” part of that Obama speech that Will.I.Am turned into that slightly cringey song is indeed a good example of the same device: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe751kMBwms#t=10m48s. I’ve heard Obama use it in small doses on other occasions as well, but he tends to stay away from going as far as that with it.
Well, we don’t have audio of Jesus, but he starts the sermon on the mount similarly. I picture a pause between them as Jesus tells the crowd the exact opposite of what they expect.
Exactly. The repetition of a phrase at the start of a sentence is called ‘anaphora’, and at the end of a sentence it’s called ‘epistrophe’. But I’m talking about the specific variant on those that black speakers like MLK, Obama and Gil Scott-Heron have used: technically they’re repeating the same phrase at the start of each sentence, but what they actually do is tack the repeated phrase onto the end of each previous sentence and then leave a pause before carrying on. It lends a powerful structure and momentum to the passage when it’s used in the right way.
I’ve often thought of it as a variant of call and response - which has African roots as a communication device in public gatherings (and in music, but other cultures, notably Indian, use it in music as well). I’m not saying it is call and response, but my inexpert ears hear some similarities.
Actually listening again, I guess it works both ways, “yes we can” might be at the beginning of the following line with a pause in between or it might be the end of the line without a pause. So nevermind.
I think the answer to your question is simply epistrophe. I would disagree with you, in the case of King’s speech, that he clearly was beginning the next sentence with the first words and then a lengthy pause. He may have done that a time or two, but those were transitional elements, where he went from establishing “I have a dream” as anaphora and morphing it to epistrophe. (In my mind, one of the many satisfying rhetorical elements of the speech). But by the time he was done with the morphing, “I have a dream, today” was clearly serving as punctuation at the end of his strophes.
Because, you see, he was picking up the next strophes with “I have a dream” again. So in terms of rhetorical labels, the things we have in play (besides anaphora and epistrophe, both of which he was clobbering us with) are repetition, cadence, and rhythm. Those will probably loosely cover it. For something new, we might consider anaphora and epistrophe simultaneous, in a bookend fashion.
On the “Revolution Will Not be Televised,” it just looks like plain epistrophe to me.
I think it’s even clearer in this “If I had sneezed…” section of his final speech. I think that clearly has to be the start of each sentence, but he leaves the pause after it. But you’re probably right that it’s just a combination of anaphora/epistrophe and pausing.
It appears that both anaphora and epistrophe refer to the repetition, not the pause, and the OP included the pause as part of the question. Or perhaps it’s the placement of the pause, shifting it from the most conventional place – between parallel phrases – to somewhere else for dramatic effect?
Isn’t a pause like that similar to one Paul Harvey used, not to mention the device William Shatner is ridiculed for?