As I analysed Barbara Kingsolver’s Naming Myself and Sandra Cisneros I noticed the concept of both poems are very similar. The concept of both poems is both Sandra and Barbara talk about their family’s history and how it doesn't represent them. Both poems mentioned their names having a bad history and both of them disliking their names. In Barbara Kingsolver’s Naming Myself, her first ancestor stole a horse and married a Cherokee . “I have touched his boots and moustache, the grandfather whose people owned slaves and cotton. He was restless in Virginia among the gentleman brothers, until one peppered, flaming autumn he stole a horse, rode over the mountains to marry a leaf-eyed Cherokee.” Here’s a man who own slaves and yet he stole a horse …show more content…
She described as wild as a horse and so wild that she wouldn’t marry someone. “Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off.” Her grandmother was forced to marry her great-grandfather. She was kidnapped and she never forgave him. “She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.” She spent the rest of her life in sadness making her name sad. Sandra describes her name in multiple ways. For example, “It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.” She thinks her name is depressing because it’s backstory. She wishes to change it because of its meanings. Even though Sandra and Barbara's poems are different, they’re similar in way. There’s no doubt the concept of these two poems are the same. Even though the history behind their names is different. They both share the same point of view of their names: shame. Both talk about their history and both want nothing to do with their name because it doesn’t represent them. They dislike the origins of the names, it’s history of an ancestor befouling the family name. However, just because the poems share the same message and tone, it doesn’t mean the history is the