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At the beginning of the poem, the speaker has a tone that demonstrates aggravation and shame towards her mother. During the description of the mother, Hogan worded it in a way the reader could interpret as a negative connotation, which was later made clearer when Hogan pronounced the Grandmother’s hatred toward the white settlers. The speaker’s father, uncle, Grandfather, and Grandmother were all Native Americans, who were constantly removed from their land, where their farms and homes were destroyed by the prospective oil dreamers. “It was the brown stain that covered my white skirt, my whiteness a shame” (28) By inserting this line into the poem, Hogan was able to show what the speaker was really thinking. A lesser author would have put that line at the beginning of the poem, leaving no imagination for the reader.
“Jugged Hare” features a bleak outlook into a relationship and describes it as a macabre experience. The poem is defined by the Jugged Hare and sets the tone for the poem as a dark and grisly mood. The Hare represents how the woman feels and could be a symbol of her own life and relationship, how she sacrifices this all for her husband. Differently in tone, “My Box” shows the experiences and moments a couple has experienced, unlike “Jugged Hare” while it only really describes the Woman as the main focus. “My Box” is almost like a recount describing how their relationship has only got stronger and evolved into the one it is today.
For many, people hold objects within their lives as sentiments of greater value than price. Whether it be pictures, necklaces, or a father’s watch; there lies an emotional connection beyond the object’s materialistic presence in which people hold dear. Themes of reminiscence as well reverence are displayed throughout the poem by the use of imagery to further convey the character’s hope that the quilt will represent her family’s heritage just as her grandmothers did, alongside an ethos application of symbolism that further portrays as well connects the emotional links of generations, diversity, and values. The first theme of reminiscence is displayed by tone as well diction in which the author portrays that the quilt allows the woman to create a feeling of connection to her family 's past as well her own. The quilt allowed the woman to feel as though she could potentially “have good dreams for a hundred years,” as mentioned throughout lines twenty and twenty-one just as her Meema.
Writers and poets often spread deep meaning in ordinary things: bowl can represent our parents’ heritage, food can represent our relationships with people and chocolate bar can be a symbol of childhood or green tea can be a symbol of love. Those simple things can be really meaningful, but mostly all authors understood the meaning of those objects and the value of the moments that they had lived only after several years. To take things for granted is a human nature, isn’t it? Children usually don’t listen to the voice of their parents, but when they grow up they understand how precious those lessons were.
Many people have traditions in their family that they must continue. Cathy Song explains how two Chinese women explore the lives when one is in America, and the other is in China. No matter where the sisters are, China or America, or what they do, there will always be a connection between them and their native country and culture that their current nation cannot supersede. Cathy Song wants to explain that by moving to America, one woman in the poem does not want to continue her Chinese heritage. The narrator wants the reader to understand the struggles of the sister who moved to America over losing her connection to her childhood and the culture she was raised in and were she came from by using symbolism.
Some poems are lengthy, and some poems can be very short, however when analyzed, they all express a deeper message. For example, when examining the poem, "The Changeling," by Judith Ortiz Cofer, the reader can easily spot the important message which the author is trying to reveal to the reader through the use of poetic devices. When closely reading this poem, the language and the terminology applied by Cofer enhances the readers ability to make connections between the theme of this poem and how it can be applied to real world scenarios. The poetic devices incorporated into the poem, "The Changeling," reflect on how young children interpret gender roles in their own way.
Her daughter Pearl was not a ordinary child in any ways comparing to others, she has a tendency of asking question and ridicule her mother often. Pearl took some grass and imitated her mother as best she could on her own bosom the decoration of letter A which is as same like of her mother’s. In this same instance she keeps on questioning “What does the letter mean, mother? And why does you wear it?
As a child, she recognized that her imitation of ‘White” afforded opportunities of mobility, education, acceptance and privilege. Her mother’s appearance as “Black” afforded opportunities of poverty, inferiority, and inequality. So, she fails to mention her mother’s identity and occupation to classroom peers and teacher. Sarah Jane wants cultural assimilation and white privilege.
Asian American Cathy Song drew closer to her Korean-Chinese ancestry, and was able to describe in a clear image of the two women she represent, one being the industrial American women and the other one being the Chinese caretaker. Cathy Song was born and raised in Hawaii making her an American by birth right. This fact did not keep her from engulfing her Korean-Chinese heritage. In the poem “Lost Sister”, Song isolates a young girl who struggles to find who she truly is in China, because of all the restrictions. The young girl wants to go to America to seek a needed fulfilment.
She opens her poem saying, “When day comes we ask ourselves, /‘where can we find light in this never ending shade,’” (Gorman, 2021). In this way, Gorman immediately creates a sense of unity and togetherness by bonding the audience to herself and to each other as a ‘we’. She unreservedly states that they are unified in their identity and that they, as Americans, have together experienced an environment that perpetuates the light-and-dark dichotomy. Further, she implies that this dichotomy is not necessarily natural, as if it were, they would not come to the eventuality that they did not want to live in a shaded world alone.
Everyone defines and identifies themselves in different ways. Whether it’s by our names, our religion, or our sexuality, we all have something different that make us unique and that we identify ourselves as. In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use,” an African American woman tells the story of her daughter Dee’s long awaited visit. Upon her arrival the mother and her other daughter, Maggie, discover some drastic changes in Dee: she has changed her name to Wangero, she has also arrived with a mysterious man who calls himself Asalamalakim, and has adopted an African style of dress; all of this in an effort to depict what she sees as her heritage. During the course of her visit, Dee tries to take several items important to her family’s heritage.
The speaker uses both alliteration and imagery to compare herself to “famous flowers glowing in the garden” (22). This image and repetition of consonants is used to both show the speaker as a metaphorical center of attention in her children’s lives and emphasize her intentions. The speaker also notices her daughters only talk about “morsels of their [own] history” instead of asking their parents (27). Here, it can be inferred that the speaker resents her daughter’s choices to independently find answers to their own questions and stray away from their mothers
The vivid imagery contrasts considerably with the speaker’s identity, highlighting the discrepancy between her imagined and true personas. The speaker undergoes a symbolic transformation into a boy, but in order to do so, she must cast away her defining features as a woman. One way she does this is by repositioning
but I do not think about what that means nor what means for my other identities nearly as much as I probably should. While the captured Africans, repressed Native Americans, and the European settlers that fragmented them are all parts of my ancestry and have led to my current identity, my identity now is so vastly different from their modern counterparts. Let me begin with the dominate culture that makes up the bulk of my identity, African
The poem begins with the speaker looking at a photograph of herself on a beach where the “sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush” (Trethewey l. 5-7). The beach is an area where two separate elements meet, earth and water, which can represent the separation of the different races that is described during the time that her grandmother was alive and it can also represent the two races that are able to live in harmony in the present day. The clothing that the two women wear not only represent how people dressed during the different time periods, but in both the photographs of the speaker and her grandmother, they are seen standing in a superman-like pose with their hands on “flowered hips” (Trethewey l. 3,16). The flowers on the “bright bikini” (Trethewey l. 4) are used to represent the death of segregation, similar to how one would put flowers on a loved one’s grave, and on the “cotton meal sack dress” (Trethewey l. 17) it is used to symbolize love and peace in a troubled society.