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Sing Unburied Sing Lee Analysis

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Best of the Worst Parenting is never perfect. Every parents questions whether they are raising their child correctly, and no parent ever feels like they are doing the right thing. With no clear distinction between good and bad parenting, it is usually left to personal preferences and judgements to decide which parents have adequately raised their children and which have failed. When a parent so call “fails,” often it is the children with their strong will and determination to survive that collectively raise themselves. In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, Leonie, one of the narrators and the mother of another narrator, Jojo, is not the most caring, hands-on mother, but is loving of her children nevertheless. Leonie is not just the failed mother most make her out to be because her thoughts are in the right place, trying the best she can given her own circumstances, but her past and her own childhood haunts her too …show more content…

Firstly, Jojo does “not hear Mama in my head, but her name: Leonie” (16), which shows that on a subconscious level, he does not think of her as a maternal figure. Jojo fails to recognize Leonie as a maternal figure because she does such a poor job taking care of him. On the car ride up to Parchman, Leonie leaves both Jojo and Kayla hungry and thirsty the whole way up and only thinks of herself when she stops for gas: “Leonie hands me the same thirty dollars I saw Misty hand to her when she got in the car this morning and looks at me like she didn’t hear me say I’m thirsty” (64). Having not eaten in a long time, “[Jojo is so] hungry and thirsty: [his] throat a closing hand, [his] stomach a burning fist…now [Leonie] says no” (84). Since Leonie doesn’t even take care of Jojo and Kayla’s basic survival needs of food and water, she forces Jojo and Kayla to fight for their own survival and figure out their childhoods

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and she just wants her family to be safe. Sang Ly thinks of herself as just a poor mother in a waste dump while everyone else in the dump sees her as an affectionate mother who loves her family. At the end of the day, Sang Ly must live day by day just trying to learn to read, trying to cure her son's chronic illness and making sure everyone makes it so sun down. Sang Ly has many wonderful traits about her. Sang Ly is caring because she tries so hard for her son, Nisay to be well

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“Free-Range Kids,” offers the controversial perspective of the ‘free-range’ parenting philosophy, telling readers that “children deserve parents who love them, teach them, trust them—and then let go of the handlebars”. Similarly, the speech given by Julie Lythcott-Haim, “How to raise successful kids without over-parenting” offers the perspective directly opposing the belief that “kids can’t be successful unless parents are protecting and preventing at every turn”. The two texts offer similar perspectives, but utilise different generic conventions. Skenazy utilizes persuasive techniques such as anecdotal evidence, statistics and expert opinion to endorse the ‘free-range’ technique and add a level of validity. She uses satire to criticise parents,

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In the novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Jojo and Kayla often fail to be cared for by their parents, Leonie and Michael, due to their drug addictions. At home, the true nurturers of Jojo and Kayla are Pop and Jojo, himself. Throughout the novel, caregivers provide food, assist the sick, and hide information which contributes to effective nurturing. Feeding or giving food is an effective way of caretaking.

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Sing Unburied Sing, written by Jesynm Ward, and published in 2017, Develops a social commentary about generational trauma with author tools like allusion and characterization of people in the book, JoJo, Michel, and Given. Jesynm Ward uses the characterization of Jojo to develop generational trauma, which are horrible experiences that pass across generations, from parents to children, by either witnessing or being a part of some violence. In Sing Unburied Sing, Ward illustrates black injustices on page 170 is about the time Jojo and the others got pulled over, and because of some of their skin colors, they are treated differently, which demonstrates the injustices that had been happening in Jojo’s past generations. “The man telling me to sit,

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Without balance in life the scales can tip and a child may not develop in a healthy manner. Some parents can never be classified as “good” simply because they let their problems or outside issues obstruct care for their

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