Wendy Rose’s poetry portfolio has a wide spectrum. Her personal identity poems and, more broadly, poems about native identity (some about tribes which, ironically, she has no direct connection to) are all works that reflect the journey many natives are on to discover who they are and their place in the world. Her quest to return to her Hopi ancestral roots in her personal poems, while sharing and understanding identity from native tribes far different from her own, are encapsulated in a selection of three poems: “Oh Father”, “Truganinny”, and “Throat Song: The Whirling Earth.” “Oh Father” is a reflection on meeting with her estranged father, a significant missing link to her Hopi ancestry. “Truganinny” and “Throat-Song” are native identity The ending lines describe jackrabbits that are easily spooked – representing her father’s character. The final line – “oh father / who am i?” – conveys her child-like vulnerability; and her lack of capitalization for ‘i’ underscores her feelings of unimportance. Her identity, fractured since childhood, is still unfulfilled. Unlike “Oh Father,” Rose takes on a more broad perspective on identity in “Truganinny.” While her imagery and diction are important, a thorough analysis of “Truganinny”’s structure brings a more intimate understanding of how Rose chose to enlighten her readers on native identity theft. To begin, “Truganinny” is divided into two parts: the epitaph and Truganinny’s monologue. Each section is symbiotic. At first, the epitaph’s purpose is to add important historical background to explain who Truganinny is and her reason for her monologue. Truganinny’s (“the last of the Tasmanians”) dying wish was not to be objectified like the “stuffed and mounted body of her husband,” but rather be buried “in the outback or the sea.” She was then “nevertheless stuffed and mounted and put on display for over eighty years.” From this epitaph, her reader begins the poem knowing three essential contextualizing details: Truganinny,
The speaker’s personal emotions emphasizes the poem’s theme since although his father is no longer with him in this world, the memory of his father will always live in his heart. Throughout the poem, Lee uses the sky, underground, and the heart to symbolize imagination, reality, and memory—emphasizing the poem’s theme of the remembrance of a loved one. Lee also uses repetition to convey the meaning of Little Father. The speaker repeatedly mentions “I buried my father…Since then…” This repetition displays the similarity in concepts, however the contrast in ideas. The first stanza focuses on the spiritual location of the speaker’s father, the second stanza focuses on the physical location of the father, and the third stanza focuses on the mental location of the speaker’s father. This allows the reader to understand and identify the shift in ideas between each stanza, and to connect these different ideas together—leading to the message of despite where the loved one is (spiritually or physically), they’ll always be in your heart. The usage of word choice also enables the reader to read in first person—the voice of the speaker. Reading in the voice of the speaker allows the reader to see in the perspective of the speaker and to connect with the speaker—understand
Shoemaker, Nancy. “ Native-American Women in History.” OAH Magazine of History , Vol. 9, No. 4, Native Americans (Summer, 1995), pp. 10-14. 17 Nov. 2013
Towards the climax of the passage, the young girl shares her perspective on her dad’s desire to help her achieve her academic goals. “Nothing’s more important than his books and vocabulary words. He might say I matter, but when he goes on a scavenger hunt for a book, I realize that I really don’t” (Lopez 26). This cite illustrates just how sightless the teenage narrator is because she fails to see that her father only left the dinner table to assist her and to do something generous, but from her perspective she takes it as her father abandoning her. I can infer that the child’s anger and feeling of not mattering, which led to her storming off to her room, could have easily been solved if she asked her father what his true intentions were in pushing Watership Down so hard during a nice family dinner. On the other hand, the dad in “Confetti Girl” simply doesn’t pay attention to his daughter’s feelings often enough, and that sets off a bomb of conflict in their relationship as well. At the end of the excerpt, the father stoops to find a book, but is so engrossed in his task that he practically treats his daughter as non-existent; she narrates the following emotion-filled line. “He doesn’t hear my angry, stomping footsteps” (Lopez 27). This cite portrays that the father is
The girl's mother is associated with comfort and nurturing, embodied in a "honeyed edge of light." As she puts her daughter to bed, she doesn't shut the door, she "close[s] the door to." There are no harsh sounds, compared to the "buzz-saw whine" of the father, as the mother is portrayed in a gentle, positive figure in whom the girl finds solace. However, this "honeyed edge of li...
Born and raised in a family of storytellers, it’s no wonder that this author, Louise Erdrich became a prolific writer. Louise was born in Little Falls, Minnesota. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, near the Chippewa Reservation with her mom, who had Native American roots and her dad who was of German descent. Her parents encouraged and challenged her at an early age to read, also to write stories and even paid her a nickel for each one that she wrote. Lorena Stookey states that Louise Erdrich’s style of writing is “like William Faulkner, she creates a fictional world and peoples it with multiple narrators whose voices commingle to shape her readers’ experience of that world” (Stookey 14). Louise writes this moving story “The Shawl” as she is haunted by the sorrows of the generations of her people, the Anishinaabeg. I initially saw this tale as a very complex reading, but after careful reading and consideration, saw it as a sad and compelling story.
The poem is written in the father’s point of view; this gives insight of the father’s character and
In the poem ¨My Father¨ by Scott Hightower, the author describes a rather unstable relationship with his now deceased father. Scott describes his father as a mix of both amazing and atrocious traits. The father is described as someone who constantly contradicts himself through his actions. He is never in between but either loving and heroic or cold and passive. The relationship between Scott and his father is shown to be always changing depending on the father’s mood towards him. He sees his father as the reason he now does certain things he finds bad. But at the end of it all, he owes a great deal to his father. Scott expresses that despite his flaws, his father helped shape the man he is today. Hightower uses certain diction, style, and imagery to
Early in the film , a psychologist is called in to treat the troubled child :and she calmed the mother with a statement to the effect that, “ These things come and go but they are unexplainable”. This juncture of the film is a starting point for one of the central themes of the film which is : how a fragile family unit is besieged by unusual forces both natural and supernatural which breaks and possesses and unites with the morally challenged father while the mother and the child through their innocence, love, and honesty triumph over these forces.
This passage defines the character of the narrators’ father as an intelligent man who wants a better life for his children, as well as establishes the narrators’ mothers’ stubbornness and strong opposition to change as key elements of the plot.
was no mother figure spoke of, just her father, which she lived with alone other then
In this poem, there is a young woman and her loving mother discussing their heritage through their matrilineal side. The poem itself begins with what she will inherit from each family member starting with her mother. After discussing what she will inherit from each of her family members, the final lines of the poem reflect back to her mother in which she gave her advice on constantly moving and never having a home to call hers. For example, the woman describes how her father will give her “his brown eyes” (Line 7) and how her mother advised her to eat raw deer (Line 40). Perhaps the reader is suggesting that she is the only survivor of a tragedy and it is her heritage that keeps her going to keep safe. In the first two lines of the poem, she explains how the young woman will be taking the lines of her mother’s (Lines 1-2). This demonstrates further that she is physically worried about her features and emotionally worried about taking on the lineage of her heritage. Later, she remembered the years of when her mother baked the most wonderful food and did not want to forget the “smell of baking bread [that warmed] fined hairs in my nostrils” (Lines 3-4). Perhaps the young woman implies that she is restrained through her heritage to effectively move forward and become who she would like to be. When reading this poem, Native American heritage is an apparent theme through the lifestyle examples, the fact lineage is passed through woman, and problems Native Americans had faced while trying to be conquested by Americans. Overall, this poem portrays a confined, young woman trying to overcome her current obstacles in life by accepting her heritage and pursuing through her
Change is one of the tallest hurdles we all must face growing up. We all must watch our relatives die or grow old, our pets do the same, change school or employment, and take responsibility for our own lives one way or another. Change is what shapes our personalities, it molds us as we journey through life, for some people, change is what breaks us. Watching everything you once knew as your reality wither away into nothing but memory and photographs is tough, and the most difficult part is continuing on with your life. In the novel Ceremony, author Leslie Silko explores how change impacted the entirety of Native American people, and the continual battle to keep up with an evolving world while still holding onto their past. Through Silko’s
The poem is about the early stages in the narrator’s pregnancy. The doctor gives her news that the baby may be unhealthy. In a state of panic, we see the narrator turning to the methods of her homeland and native people to carry her through this tough time, and ensure her child’s safe delivery into the world. Da’ writes, “In the hospital, I ask for books./Posters from old rodeos. /A photo of a Mimbres pot /from southern New Mexico /black and white line figures—/a woman dusting corn pollen over a baby’s head/during a naming ceremony. /Medieval women/ingested apples/with the skins incised with hymns and verses/as a portent against death in childbirth” (Da’). We not only see her turning to these old rituals of her cultural, but wanting the items of her cultural to surround her and protect her. It proves her point of how sacred a land and cultural is, and how even though she has been exiled from it, she will continue to count it as a part of her
It is a way to crucially engage oneself in setting the stage for new interventions and connections. She also emphasized that she personally viewed poetry as the embodiment of one’s personal experiences, and she challenged what the white, European males have imbued in society, as she declared, “I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
Her family life is depicted with contradictions of order and chaos, love and animosity, conventionality and avant-garde. Although the underlying story of her father’s dark secret was troubling, it lends itself to a better understanding of the family dynamics and what was normal for her family. The author doesn’t seem to suggest that her father’s behavior was acceptable or even tolerable. However, the ending of this excerpt leaves the reader with an undeniable sense that the author felt a connection to her father even if it wasn’t one that was desirable. This is best understood with her reaction to his suicide when she states, “But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.” (pg. 399)