"Compressed emotions," that is the explanation a teacher once gave to the ongoing question, "What is poetry?" He said it was someone's deepest emotions, as if you were reading them right out of that person's mind, which in that case would not consist of any words at all. If someone tells you a story, it is usually like a shell. Rarely are all of the deepest and most personal emotions revealed effectively. A poem of that story would be like the inside of the shell. It personifies situations, and symbolizes and compares emotions with other things in life. Louise Erdrich's poem Indian Boarding School puts the emotions of a person or group of people in a setting around a railroad track. The feelings experienced are compared to things from the setting, which takes on human characteristics.
Louise Erdrich was born part German, part American Indian. Since the title and other references in the poem refer to Indian people, it is most likely that this poem was very personal to her. The boarding school may have been a real place she went to, or where mistreatment of her people was not uncommon, or it could simply be a tool she used to express racism towards them in general. With that fact, the reader must remember that although the words are from the runaways' point of view, there are not necessarily any real runaways.
From the point of view at which this is told, the runaways are eager to find their way home. They do not necessarily really try to runaway, it may just be in their fantasies, "Home's the place we head for in our sleep." (line 1). The first use of personification is in the line, "The rails, old lacerations that we love,"(line 4). It is not yet quite clear why Erdrich would compare the train tracks with old lacerations until the lines, "shoot parallel across the face and break just under the Turtle Mountains." (lines 5-6). Mountains are definite things that are physical in nature. Train tracks on a face are hard to imagine, so it leads us to believe it has some deeper meaning. This reveals that the children want to run away from the boarding school for more serious matters than just good old home-sickness. The "old lacerations" may represent wounds on their own faces, internal or external. Visually, train tracks look like wounds that were stitched and scarred. The Turtle Mountains must relate ...
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...d when it dried. That was the time when they remembered "delicate" injuries. Injuries that a child gets while playing or falling, not from bigotry or violence. Now those things are only memories.
It is very likely that Louise Erdrich experienced some kind of racism or prejudice in her lifetime. Segregation laws were still in use while she was growing up in the fifties, and in the sixties, many of the same people still felt racist, with or without the laws. Boarding schools were not an exception to this fact either. School authorities probably did take advantage of the fact that boarding schools are away from home and not under the watchful eye of any parent. This poem demonstrates the truth of what it really felt and feels like to have lived through such bad treatment. It is disturbing to think that instead of just learning at school, Louise Erdrich, amongst other children, may have learned what it felt like to be hated. At such early ages, they taught these children that the way they were treated was how the world was supposed to be. It displays the painful scars embedded so deeply into a child, from a time that should have been the most nurturing part of his/her life.
If god was all good, all powerful and all knowing, he would not allow the existence of evil.
Even though this poem is pretty tame compared to the others, it still has a much deeper meaning. David is wondering why the camp was so bad, all he remembers is playing a few games, and with a bit of famine. David's mother doesn’t really understand why he doesn’t remember how bad it was. This show how bad the internment camps were for keeping families together, even after they were dismantled. Alongside this, the camps kept people from partaking in cultural events, hobbies “mostly we were bored” (Mura 9). This shows how between the two generations, they can have vastly different views on how bad the internment camps
...ites a short 33-line poem that simply shows the barriers between races in the time period when racism was still openly practiced through segregation and discrimination. The poem captures the African American tenant’s frustrations towards the landlord as well as the racism shown by the landlord. The poem is a great illustration of the time period, and it shows how relevant discrimination was in everyday life in the nineteen-forties. It is important for the author to use the selected literary devices to help better illustrate his point. Each literary device in the poem helps exemplify the author’s intent: to increase awareness of the racism in the society in the time period.
...the death of her husband and father, she finally decides to move on and forget about her husband and father completely. She succeeds in doing so for awhile, but five months after writing the poem, the speaker commits suicide, leading the reader to believe that she had some sort of a mental issue and was never able to completely, like she thought she would be able to. It is sad that the narrator had such a hard time moving on and was majorly depressed, but sometimes it is better to move on life and not dwell on the past.
As with any disease there are factors that may put one at more risk for developing the disease. The most common risk factor is age. After 65, the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease doubles every 5 years - this means as you age you are more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Although, in early onset, people can be diagnosed as early as in their thirties - there are 500,000 people in America living with early onset Alzheimer’s. Being female is another risk factor. Women are more likely than men to be living with Alzheimer’s. Two-thirds of people living with Alzheimer’s in America are women. Another risk factor is genetic predisposition or family history. Some avoidable risk factors involve head injury and heart health...
In Hayden’s poem “The Whippings,” the readers are given a more direct vision of what Hayden experienced at the hand of his foster mother. Hayden writes the poem in third person as he reminisces about how his mother “strikes and strikes the shrilly circling boy till the stick breaks,” and how “his tears are rainy weather to wound like memories” (The Whipping 1). He then ends the poem with by saying “… and the woman leans muttering against a tree, exhausted, purged—avenged in part for life long hidings she has to bear” (The Whipping 1). We see through the eyes of Hayden himself, that his foster mother would go far beyond a simple disciplinary punishment. Instead, she beat him in order to release her own frustrations for the demons in her life. Her actions filled Hayden’s childhood memories with pain and sorrow, and we see that through his own recollections in “The Whippings,” and “Those Winter Sundays” alike. In the poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Hayden’s choices in diction like the words “cracked,” and “ached” initiate the gloomy tone of the poem, and reflect the pain that derived from his relationship with his foster mother, which also could be a reason for the purposeful absence of Hayden’s foster mother in the poem (Howells 288-289). The reader also interprets that Hayden’s painful memories of being beaten and tormented as part of the unspecified “chronic angers” that haunt
Many people say that God does exist even know there is unnecessary evil in the world. There are many reasons to why people believe God is real, for starters, they believe that without the bad, there is no good. In other words, if bad things didn’t happen in the world then we wouldn’t know that good things existed. Another way people justify evil in the world is by stating that if there was no evil and God prevented all bad things, there would be no virtues. In “Why doesn’t God intervene to prevent evil?” the author points out the fact that “without the suffering there would be no occasion for the production of such virtues as courage, sympathy, and the like” (Johnson 122). Take for example an alcoholic parent who throws their 5 year old child out on the street to fend for itself and the child ends up getting hit by a car. Some people would say that God didn’t help the child because he wanted someone to gain courage from the situatio...
She slightly touches the poem with a sense of humor and then, her poem turns into something cohesive. Her serene voice was full of deep and thoughtful reminiscence of her experiences. Throughout the Q&A session, I realized how poets start their writing out of their experiences. Bell Crew was influenced by her experiences of living down in suburban Iowa where she enjoyed the rural landscape of the church, school, and farms. What is poetry? This is the question one of the audiences asked her. I think poetry is just a melted pot of freshly cooked ideas served in one plate. Willis talked how everything she writes is just a mere rough draft, but she rarely revises them, because she wants them to be honest. Sometimes, she would memorize her poem to carry the words in her bloodstream. When I was growing up in Russia, reciting Russian poetry was an everyday requirement. Sometimes, I would forget the words, become anxious, and that just led me to hate poetry. Now, I realize the essence of the ritual we were taught: our literature teacher just wanted us to breathe in the poetry and carry the words of the great Russian poets in our bloodstream. And I think that it’s never too late to start again the adventure into the
I watched Indian School: Stories of Survival (Films Media Group). In this documentary, Native Americans ( from many different tribes) speak about their experience with ethnocide. Ethnocide, according to the textbook is “the destruction of a group’s culture, without necessarily killing any of the members of the culture” (Eller 235). In this particular case, they speak on Indian boarding schools, which were created to essentially erase Native American culture and idealogies. Children at 7-8 years old, would be taken from their homes and sent to various places. This was so the children were spread out to ensure that a bunch of children from the same tribe would not end up in the same place. These children would experience emotional, physical and spiritual abuse, in order to ensure that all remnants of their culture were extinguished and would return home at 17-18 years old, an entirely different person. Thus, boarding schools were created to assimilate children to live and participate in a white society. This was brought on by white settlers in the 19th century, as they wanted the Native Americans to minimize their ideologies and instead practice American culture. Americans regarded the Native Americans with either fear or saw them as inferior, and reformers believed that
In most of the countries where sweatshops exist, the natives suffer from serious issues, such as poverty and sex trafficking (Balko, 2006). Therefore, working at a sweatshop for little pay is better than the alternatives. Even though sweatshop workers endure a lot of suffering, it remains the lesser of two evils. They also state that many powerful nations, such as the United States, owe their success to child labor, which takes place in sweatshops (Balko, 2006). Without it, they claim, certain nations would not currently be prosperous. As for the consumers, it lowers the prices of their favorite clothing items. Sweatshops simply cheat the system, therefore making its products seem cheap compared to other businesses that actually follow the costly legal
When reading or listening to poetry, the main objective for me is to feel moved. Happiness, longing, sadness are some of the feelings that can be achieved just by listening to others’ words. It is within these words that creates another world, or separates us from our own. Words all have a certain kind of attachment to them, so if used properly an author can stimulate a reader beyond belief.
There are many cities in the United States of America, which are very popular for quality education. New York City is one among those popular cities. Yes, this city is not just popular for skyscrapers and bright lights; you also get a top class education. There are many popular universities for those parents who want to provide quality education for their kids. Along with the top universities, you also have many boarding schools in New York City. Here is the list of most Expensive Boarding Schools in New York City:
Personally I think that sweat shops are a necessity in some country. In the small poor country around the world they are struggling for jobs and income. When a big company Like H&M or GAP come in and create a factory or sweat shop it creates jobs for the people. In our eyes being wealthy Americans that most of our parents have minimum wage jobs or better we can look at a sweatshop or a factory and complain about the horrid working conditions and the terrible pay. For the people in those counties tho it is normal or even good. It is better to have a Job that pays little and is in bad working conditions then to not have a job and not be able to provide for your family or starve
Alta Gracia in Bangladesh is an established business that is paying its workers three times minimum wage of the country. They do not make their employees work absurd hours. The employees’ overtime paychecks also do not go missing. The workers at Alta Gracia are able to take frequent breaks. Even though they pay their employees more, Alta Gracia still makes a profit (Bhasin). This is what all companies that are named sweatshops should try to do. They should all look at what they are doing and start to treat their employees better. All that has to be done to stop sweatshops is to start petitions and inform people about them. There are many different petitions and organizations against sweatshops out there. They need to drive for people to join them and support the
Author Dudley Randall wrote this poem to show that children were racism victims of the civil rights movement. Children didn't even know half the things that were going on at that time. Like in the poem the mother didn't even want her daughter to march beside her. The mother knew what dangers there would be , the kid did not. As in turns of events the mother left her child in the church thinking her daughter was secured and safe. When she came back it was bombed and the church had fallen