LITR 4332: American Minority Literature

Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2001

 Question 3. Thematic and stylistic analysis of a poem by a minority writer.  45 minutes to an hour. 

Choose one of the three sample poems provided. Write a complete essay on the expression of minority themes through stylistic techniques of the poem.

·        For the “thematic” aspect of your answer, relate the attitudes, situations, or values of the poem to those of minority identities in general and/or to the particular minority group under consideration. Refer to the course objectives. You must refer to ethnic minority considerations, but you may also discuss gender & class as minority categories.

·        For “stylistic” elements, answer “the style question”: How does the idea benefit from being written as a poem rather than in prose? Concentrate on poetic techniques or devices such as imagery, metaphors, sound, rhythms, etc. Estimate their effects on readers or listeners and their value to the development of the poem’s ideas

QUESTION #3

(Poem Selected  "November" by Linda Hogan)

Native American respect and worship the power and wonder of nature.  For Native Americans nature and life evolves in a cyclical pattern.  Creation is happening all the time, along with death or destruction.  This poem by Linda Hogan deals with the following objectives: 1b. "Voiceless and choiceless" 3b. The Native American alternate narrative of "loss and survival", 5a.  To help others hear the minority voice, and 5e.  To emphasize how all speaker and write may use common devices of human language.  This poem uses items found within nature to express the feeling of "voiceless and choiceless".  The corn in the field over and over tells the narrator "Shh".  The sow is choiceless in its fate, neither her prayers or her teats (her ability to birth other pigs) will save her.  However through the loss and through the death there is a sense of hope.  The narrator will walk into the sun and not the dark light.

The ending of the poem radiates a feeling of hope.  All the creatures of the earth are not simply blood sacrifices.   They will go to the sun, to the red mesa in the sky and live.  The sun will continue to burn causing the earth to forever live.  One of the reasons that this poem is so powerful is because of it's poetic devices and use of language.  It truly does help the reader to hear the minority voice and share in that experience (Obj 5a).  The poet beautifully personifies the rows of corn and the sky.  The corn speaks throughout the poem, hushing the sounds near it.  The poet personifies the sky as an old woman who "has opened her cape/ to show off the red inside".

The poet then uses a simile to compare the "old sky lady" and her red cape as being "like burning hearts".  The poet will walk with the "old sky lady" with the red burning inside of her.   The poet also uses other similes such as "birds beat the red air/  like a dusty rug".   Throughout the poem the color red is used over and over again.  The redness of the sky can be seen in the rows of corn, on the backs of the sows, in the footprints of the butcher, the horses, the mesas and the air surrounding the birds.  The use of nature and the cycles of life in this poem makes it sound a lot like an Indian narrative, or a story that has been passed through the Native American oral tradition.  Because it has the feel of a story, it makes the use of similes, personification and other devices of human language very natural. [AM 2001]

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Linda Hogan, a Native American poet (Chickasaw with a mixed heritage), provides a good example for the minority voice in modern poetry.  Since I chose to write about the poem “November,” given as an option within the test, I decided also to reflect on some of Hogan’s anthologized works as well (“The Truth Is” and “The New Apartment”) to see if I could discover common themes and get a better understanding of her writing voice.  Her work is written in free verse, and she uses repeated images of color, especially red, to represent the conflict Native Americans face within society (and the inner conflict she faces).  Some of the other repeated images she uses are night, doors, fire, earth, the sun and moon.  Her vivid imagery and careful word choice allows readers to ‘vicariously share the minority experience’ (course objective 5a).

In the poem “November,” Hogan gives us both sight and sound to bring her world to life right from the beginning.  She writes “The sun climbs down / the dried ladders of corn. / …Dry corn sings, Shh, Shh.”  (If you make that sound (go ahead and do it), it sounds something like a slow fire burning.  More commonly, though, we know it as the sound our mothers use to tell us to be quiet.  I was impressed with an image of Indians hiding in a field of corn, saying “Shh” to their children and hearing fire “Shh” all around them.)  As the speaker walks with “the old sky woman,” we realize that the color red drenches everything around them – “red fire,” “the red inside” of the woman’s cape, “red footprints,” “the red air,” “red mesas” and more. 

Other references of redness are found in the mention of fire, wine, and blood.  The corn field, then, transforms itself into a ‘killing field’ and the corn becomes representative of the Indians themselves.  We see clear indications here of course objectives 1 (a. involuntary participation) and 3 (b. American Dream vs. Loss and Survival).  Although there is a strong feeling of being voiceless about losing land and life, there is also the destruction of the myth of the ‘vanishing Indian.’  Note the following lines:  “I walk.  I will not think we are blood sacrifices. / No, I will not watch the ring-necked pheasant / running into the field of skeletal corn.” 

By continuing to walk, the speaker is continuing to live.  By not thinking of her people as blood sacrifices, but mentioning it just the same, she, in effect, requires her readers to think of them that way, allowing her words to serve as the conscience to the dominant group.  (Not to trivialize that image, but to make the point: if I said, “Don’t think about yellow corn right now,” you already have the thought and image in your mind before the sentence is finished.)  And by refusing to watch the pheasant invasion of the field, (as the birds sing “God Save the Queen”)  she has some way to claim a choice – to survive as by resistance rather than assimilation.  (By the way, why did she choose a ring-necked pheasant?  That species is known as being swift runners, strong flyers, and extremely noisy as they come into a field to consume food; the rings around their necks (males) are white.)

In “The Truth Is” (p 295 of anthology), Hogan relates the conflict of being from a “mixed” heritage, in this case, Native American and white.  She writes, “I’d like to say / I am a tree…/ bearing two kinds of fruit, / apricots maybe and pit cherries.”  We notice first that Hogan chooses cherries (a deep red fruit) and apricots (a pale colored fruit).  Then when we think about the image of a tree bearing two kinds of fruit, it seems as if there is something “wrong” with that.  Although trees can be grafted together to make one tree bearing two kinds of fruit, that does not happen on its own.  In nature, when two different trees are planted side by side, they will not naturally grow together, but rather, one will dominate over (and sometimes kill) the other by consuming all its resources.  We see objective 4 (b. distinguish American racialism with American practice) in this poem.  The speaker struggles with her identity and the past of both groups of people she is connected to.  But she remembers “who killed who,” and she says “For this you want amnesty / and there’s that knocking on the door / in the middle of the night.”  In our class discussion of this poem there was some confusion about why, as a Native American, this woman would want or need amnesty from anything.  Perhaps, though, because of her knowledge of the past, it is the “white” part of her that begs amnesty from herself when white guilt and red rage come knocking in the silence of night.

In “The New Apartment: Minneapolis” (p 343 of anthology), Hogan uses the recurring themes of  her work to create images that reflect living in the past (“November”), the present (“The Truth Is”) and, in some ways, the future (“The New Apartment”).  Early in the poem the speaker mentions that “the burns remain” on the floor of the apartment, and we are given the sense that her understanding of the past makes her who she is.  There is an image of an Indian being hung “on a meathook and beat” by whites, and it brings to mind the “red footprints” of fire and blood in the cornfield of “November.” 

Hogan allows the “vanishing Indian” to reappear, and in the city, no less.  The speaker of the poem is struck by the odd way “people [are] suspended in air” in their own homes, which illustrates apartment style living.  This image is not the one we have been taught in school of the American Indian.  Although we realize that Native Americans are living in the same world as we are, there is still some tendency to want to romanticize their lifestyle.  Hogan makes the point that, at one point, their lifestyle did not need romanticizing.  She insinuates that if there were a door to travel back in time we would see that “there are no apartments, / just drumming and singing” and no one would lose “the will to go on” the way they sometimes happens in the city. We see objective 6 (a. contrast of images of Native vs. dominant) in this poem.  In her heart, the speaker yearns for a time when she can walk “quietly on the soft red earth” in harmony with nature, when she can feel peace and be able to say at last “I am home.”  There is a common faith among some native tribes that the dominant culture will destroy itself and ‘the forests and buffalo will return’ (objective 3b).  The speaker of this poem puts hope in that day for the future of her people in the following lines:

I remember this war

and all the wars

and relocation like putting the moon in prison

with no food and that moon already a crescent,

but be warned, the moon grows full again

and the roofs of this town are all red.

It’s clear through the study of these poems that Hogan and other minority poets gain a strong voice through the literary devices of poetry that may not be conveyed as powerfully through prose.  The last quote about the future speaks of a rising up again of the Indian nation, but think of what the message would lose if Hogan had simply written in an essay, “someday the world will change; there will be a new kind of revolution.”  In order to cause readers to share the minority experience, a writer must bring the reader into their world.  Poetry is the perfect vehicle for conveying an experience vicariously because each word must be so carefully chosen that the view into the writer’s heart and mind happens as quickly as looking through a window.  With novels, essays, and even short stories, ideas are introduced relatively slowly and then built upon layer by layer until finally an image is produced; more often than not, the product is not as engrossing, interesting, or as beautiful as the same image would be in a poem, as evidenced by Hogan’s work here. [JM 2000]