"What Kind of Fool Am I?" on page 8 and "Red Brocade" on page 40 are poems that curiously show the before and after of culture transitioning. "Red" discusses the cultural norm I assume in the Arabic culture of taking in someone for three days when they ask for refuge, properly feeding and housing them. It also goes on to point out that questions cannot be asked of the stranger until after a certain extent, the author's attitude of the end of the poem suggests this is an inconvenience to her but she must obey this law, "No, I was not busy when you came! I was not pretending to be busy... I refuse to be claimed..." (41). This is a contrast to the "What Kind.." poem that highlights another culture that I assume is American.
"What Kind of Fool Am I?" I have interpreted is about a father who had brought and/or started his family in America but kept his old culture in addition to the new one. In the beginning he is singing songs from the Arabic practices but then transitions into English. His children ask him what kind of fools they were and he answers they are not fools at all. The second piece of evidence of the culture transition is when the narrator mentions he has given them the freedom to be fools if they wanted to me. I took this to mean permission freedom, meaning being silly when they want too as well as the freedoms of living in a place such as America, typically connected with the idea of freedom.
The poems are similar with their obvious influences of the culture they live under but different when it comes to which cultures are being practiced. The first follows one culture while the second poem has the blend of two different cultures.
This idea reminds me of our previous book. How Sophie makes this transition to a new culture and kind of fuses her Haitian culture with her new american while her mother rejects the Haitian and tried to adopt the American as her only culture. In both that book and these two poems there seems to be the idea that adapting and accepting two cultures turns out to be beneficial over trying to ignore one culture altogether.
ReplyDeleteIrene Bloomer
Both Nye and Danticat have a great skill in describing the lesser known aspects to each of their cultures. While ideas of obeying laws, having freedom, and accepting customs that are unfamiliar are all general themes, Nye and Danticat knew how to take little snipets of various cultural norms and show how diverse, yet similar, we all can be.
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