In one of her poems, "Asylum," Xiomara expresses her desire to escape from what she describes as the asylum of a silent home life with aging parents. This is a development of a theme that she first introduced in an earlier poem, "The Last Word on Being Born to Old Parents," when she refers to the oath of silence that her father has supposedly taken. Clearly, this is not a household for small children because they cannot play, explore, and express themselves loudly.
Thank heavens, then, for music—which, as Xiomara tells us in "Asylum," provides her with a welcome escape from her stifling surroundings. The songs that she's particularly drawn to are those where people express all the things that hurt them. According to her, this is one reason why there's nothing quite like music for establishing a bridge between oneself and a total stranger.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
How does Xiomara reckon with her own silence in The Poet X?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What is the theme of the chapter Lead?
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
The statement "Development policy needs to be about poor people, not just poor countries," carries a lot of baggage. Let's dis...
-
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman was enormously influential. We can see its influences on early English feminist Mary Woll...
-
As if Hamlet were not obsessed enough with death, his uncovering of the skull of Yorick, the court jester from his youth, really sets him of...
-
"Mistaken Identity" is an amusing anecdote recounted by the famous author Mark Twain about an experience he once had while traveli...
-
James is very unhappy on a number of occasions throughout the story, but he's especially unhappy with his life situation as the story be...
-
The difference between Charlie at the beginning and the ending of the story Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes lies in his degree of conte...
No comments:
Post a Comment