Click on the "comment" button below to leave your blog post. I suggest you type your response first in a word document, and then copy and paste it into the comment box. When using book titles in your post you should set the title off with the underscore key: _Brown Girl Dreaming_ (as the comment box does not recognize italics). If you are signed up to be a discussion leader, your blog post should be at least 500 words of original prose (do not duplicate anything other bloggers have already said here) in which you engage with the text for the week critically AND pose an original discussion question. If you are signed up to be a responder, your post should be 250 words in length and respond to, answer, extend, or disagree with a question or thought from another student's post. Be sure to write your full name and word count at the bottom of your post. The cut-off time for this blog post is Friday, February 12 at midnight (for discussion leaders) and Monday, February 15 at midnight (for responders).Discussion Leaders: Summer and Bryan
Responders: Carla and TeAnna
In Jaqueline Woodson’s _Brown Girl Dreaming_ we are introduced to a child that is born into an era of segregation and discrimination. We are familiarized with what time period this child lives in, in the first short poem “February 12, 1963”. The descriptions the narrator (child- Jaqueline) uses in this first poem are things like; “a country caught between black and white"…and “the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed…” (p.12). Because of the time period and the specific events that are happening, the childhood character in this novel would be a ‘child soldier’. In Hintz and Tribunella’s _Historicizing Childhood_ they explain a child soldier character as one “that either witnesses to or participants in wars.” It gives the child a persona of less innocence because she is exposed to so much and also the curiosity from growing up and being introduced to knew things is still prevalent in the story. Jackie could also be considered to be a Romantic child in the historical models of childhood. She has a lot of innocence to her and is curious and susceptive to the things around her, these examples might consider her to be a romantic childhood character.
ReplyDeleteAlso, _Brown Girl Dreaming_ is a domestic fiction novel. It is a domestic fiction novel because it is realistic of everyday life during a civil war and at that time home can be a very dangerous place depending on your social class and ethnicity. People in the novel face power relations and plays a role in the plot of the novel and the thoughts and actions of Jaqueline. Jackie emphasizes in all of her stories the events that are happening and how the place she lives in and the time she is growing up in is very important and can change history and her future. on page 12 in _Brown Girl Dreaming_ Jackie says “February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want”, which means that it is a time of change. Another reason why this is a domestic fiction is because the emphasis that wealth and poverty has in the novel and the relations with family and community. The Woodson family in the story plays a big role in the community and the history of the family is what influences what everyone is the next generations decides to do and help influence their success. An example of the how the Woodson family plays a big role would be on page 18, “the Woodsons of Ohio know what the Woodsons coming before them left.” We will later see in the novel the large role that the family’s history plays in the novel.
Would you agree that the Jaqueline would be a child soldier childhood character or a romantic child childhood character? What other childhood character would Jaqueline be considered to be? How do the movements and events effect Jackie’s character?
Word count: 507 words
Blog Responders: Because there was only one discussion leader post this week, please feel free to respond to Summer's question OR to choose and respond to any of the blog post possibilities on the _Brown Girl Dreaming_ Reading Guide linked on the left hand side of the blog. See you all next week!
ReplyDeleteKrystal Howard
In _Brown Girl Dreaming_ the author Jacqueline Woodson uses a form of poetry writing called haiku. A haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry that consists of 3 lines. The first and last lines have 5 syllables and the middle line has 7 syllables. A haiku is used to capture a moment and create a picture in the reader’s mind. I believe that Woodson used this type of style to allow the reader to pause and put oneself in her place of what the previous poems were telling us.
ReplyDeleteJacqueline Woodson writes a series of 10 Haikus in _Brown Girl Dreaming_ each reflecting back on what we have just read. In Woodson’s poem “how to listen #6” she is describing to us that nothing can interrupt her:
When I sit beneath
the shade of my block’s oak tree
the world disappears.
When Jacqueline said, “the world disappears” (225) she is deep in thought imagining what and how to write about the things happening in her world that she sees or hears nothing going on around her. The significance of this poem is relaying to the reader that we all have to slow down and think about the things that matter most. In her case she reflects back in her childhood trying to make since of the south and north during the civil rights movement and why others think they are better than those of color. It was hard for her to understand why she couldn’t act the same way in the south like she did in the north.
Carla Ritchie
Word Count: 259
The historical events have negatively impacted Jackie’s character, where segregation has developed a form of hatred that she cannot understand at first as a child. Jackie’s hatred is expressed during one of her few encounters with Coraandhersisters during Christmastime:
ReplyDeleteOur hearts aren’t bigger than that.
Our hearts are tiny and mad.
If our hearts were hands, they’d hit.
If our hearts were feet, they’d surely kick somebody! (p128).
When Jackie is disrespected by Coreandhersisters, her heart feels hatred, a feeling that has become automatic due to the discrimination she was destined to experience because she was born “brown”. And, instead of expressing her feelings openly, she writes in her composition notebook:
You can’t leave ‘cause your heart is there, Sly sings.
But you can’t stay ‘cause you been somewhere else.
The song makes me think of Greenville and Brooklyn
The two worlds my heart lives in now. I am writing
The lyrics down, trying to catch each word
Before it’s gone. (p221)
…settling into my brain, into memory.
Not everyone learns to read this way—memory taking over when the rest
Of the brain stops working,
But I do.
Sly is singing the words
Over and over as though
He is trying
To convince me that this world
Is just a bunch of families
Like ours
Going about their own family affairs.
….I go back to writing down the words
That are songs and stories and whole new worlds
Tucking themselves into my memory (p222).
There are many references to “memory,” where the term reappears many times throughout her poems. It is as if the good experiences dissolve into memories, while her negative experiences become the truth, where the truth is “somewhere in between all that I’m told and memory (p176)”. Also, Jackie has prevailed through the hard times because her family bonds are so strong and she has so much positive support. This may also sound cliché, but love has truly conquered all. Without love, Jackie would have lived on hating white people and how they treated her family. But, she was able to overcome the hardships because her family taught her to have faith in God and taught her how to be strong. With these lessons about life, she was able to develop her feelings of hatred into the words that would change the world and literature.