Following class today, 3/24, I noticed we actually did not really come up with Diaz's thesis or argument, if we had to pick one. I would also like to discuss something else we did not mention in class, the three parts to the book.
The first of three parts really deals with Diaz's family and the cultural in which she lives. In many ways, it talks about life on a reservation, but more in general, the life of a Native American, past and present, in the United States. This section features many poems that deal with oppression of Native Americans, with a strong Mojave theme present. The different poems range from a serious tone, like in "The Red Blues", to a satirical tone, present in "The Last Mojave Indian Barbie".
The second section in this book takes her brothers drug addiction and talks with how it affected the family. Nearly every poem in this section show some sort of parent reaction, her mother or father, to Diaz's brother. It focus on the destruction he brought to the family because of his drug addiction. This is clear in "As a Consequence of My Brother Stealing All the Lightbulbs".
In the last section of Diaz's book, she reflects about life outside of the reservation where she grew up. A common theme here comes from Diaz's viewpoint of how she was thrown into the unknown - world outside of the reservation - when she moved off of the reservation. She puts the readers in the narrators shoes, which puts most of us in unfamiliar experiences as well, and what becomes of it is confusing and not always for certain. In this section she reflects on how unfamiliar and tough it was being thrown into a new world and how she handled it.
So, if I have to write a thesis, or explain to someone what this book is about, I would say that this book is about a Native American family who abruptly moved off a reservation into a new world and where this new, unfamiliar world, brought up many problems - like her brothers drug addiction and her realizing the harshness of the world - that were not on the reservation. Diaz does a great job of placing the readings in the shoes of the speaker in the book and giving the readers enough context to make sense of it and understand part of what she had to go through.
The reading of this book that you mentioned is a very good understanding. I think the shift of moving off of the reservation into an unknown world is key. However, I am hung up on the thought of why this transformation was so rough for her native culture and led to her brothers drug addiction.
ReplyDeleteI feel that since Diaz is consistently saying negative things about the world outside of the reservation, this implies that she misses the old days. In the old days on the reservation, her brother was not a drug addict and she was not aware of world issues. Coming off of the reservation into this cruel world forced her brother into drug addiction and forced Diaz and other Native Americans to be discriminated against in the United States, because the U.S. and the rest of the world naturally segregates, which Diaz was unaware of.