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You must write at least 500 words on Olive Senior’s “The Pain Tree” and Donna Weir-Soley’s poems from First Rain. You must write 200 words on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. Remember to title your post: the title of the post should give an indication of your angle of approach.
Further guidelines:
To avoid surface-level synopsis and to practice a close reading of the texts, you should develop your own response and interpretation by focusing on topics and ideas that help guide your analysis. It is important to take a unique and focused approach to the texts.
Make sure the title of your post reflects the aspect of the text you are analyzing, just so it makes it easier for your peers to look up when they respond to you by Saturday.
Divide your post into at least three paragraphs. Be sure that you support your interpretation of each of the texts using textual evidence from the readings.
To cite the texts put the last name of the author and the page number in parenthesis—i.e. (Weir-Soley 22).
I encourage your own formulations, but some questions to consider:
For Olive Senior and Donna Weir-Soley:
*In the primary readings you are going to encounter a protagonist and a poetic voice who are both trying to reconstitute and re-member (as in “putting together again”) their past. How does the process of re-membering in both texts reflect Jamaica’s history?
*Both Olive Senior and Donna Weir-Soley evoke imagery emphasizing a newfound re-orientation of the past. How does the perceptions of place and history change in both texts?
*How do these texts compare with the poetic process as articulated in Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and/or Fernando Ortiz’s cultural-historical process? How can Senior and Weir-Soley be involved in a similar enterprise of “returning” to native lands?
For Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust:
*Dash’s Daughters of the Dust represent African diasporic spirituality in complex ways, multi-faceted ways. How do we articulate African diasporic spirituality as represented by the film?
In the film, Mr. Snead (who perhaps refers to the great African-American film critic James Snead) introduces a kaleidoscope: as he describes the play of mirrors that makes the kaleidoscope function, consider how the film itself reflects metaphorically the features of an African diasporic kaleidoscope.
There are tensions in the film between the duty to ancestral memory and the demands of modernity. Do you think the film ever takes a position on the tension between “moving forward” and “looking back”?
*Many of the characters struggle with gender norms, and this becomes the source of division within the community. How does this concern with gender norms connect with the film’s other themes?
*At a climactic moment in the film, Eula gives a speech to the community: “We wear our scars like armor for protection. Thick, hard, ugly scars that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let’s live our lives without living in the fold of old wounds.” How do you interpret Eula’s speech? What’s she saying and why is this important for the film as a whole?
*There may be an implicit connection to Nana’s tin can filled with “scraps of memories” and Yellow Mary’s monologue on the “pink satin case” where she could “put all those bad memories in that case…so that I could take them out and look at them when I’d feel like it”. What’s the significance of these containers of memory? How are these containers of memory acting as metaphors for the film as a whole?