White Lies Natasha Trethewey Summary

Secondly, the author uses word choice to show the speakers overall sorrow. Throughout the whole poem there are word scattered everywhere that describe the general emotion of sorrow, some of those word being “restless” (19), “torment”, and “troubled” (4). These words instantly give the connotation of feelings like despair and sadness. The speaker also uses literary elements such as simile to express sorrow, like when she says “These troubles of the heart/ are like unwashed clothes” (27, 28). Everyday people usually do not pay much mind to unwashed clothes, and usually look at it as something unimportant or irrelevant. When the speaker compares her internal troubles to something that holds little importance to everyday life and is also seen as unpleasant, the readers really get a look into the sorrow and sadness that the speaker is truly feeling. The speaker also uses word choice to help show the readers the true intensity of what she is going through.

A large portion of this poem is comparing the difference between black and white. In the poem it practically says “what if all the black is now white, and all the white is now black?”, then goes on to give some examples like “Black Presidents,

Helping making the theme of this poem clear that many blacks wore a mask that suggested happiness and contentment, but concealed

Secondly, the speaker of the poem can be described as underprivileged, and this is shown throughout the entire poem. For example, line 1 of the poem it states "some are teethed on a silver spoon” and line 5 it states "some are swaddled in silk and down”. This shows that the speaker is not the same as the person who is teethed on a silver spoon or cared for very carefully. This inclusion also shows that the speaker was not born into a wealthy family and so the speaker must fight for what they need pertaining to themselves and the family.

Once I was able to associate these words to emotions and issues present in everyday life, the poem started to make me feel sad. I began thinking about all of the emotions and feelings that everyone hides as they go about life. For example, how the waitress I see once a week may have an eating disorder, or how the singer I look up to just lost her son, or the businessman who got laid off today. Everyone has their own personal battle that they carry everywhere, at any given moment. This explains why the setting is so plain, since the internal struggles people face affect them even at a bus stop. While each person waits, the waitress may be thinking about how much skinnier the person next to her is. The singer could be remembering when she held her baby. And the business man could be planning how to break the news to his wife. No matter how small, everyone experiences a type of trauma or bad experience, and this poem seemed to show what happens when these emotions become bottled up. No one can help each other because they are so stuck within their own issues. The difficulty helping others reminded me of the idea of having to take care of yourself before being able to take care of others.

Cynthia White was found guilty of felony murder and cruelty to children in the death of her 3 year old son in 1992. Her convictions were affirmed in White v. State, 265 Ga. 392 (456 SE2d 587) (1995). She filed a “Petition for Resentencing Under the First Offenders Act” in July of 2016. She now appeals from the trial court's denial of that motion.

Allison Joseph and Sekou Sundiata are both great writers who engage the world by expressing their struggles through poetry. Both authors write about how people make assumptions because of what they hear and see around them. Their poems discuss the altercations and obstacles they have faced only because of the color of their skin. In the poem “On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person,” Joseph incorporates a wide breath of experiences from her point of view. She expresses her strong emotion by using descriptive language which allows us to read with emotion. In “Blink your eyes,” Sundiata shows the intensity of his feelings by using the repetition of phrases and reinforcing the poems irony.

During the entirety of the poem the speaker uses the contrast of light and dark to illustrate the divide of Caucasian and Native American in her life and the specific wording she uses throughout shows that she is ends up moving away from her white heritage’s side. We first start to see that she is upset with her white roots when she states that her mother left her with “large white breasts” that weigh down her body. This statement is quite important. With the addition of the word “white” and the use of the words “weigh down” the narrator seems to be implying that it is a burden to carry the whiteness. Also, the narrator uses specific wording in this statement in order to disassociate herself from her own white leanings since she refers to her breasts as if they were her mothers and not her own. The next time she mentions the word white comes in the third stanza. The speaker devotes an entire line to the short phrase “and is white” almost as if to single out that word in the poem and signify that being white

The girl represents people all over the world who blissfully live their lives, not knowing that they are contributing to the suffering of others that are making those things that make our lives lavish. Next the poem continues on to kids disguised as ninjas whispering,”Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good”. The kids are an allusion to the Asian workers whom happen to be young teenagers being forced to work in large tech factories in order to survive. Then it is followed by boys in camouflage yelling,”Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me”. These boys are a reference to veterans who live in turmoil within themselves because they cannot accept the things they have done during a war and without any support from their communities, they commit suicide seeing no other way to get rid of their guilt. Next they are followed by kids masquerading as cowboys and Indians,”Trick or treat, smell my feet”. The kids remind us of what the

Even though the woman doesn’t personally know the man, she stills feels free to judge him based on his looks. The poem is mainly composed of imagery. The narrator highlights the color black every time the man is being described in order to show how the lady sees a great difference

In her poem, “White Lies,” Trethewey’s theme in the story is discrimination and her struggle with her personal identity in America. Being born bi-racial, Trethewey explores racial identity that she experienced during her childhood. She was born in 1966 in Mississippi to a black mother and a white father. At this time, interracial marriages were not legal in Mississippi and were seen as shameful in society. Trethewey was very light skinned and had the desire to be white. The poem delivers the author’s experience with bigotry while living in the South (Bentley). This created an atmosphere of a racist society where the white community was superior over the African Americans. Growing up during this period, Trethewey felt like a lost little girl struggling with trying to find herself. In The Washington Post, Trethewey said, “Poetry showed me that I wasn’t alone” (Trethewey). This meant that writing poetry helped her to realize that she was not alone in this world of judgment, there were others facing the same issues that she was. The tone of her poem was sadness because of the prejudices she faced. To her, poetry was a place that could hold her grief (Bentley). Throughout her poem, “White Lies,” she desired to tell lies about who she was and how she lived. Her childhood was filled with thoughts and hopes of being white instead of being bi-racial. She states, “The lies I could tell, / when I was growing up” (Trethewey l. 1-2). These lines imply that she could easily lie to cover

As i close my eyes and picture this “Horror of the shade” (10) it hits me that the speakers “black pit” (2) is alot darker than expected. They are indeed afraid of what is happening in their life, and do not know what to do with this fear except to bottle it up and keep it inside, to only continue to have it grow and become something more terrifying than it already has become. The world in which we live in is a place none other than a “place [filled with] wrath and tears” (9). Seemingly no place to hide from the societal norm, the speaker truly struggles with the fact that he has no here to hide, no where to show their true emtions, no place to cry, even in a world, a “place [full] of wrath and tears”(9). 3.Henley uses biblical backgrounds to make his poem flow also.

In the poem she says “I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide”, and “I am the dream and the hope of the slave”. She is saying that because she is black woman and has to face problems; it has made her stronger. She has risen above and has become the person the slaves had hoped to become one day. Just because she is a minority doesn’t mean she can’t be proud of her accomplishments.

Laughing still. / Though never was a poor girl lorner” (l. 10, 11). The speaker’s mood has changed from mocking and carefree to lonely, which results in the mood of the poem changing with her. By the fifth stanza, the speaker has taken on feelings of despair. This transition occurs when she says, “Oh, dig me out of my don’t-despair. / Pull me out of my poor-me.” (l. 29, 30). The speaker reveals that’s she is upset, but “poor-me” makes the reader assume that she feels bad for herself more than she feels bad for Sammy. As far as the reader is concerned, her sadness is more of self-pity than any sympathetic feeling for Sammy. However, this does create a shift in the mood, making the poem slip into a stage of despair. This despair soon turns into anger around the seventh stanza where she says, “Often and often you cut me cold, / And often I wished you dead.” (l. 44, 45). Again, this shift from despair to anger occurs with an episodic shift from the present to the past “school days.” This informs the reader that she is angry looking back at the situation during their school years, but presently she feels self-pity. These episodic shifts are responsible for letting the reader know how the speaker is feeling, depending on what stage in time she looks back on. Brooks chose a very realistic way to represent her reflection, which makes the