Sapphire. American Dreams. New York: Vintage, 1996. Print.
In American Dreams Sapphire creates raw graphic poetry that gets under your skin and makes you realize how difficult the plight of young people can be. In studying this book among the methods, I found it hard to separate the story in the poem from the devices the writer used to tell the poem. If you read the poems in chronological order you can see a character narrator developing that is showing how people go from early childhood sex abuse to continue to be objectified by men. She talks of stripping, drug use and prostitution. Sapphire finds love in women and finds her voice in the injustices of the world with which she lives in. She developed as a person through her writing from someone who was naive and manipulated to someone who looking at the world for deeper meaning. What her text taught me was that I would have to challenge myself with the idea that I didn't want to say things in her way and then I realized that in being the person who would censor her I was also censoring myself.
|