The Deliverer Flashcards
‘The sister here is telling my mother’
Intentional ambiguity - unclear on the nature of these family dynamics - reflecting a broader theme of what it means to be a mother.
‘crippled or dark or girls.’
Listing, and end stop emphasising ‘girls’ demonstrates how the girls are being reduced to a single, socially undesirable characteristic that cannot be controlled.
‘Covered’ ‘Stuffed’ ‘Abandoned’
‘Found naked’
Tricolon of verbs : Girls are treated inhumanely, easily disposable and disregarded.
‘Found naked’ conveys an image of vulnerability in the treatment of the girls.
‘One of them was dug up by a dog’
‘bone or wood, something to chew’
‘The one my mother will bring’
Girls are denied of any meaningful identity - considered more lowly than an animal.
Structure: ‘This is the one my mother will bring.’
Break in the tercet structure conveys change.
Milwaukee Airport, USA
Shift in time, and place to the modern, Western world. Symbolic place of journeys for the change that is about to occur.
‘her fetish for plucking hair off hands’
Conveys her compulsion as a form of human intimacy.
‘Or how her mother tried to bury her’
Stark reminder of her brutal origins - juxtaposes the joy and love that is supposed to define this scene meeting the adopting parents.
‘But they are crying. We couldn’t stop crying’
End stop emphasises the emotion.
In this environment, emotion can be displayed - unlike in Kerula.
‘The girl grows up on video tapes’
‘She returns to twilight corners’
- Shift in time and tone to an older age.
- Metaphor - revisits her unconscious memories. Appears to be in a liminal state between her past origins and her new American identity.
- Language becomes more figurative, descriptive.
‘some desolate hut outside village boundaries’
Conveys the corrupt, transgressive nature of the act.
‘Where mothers go to squeeze out life’
Pun describing both childbirth and death - the creation of new life, if female, quickly becomes the taking of that life - the same for their culture.
‘Feel for penis or no penis, Toss the baby to the heap of others’
Blunt, monosyllabic language used - seems matter-of-fact. Reduces the beautiful and magical nature of childbirth to something meaningless.
‘lie down for their men again.’
Final line stanza presents the mothers as powerless victims of a patriarchal cycle. Gendercide is presented as a cycle, until they succeed and get a boy.
