The Deliverer By Tishani Doshi Flashcards
Tone
Matter of fact: leaves the crimes in their raw state which creates a sense of discomfort in the reader - emphasises the normality of the events
Form
Free verse: allows the events to be the main character of the poem
Purposefully isolates lines to create emphasis and give them power - usually social commentary
Themes
Objectification, Gender discrimination and infanticide
Motherhood and adoption
Objectification, gender discrimination and infanticide theme
Women are seen as baby making machine with the singular goal of making a male heir
Thousands of female or disabled babies killed and abandoned every year
Seen to have no purpose as a baby girl since she wont carry the name - a sense of shame towards them
Motherhood and adoption theme
- women are seen as baby making machines with no other purpose or feeling
- the difficulties mothers experience. Having to push out babies only for them to be discarded
- how in different places of the world motherhood is seen differently
- constant cycle of baby making in LEDCS for women that makes them numb
- questions what motherhood is? The child bearer or the one who actually cares for the baby
- contrasts different conditions: baby girls who are cared for and those that are just discarded
- adoptive parents / motherhood: sense of selfishness
Title: The Deliverer
Double meaning: mother delivering baby and the women physically delivering the child to the usa
Objectification of the baby girl as a package
OUR LADY OF THE LIGHT CONVENT, KERALA
The sister here is telling my mother
How she came to collect children
Because there were crippled or dark or girls.
Kerala setting: poor and underdeveloped
Collect children: objectification as if they as something to collect and amount - shows how normal this is
Last line suggests that (at the time in India, what was valued was fields work) baby girls are useless and a minority.
Shows the little appreciation for them
Found naked in the streets,
covered in garbage, stuffed in bags,
Abandoned at their doorstep
Naked: emphasis on how vulnerable and small these girls are - creates a sense of horror and shows how discarded they are
‘Covered’ and abandoned: suggests that they are concealed and hidden from the world as if they are shameful
Garbage/stuffed in bags: seen as worthless and as trash to throw away
One of them was dug up by a dog,
Thinking the head barely poking above the ground
Was bone or wood, something to chew.
This is the one my mother will bring.
One of them: multitude of little girls being found
Dug up: they try to make the little girls disappear - paints them as objects
Something: an object with no life - since she has no value she’s seen as nothing.
To chew: suggests it’s to play with - reinforced idea of not having purpose in society
Even a dog is more moral than a human to understand that a baby girl shouldn’t be buried underground
Mother contrast: she is a caring mother who will give her a home - idea that luck plays a bit part in motherhood
Single line and the one: shows how despite her world rejecting her and throwing her away she is special and is almost like a chosen one (comment on society)
MILWAUKEE AIRPORT, USA
The parents wait at the gates.
They are American so they know about ceremony
And tradition, about doing things right.
Irony of ceremony: Americans don’t about the culture and traditions where the little girl is from
Adoptive motherhood: idea of selfishness - why are the parents adopting her, for her own sake or for their own pleasure?
They haven’t seen or touched her yet.
Don’t know pf her fetish for plucking hair off hands,
Or how her mother tried to bury her.
The first thing in the poem about the baby’s personality: deobjectifies and emphasises how this baby girl has been mistreated
Stanza reflected how the parents will never fully know her and where she’s from
But they are crying.
We couldn’t stop crying, my mother said,
Feeling the strangeness of her empty arms.
Shortest line in the poem - emphasis on how despite the fact that it’s the baby who suffered the most, the parents cried as if they suffered. Contrast between how much they care for her and how little her real family cared for her
Strangeness of her empty arms: idea of what motherhood is. The deliverer is the one who held her and took her to a safe home - nurtured and protected her and created an emotional bond with her
This girl grows up on video tapes,
Sees how she’s passed from woman
To woman.
She returns to twilight corners.
She learns about her past and understands how she arrived to where she is now in America.
Twilight: dark corners - she returns to a dark place - emotional or physical? Suggests a struggle with identity and never knowing her parents or where she is from
Single line emphasises the importance of how she’s suffers now because of it
To the day of her birth, how it happens in some desolate hut
Outside village boundaries
Where mothers go to squeeze out life,
Watch body slither out from body,
Desolate: women are alone and unsupported - fear it’ll be a girl and want to be hidden
Outside boundaries . Sense of shame of disappointing their men and having a girl
Squeeze out life double meaning: birth or death - shows how quickly a babies fate can be decided just by their gender
Body: objectification- aren’t human just baby making machines
Slither: devilish connotations - comment on society and how this is accepted and normalised (single line emphasises this comment - all the single lines are comments on society
Feel for penis or no penis,
Toss the baby to the heap of others,
Trudge home to lie down for their men again.
Constant use of command words: feels like a routine and constant cycle
Toss: dehumanization - the moment it’s not a boy it is seen as useless and an object or burden to get rid of
Heap of others - emphasis on the multitude
Trudge: imagine of the wives being tired and lifeless
Again: cyclical nature
Last line places the blame on the men for this and on society for enforcing this system on women
Criticism or society and their ways
