The deliverer - Tishani Doshi

Question 1

Title

Answer 1

• religious connections - religious scripture
• ambiguity - a woman who gave birth, the adoption agency. effective in making the reader feel complicit in events

Question 2

‘Our lady of the light convent, Kerala’

Answer 2

‘Kerala’ - India
- the first section is written in 3 tercets and an extra one line stanza

Question 3

‘mother’ ‘collect children’

Answer 3

• lack of figurative language - helps imagery remain simplistic and realistic

Question 4

‘because they were crippled or dark or girls.’

Answer 4

• list of three emphasises tragedy of children who are unwanted
• ‘girls’ - the severity of being a girl in a male dominated culture

Question 5

‘found’ ‘stuffed’ ‘abandoned’

Answer 5

• emphasises the baby’s vulnerability and the cruelty of the act. Juxtaposes the first stanza

Question 6

‘one of them was dug up by a dog’

Answer 6

• connotations that the child is dead to their parents

Question 7

‘this is the one my mother will bring’

Answer 7

• highlights the difference between the speaker and her mother’s relationship compared to parents who care for their children.

Question 8

‘Milwaukee airport, USA’

Answer 8

• Wisconsin
• three tercets, with no extra line

Question 9

‘they were American so they know about ceremony
and tradition, about doing things right’

Answer 9

• satirical implying that the girl is from a richer culture than the ones that adopted her

Question 10

‘how her mother tried to bury her.’

Answer 10

abandonment leads them to have issues later in life

Question 11

‘we couldn’t stop crying, my mother said,
feeling the strangeness of her empty arms.

Answer 11

the ‘empty arms’ suggest the lack of love and tenderness she has grown up without

Question 12

‘this girl grows up on video tapes,
sees how she’s passed from woman
to woman.

Answer 12

• sibilance creates a sense of danger and has negative connotations
• repetition - views the child as a commodity

Question 13

‘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’

Answer 13

• cyclical - birth is a cycle
• monotonous tone, clinical, strips the emotion away from a usually life-changing experience in our western society

Question 14

‘feel for penis or penis,
toss the baby to the heap of others’

Answer 14

• emphasis on preference for boys and how the male empennage symbolises this wealth and power within society
• ‘toss’ - lack of care for children - girls

Question 15

‘trudge home to lie down for their men again’

Answer 15

• unwillingness and despondence of the women
• negative tone, society is trapped in a repeated cycle, encourages the reader to form an opinion and take action

Question 16

Overall messages

Answer 16

• built around ideas of gender and differences in views of ‘value’ in an individual gender
• highlights how different societies and cultures can put a value on gender in a gruesome way, highlighting to a potentially unaware and assuming reader that severe suffering can still exist when least expected
• reference to the murder of newborn babies transgresses societal expectations most brutally, demonstrating how different cultures can have such differing views

Question 17

Structure

Answer 17

• two written subheadings - ‘Kerala’ and ‘Milwaukee’, difference between societies, more developed western society
• no rhyme scheme, lines of uneven length - shows chaos and stress of girls
• written in first person narrative - narrator doesn’t have a side, instead stepping back and letting the reader choose