Alexandra Guerrero
Dr. Despain
CODES 121
22 October 2024
Literary Analysis
In my reading of Sherman Alexie’s poems, he shows many symbols, all different with each poem. My favorite one was (Eulogy 38) where the author shows grief, cultural identity understanding, and memories shown with various symbols throughout the poem, giving a better understanding of how he viewed the experiences.
In the poem’s first sentence, he starts by talking about his mother. My mother was a dictionary (116) from Eulogy, which gives a solid foundation for the poem and illustrates the title of Eulogy, which means to praise the dead. The dictionary refers to his mother as a brilliant woman full of wisdom. Still, her knowledge was not passed down to his generation or family; she was the only one who knew the tribal language.
Secondarily, the elderly woman is a mother and loved by many. She carries in her blood and minds a whole culture and history that will fade with her. As the poem says, she was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language. She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew. We buried all those words with her (116). Her life was a whole generation of history and cultural life that died and had no going back because she took it all with her. She saw that her knowledge was unnecessary for the new generation, as they now have the modern world. New knowledge is the key to success with references to the English language, she said to her son.
At thirty, the author feels an attachment to the memories of his passing mother, specifically the tapes of their native language. He said, “And I don’t want to risk letting anybody else transfer the tape to digital.” they hold an extraordinary place in his heart.
Finally, to sum it all up, the author could show how the tape, language, and dictionary worked as symbols to represent different things the author went through during his mother’s passing. The poem is about grief, but it shows cultural identity from how his mother took an essential part of his culture away from him because, for him, he grew to what his mother referred to as modern words. The tapes hold the little culture he has left from his elders, but they also tell his family history very private, which is why he doesn’t want it to be accessible to the public. Sherman Alexis’ poem shows many different symbols used to express his experiences with processing a loved one’s death.
Some of the background information I learned about symbols was from Thomas Foaster ‘s “How to Read Like an English Professor.” Pay attention to what you feel about the text. It probably means something (page 114). Sometimes, we need to look more at the text to understand it, not overthink it, but use our creativity to imagine. With that, we can apply it to CODES to be more creative in our writing and analysis of the text and all possible meanings and symbols.