AP Lit: Week 3 - Racism

It's shocking to think that we are already halfway through the first marking period! This week we took quite a lot of time to work on our group essays. We have been writing a collaborative essay over the books that we read over the summer. In my group, we read "The Book Thief" and "Obasan". Both of these stories have themes of death and racism. I definitely enjoyed "The Book Thief" more and thus understood the story better. We also read and wrote about a poem called "Cross". The poem focused on a person who is of mixed race living in the south. He is wondering what will become of him since he is neither white nor black. I enjoyed this poem much more than "The Eagle" from last week because it had a powerful political undertone that was easy to understand. By the way the author wrote the poem, the reader realizes that the narrator lives in the south and has a black mother and a rich white father. The poem implies that the mother is a slave and the father is a slave owner, and that there was probably a relation between the two that produced the narrator. At the end of the week we took forty minutes to write about the meanings of the poem and how they relate to the title. My main focus was that there can be many meanings to the word "cross" and they are alluded to throughout the poem. I thought that writing about the poem in forty minutes was really easy, so that probably means that I am doing it wrong! Overall this was a really productive week, I just wish I hadn't been sick for all of it!

Just look at all of the different meanings of "cross"

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cross