Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Here are the children’s poem collages.

This past week we were priviliged to work with the distinguished poet Natasha Trethewey. After guiding us through a close reading of several Amistad poems by Elizabeth Alexander (in her collection American Sublime), she helped us create one of our own. Inspired by the original profiles of the captives in John Barber’s book, we then created our own persona poems. You can see them here. But first, here is the poem we wrote together:

Margru

What I remember of home is this:

green – green mangoes, green snakes, green bananas:
brown – my mother, my father, myself, the tree
trunks, the brown earth, the color of my language,
Mende,
the only language I had
to describe these things.

Often I think of
how I came to be here:

my father pawning me, waving goodbye,
his face crumpled, tightened, looking
away from me.

I felt my captor’s white, cold hand
tighten around my wrist as if
he were a solid ghost taking me away.

Now I wish to see again
the green rice fields,
my father’s brown face,
clouds in the sky —
the only white things,

to hear someone speaking my language,
someone saying

Margru.

A few weeks ago, as part of our study of historical fiction, I read aloud Amistad Rising by Veronica Chambers with illustrations by Paul Lee. Now we are going to look at the Amistad story again through the eyes of one of its participants — Sarah Margru Kinson. As I mentioned to you, the Amistad captives were mostly Mende, people who live in a part of Africa that is now in the country of Sierra Leone where I lived many years ago as a teacher for the Peace Corps.

Through Sarah Margru’s story, a story I’ve slightly fictionalized and told here (I will give you the username and password in class to access it), I hope you will have a deeper sense of forced immigration. So, here is what I want you to do:

As you read Margru’s story, write notes and responses in your chapbook. Divide each page up into three parts (I’ll show you how in class) so that you can take notes on these things:

Literary Stuff Here you can jot down any words or that seem descriptive, poetic, or otherwise give a literary sense.

Historical Stuff
Here you can jot down words, phrases, and titles of images that are clearly from history. (Be sure to include the images as most are primary sources and you may want to use them later in your blog posts and project.)

Response
Here you need to write how the part you read made you feel, questions you may have, or anything else you want.

We will be, of course, also talking a lot about Margru’s story. I will be showing you artifacts and photos of Sierra Leone (her homeland) from when I was there. I may also show you another version of her story — one I wrote first as nonfiction — so you can see what is different between writing historical fiction and nonfiction. When you are done reading with all this you will be writing a blog post and also doing a poetry project related to Margru’s story and the Amistad.