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Woodticks In Saskatoon By Joy Kogawa Summary

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dtick Questions In the poem the speaker’s daughter is being mocked by some white children for being Japanese. The speaker then has a flashback to her time living in Slocan. She remembers the time when the other white kids made fun of her and she ran into the forest to hide. When she reaches deep into the forest, she then listens for the voices of the kids to guide her back onto the path, and she vows to never go near the mountain alone again. Then she flash forwards back to the present and she reassures her daughter that they do not have woodticks in Saskatoon. From reading the poem it can be determined that the speaker is the author, Joy Kogawa. One of the major giveaways of this is name of the daughter: Deidre. Joy Kogawa has a daughter …show more content…

Joy Kogawa’s word choices help convey that message. The way she says how the teen “Slanted” his eyes, how the “big white boys” “crowd[ed]” her and Deirdre's “whisper[ing]” to walk faster all convey feelings of fear and inferiority, consistent with how many Japanese Canadians felt at the time being “enemies” of the state. However this is not the speaker’s only fear, shown when she runs into woods and reveals she fears woodticks. From the end of the poem where Joy Kogawa states that there are “no woodticks in Saskatoon”, we can understand that the woodticks are symbolic of racism. Similar as to how woodticks burrow “into [the] scalp”, racism can eat away at a person from the inside leaving them helpless and direct parallels can be drawn right there between the two. An excellent example of this effect racism has on a person is from another work of Joy Kogawa’s, Obasan. In the novel, the character Stephen is faced with racism and we can see his slow downfall from the internal struggle he faces. If racism can affect a person in such profound ways, perhaps that is why Kogawa says “there are no woodticks in Saskatoon”, she now has come to terms the with racism she faces and has become so desensitized that she refuses to acknowledge that racism is still very …show more content…

However, upon reading the poem and the uses of the title within in the text we can also see the allusion drawn to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which there is also a wall within Act V. In this act, the characters of Thisbe and Pyramus, who are lovers, are separated by a wall and are only able to communicate through a hole in the wall. Eventually their love for each other proves to be too strong and the wall then leaves. Parallels that can be drawn to the poem includes whispering through “loose bricks”, a reference to the hole in the wall in the play, also when the word “dream” is used in the third stanza references the title of the play, while the “voice… from the wall” can be compared to the talking wall in the play. The significance of these allusions in the title is that they reinforce the overall arching theme of the poem that there are always ways past obstacles or barriers and where these hindrances are, people will always be looking to overcome them. On a literal level, the author Joy Kogawa explores the various methods to evade a wall. She suggests ,through a door, sneaking, torturing, bombs, zeppelins, battering rams, whispering through a hole in the wall. All of these are methods which can work, but the one way we sometimes fail to realize

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