Becoming a Woman by Hillary Tham

   

Hilary Tham's "Becoming A Woman" highlights the receiving of maternal wisdom that only women who are going through it. This poem presents various portraits of the transition from childhood to adulthood when a girl reached her puberty. The poet perhaps is telling the story within her own experiences on becoming a woman. This we can read in this stanza,   

“You will bleed
at a special time of the moon.”
she told me. “Use these
to preserve modesty and the secret
of your femalesness.”

The poet's mother is teaching her to use the traditional white paper while having her menstrual but the poet did not follow her way.  She hates menstrual which all girls could not escape. She finally accepted the fact of having  menses after she became a mother. 

"I have forgiven the moon since our children came, 
spores of the sunrise in their newborn hands" . 

As for me, I think this poem is not suitable for teaching literature for secondary school students. We are living in the eastern country whereby we still uphold our older generations traditions and cultures. It is a mother's responsibility  to carry out their jobs to tell her child especially girl on becoming a woman. Discussing this poem in a classroom may lead to embarrassment. Of course, we are advancing and heading towards modernization but that doesn't mean we should reveal private matters publicly.

Aesop’s fables

 The fox and the crow is one of the Aesop’s famous fables. In this fable, a fox cunningly cheated a crow for a piece of cheese. What do we learn from this story? Fables often teach moral values either in an implicit or explicit manner. There are many moral values we can learn from this story  beside ‘not to trust flatterers’ such as ‘do not cheat others’, not safe to take another agent’s words and actions at face value, without trying to understand the agent’s underlying goals and intentions or ‘think wisely about possible consequences before do something’. There are many Malaysian fables which are similar to this story such as The Adventures of Mouse Deer, Sang Kancil and The Crocodile, The Vengeful Fox Bitter Lesson and The Crow and The Vain Pigeon.

 

   For more stories on Aesop fables go to this website http://www.english-for-students.com/Moral-Stories.html

Langston Hughes

When I read these poems; The Cross, Dinner  Guess: me and Harlem by Langston Hughes, it made me to think about Kunta Kinte in the 'Roots', once which  was a very popular television series. The series were adapted from the book Roots: The Saga Of The American Family written by Alex Harley in 1976. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an Africa, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. The story in 'Roots' mainly about the oppression by whites on blacks. 

African Americans have been known by many names. They were called Negroes, Blacks and Coloureds. The term “nigger” was used in the southern part of the USA , where discrimination against them was very bad. In the last 30 years the term African Americans has officially been used. Many world leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King were among those who fight against this discrimination. There were still other groups of people who opposed this same issue in a different way. Among them are novelist and poets. Langston Hughes was among one of them. 

Many of the Langston poem's theme seems to be revolved the theme of racist. The Cross, Dinner guest and Harlem are based on the same issues. The cross which was written by Langston Hughes in 1920's convey his dilemma in a witty way. The persona in this poem actually apologizing his dead parents for blaming them for his bitter life because he wasn't accepted by blacks nor whites. His mother was a black and father his was white. He was so confused not knowing in what category he falls into, black or white.The persona is stuck in them iddle of two extremes, poor black America that was looked at with disgust by white America and rich, "ideal" white America was looked at with eyes of amazement and hate by black America. The poet was angry with his parents for passing him on an amalgam of genes (cross).Hughes touched on the psychological hardships of being a mixture of black and white descent in this poem. 

The dinner guest; me, on the other hand tells about a black American who is an honored guest at a banquet where most or all of the other people at the table are white Americans. They all think of themselves as anti-racist. But because white and black historical experiences in America are so radically different, there's a lot that the white folks just don't get. Towards the end of the poem, it is stated that the solutions for 'the Problems' America's troubled racial history is still a long way from being solved.

As for the poem Harlem, it is concerning frustration  of American blacks even though after the  federal laws had granted them the right to vote, the right to own property, and so on. They were relegated into the second class citizenship. 

The issues raised by Hughes in these poems (oppressed by white) not only faced by African American but also by other marginalized ethnic groups, for instance Brahmins in India.