The Speaker's Attitude Towards the Subject Matter of White Lies Poem - Essay Example

The poet is confused and bitter over the issue, for she can tell others she is white, and that they lived in a better place, and still manage away with it. Her classmates assume that she Is white, as the classmate does when she holds her hand in an act of unity. she is though sad but optimistic in life. (Trethewey, Natasha) Trethewey has used color imagery in the poem constantly, especially in the first stanza.

The poet mentions six colors, which are all different, and all describe the lies. "light-bright, near-white, high-yellow, red-boned, white, and black." It is an African American speaker who could lie frequently, though the lies did not mean anything much. She would lie about where she lived, and where she bought her clothes, "uptown .. homemade dresses came out the window of Maison blande," but would also lie about being African American. She did pass easily for being white. It's sad the way she describes lying about her skin color.

She writes, "I could even keep quiet, quiet as kept, like the time a white girl said "squeezing my hand, Now we have three of us in this class." It is sad because she is lying to be part of the group. She writes "squeezing my hand," brings the sense that she only lied because she was amazed by the way the girl was behaving as a good friend. The first stanza does describe her as light-skinned for an African American. It says, "I was growing up/light-bright, near-white/high-yellow, red-boned/in a black place.

" The words "light-bright" and "near-white" make me think of a very light color. (Trethewey, Natasha) The color white also has a double meaning here because, while white is connected throughout the poem to lies, at the end of the poem it is connected to soap that will purify someone. The speaker says in stanza three, "She laid her hands on me, then washed out my mouth with Ivory soap. This was to purify, she said, and cleanse your lying tongue." White is described as the right thing here according to the speaker.

She does it also in stanza two when she says, "I could act like my homemade dresses come straight out of the window at Maison Blanche." This phrase would make us think that only dresses from the "White House" were better than any other from other places. (Trethewey, Natasha) I can therefore conclude and say that, the speaker perceives white as the best for everything in life. white Clothes from the white house were good for her, she knew minds are purer only with white soap, and nothing was more pretty than white lies.

The speaker's mother was not for the idea of pretending to be white while her daughter was not, she wanted to be identified as black, for according to her nothing was so good with the whites. The tone is sad, and we could sympathize with the speaker because it was all because of what the blacks and the mixed races had to go through in a locality full of racism and segregation. Natasha wrote passionately about human sufferings and vivid history because his idea and the poem can be compared to other poems like Domestic Work, Flounder, and even Letter Home.

They all explore the theme of blacks' sufferings, and how this racism haunted them constantly wherever they walked and whenever they found themselves in the middle of some whites. Natasha's poetic license was all aimed at asking us one big question: can we do away with history because it had much to remind the people of where they came from or where they were going?