- What do you imagine the mother’s relationship with Dee? What is the significance of the daydream where Mother and Dee are together on a TV show?
I think the mother’s relationship with Dee was not very good because the mother wasn’t what Dee wanted. In the tv show ad Mama describes herself as 100 lbs. lighter and quick-witted, someone her daughter would love. I think they are close as a family in the love one has for their daughter and mother. However, their relationship was not very close. The daughter was smart, educated, and very modern whereas her mother was a practical, school dropout who likes to do a man’s work.
- What is Hakim-a-barber’s purpose in this story? How does his character contribute to our understanding of Dee’s transformation?
Hakim is Muslim and is alien to the mom’s experience. Showing Mama that she went and found someone just like her. That they both regard their way of life with condescension and disregard. Mama shows animosity toward him and her daughter by passively aggressively pronouncing their names incorrectly.
His character brings about resentment and disconnects from Mama to her daughter. That her daughter so can easily disrepute her past by changing her name, and not marrying someone’s religion that they now even have different Gods. Hakim is a walking version of all the things Mama doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to know about.
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- What’s the significance of the quilt? And what does it symbolize?
The quilts represent a generation of hardship and overcoming obstacles. That they were meant to be used and loved as the people who made them intended. It’s full of memories/pieces of history and stories. Maggie knows these histories and how to fix or make more quilts if need be. It shows the use of functional history in keeping people warm or the history should be displayed as Dee intended to preserve them and hang them.
- We usually admire a person who rises out of poverty to get an education and better her circumstances, but in this story, the reader does not generally identify with Dee. Why not?
How do the views of the narrator influence the reader’s viewpoint? We don’t identify or sympathize with Dee because she is not a good person. She just wants to better her own life even if it’s at the expense of others showing how she is both arrogant and ungrateful. She is condescending as well as she and Hakim are educated and think they are fighting the struggle of oppression when in actuality is people like Maggie whom they look down upon that are keeping the culture alive. She thinks they should be ashamed of themselves to live around their oppressors, yet they are still able to see the good in their life, like the yard.
They take pride in what little they have and what the creator provides for them. We can respect Mama and Maggie’s unwillingness to conform to the demands of the daughter as they know what they want from life and are content to live that way. They can go to sleep peacefully every night and that is an admirable trait.
References
- JSTOR – Online library of academic journals, books, and primary sources
- Citation Machine – A tool for generating APA citations for websites
- ScienceDirect – Leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from over 2,500 peer-reviewed journals and more than 11,000 books.
- APA Formatting Guide: Reference List: Electronic Sources (Web Publications)
- PubMed – A public resource for searching and accessing scientific articles
