Interpretation of “correcting My Mother’s Essay”

Sofia Jimenez De La Torre, Farah Nasrallah, Nour Awada, Lara Abou Daya, and Sofia Sayed

ENG 203/ 45

Abir Ward

September 18, 2017

Response 3

Interpretation of “Correcting My Mother’s Essay”

The Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck is the author of the poem “Correcting My Mother’s Essay,” which reflects on the Lebanese civil war and her mother’s experience with it. The poem can be looked at from many different perspectives. The narrator uses her mother’s writings as the backbone of her poem, and one way of looking at it is from an emotional perspective, using a psychological viewpoint, because it appeals to our human feelings in many different ways. Thus, throughout this paper, we will use the emotional perspective, which is one of the “Five ways of interpreting a text” according to the literature professor John Peters, in order to analyze the poem.

The first approach we have towards the text is an emotional conflict between the narrator and her mother. For instance, she begins her poem by stating that her mother’s essay has “wrong punctuation/ wrong tenses/ wrong spacing/ wrong spelling” (lines 3-4), which makes the reader feel that the narrator is mocking her mother, or bringing her down. Then the poem switches into a mood which is more comic and fairly jeers. The narrator repeats  her mother’s mistakes at multiple occasions in order to emphasise on the wrong spelling, “suddenly explodes”(line 37), “I couldn’t breath” (line 41), “to send all his angles” (line 44).  However, the author herself wrote with incorrect punctuation, and did not give any structure to her poem. By looking at it with an emotional perspective, the lack of punctuation and structure from the author is showing the reader, that the narrator might not be mocking her mother, but instead supporting her.

A second approach in order to emotionally analyze the poem is to search for the objects which reflect an emotion within the text. A few examples of those phrases would be, “broken English” (line 56),  which is used to describe the bad spelling of the mother’s writing, and shows the compassion of the narrator to her mother. There’s “Maratone” (line 49), which is how some Lebanese would pronounce marathon, and seems to be a tool for the narrator to indirectly mock their pronunciation by using her mother's writing. “Angles” (line 44), is used to refer to angels, and it reflects help and protection. “Worst century” (line 47), which describes the terrible experience of the mother during war, gives a feeling of melancholy and extreme sadness. “Sky red” (line 52),  is used to describe the hate and blood, and lastly “broken homes” is a general way to refer to all the damages that were caused, and gives a feeling of destruction. As it is shown, this poem contains many objects of emotions. We can see that the war, leads us to memories, which have strong emotional significance. Those memories reveal to us the mother’s deep hidden emotions. In fact, the mother remembers, from the “Boston Marathon” (line 16), her own experience with war, and “her own ‘Maratone’” (lines 48-49). With her broken language she tries to describe her feelings in many possible ways, showing us how scattered she is.

According to Peters, in order to be able to discover the emotional range of the text, we should recognize the emotional contrasts, which are simply structures that help the readers to share the author’s sympathy or awareness of a conflict. In addition to that, the feeling of being scattered of the mother is very much shown in the odd form of the poem. The poem is a free verse, has an odd punctuation, many pregnant pauses, and useless spacing. This form of the poem can be seen as a mirror reflecting the mother to the reader: the punctuation speeding the rhythm, anxiously; the wrong odd form of the poem that fits her wrong language, the spacing showing deep bullet holes that scattered her forever. Moreover, these objects of emotions often lead to contrasting emotions necessary to the text’s structure.