Understanding oneself through Home

  

As I read the second half of Jacqueline Woodson’s “brown girl dreaming”, I was particularly mindful of the ways in which the concept of setting and place contributed to play such a large role in her writing.  Just as in the first half of the novel, it seems as though the place that the narrator lives, and the place that she considers home are often two different things.  Additionally, setting and physical place play a significant role in revealing Jackie as an individual and character.  The ways in which she understands concepts of place and home are also, in a very beautiful and poignant way, the ways in which she comes to understand herself.

 

The “halfway home #2” poem provides context to Jackie’s feeling of displacement, and inability to comprehend what it means to be truly home.  Woodson writes, “And though it still feels strange to be so far away from soft dirt beneath bare feet, the ground is firm here.”  This sentiment echoes a feeling of being caught between two places that Woodson expresses in “halfway home #1”, where she writes, “I imagine her standing in the middle of the road, her arms out, fingers pointing North and South.”  This paralleled sentiment of not quite knowing where home is - whether it is soft dirt, or firm ground in her second poem, or North versus South in her earlier poem - tells more about Jackie as a character and narrator than it does about location at all.  Although her physical location is significant to her storytelling, readers learn more about how she feels and responds to the displacement and feeling of never being home.

 

         Additional insights into Jackie’s deeply personal reckoning with her identity in response to place arise in “halfway home #2.” She reflects on her own dialect, noting, “The city is settling around me, my words come fast now. When I speak, the soft curl of the South on my tongue is near gone.”  Although at the surface, something as simple as one’s accent doesn’t seem noteworthy, Jackie associates her accent with her identity, and as she begins to lose her southern drawl, she also begins to lose a sense of herself.  At the end of the poem, Jackie reflects on a phone call with her grandmother, saying, “And when he say, I love you, too the South is so heavy in her mouth, my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I’ve ever known.”  In the simplest of ways, Woodson succeeds in conveying her longing for the past, and for home, in something as simple as the sounds of the South.

 

         As I’ve found with all beautiful poetry, Woodson is able to convey a much deeper meaning - namely, her own reckoning with her identity - through more tangible concepts of place and home.

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