Review the poems read this week, then answer the following:
“Today Was a Bad Day Like TB”
1. What argument about the ways whites relate to Native Americans is Chrystos making? What assumptions about whites does Chrystos seem to have? What stereotypes does the seem to harbor?
“In Response to Executive Order 9066”
2. What claim is Okita making in the last stanza? On what assumption about friendship is it based?
3. Sine there was no evidence that Japanese American citizens ever gave any “secrets/ away to the Enemy” (lines 18-19) during World War II, why do you think Denise and millions of other Americans made that assumption?
“Today Was a Bad Day Like TB” and “In Response to Executive Order 9066”
4. Okita creates a young female narrator to speak for him. Does this make his poem less direct than Chrystos’s?
5. Is the alienation described by Okita more or less painful than that described by Chrystos?
“Legal Alien”
6. Explain the significance of the “token” metaphor in line 16.
“Legal Alien” and “Today Was a Bad Day Like TB”
7. Compare Mora’s tone with Chrystos’s.
8. Which of the stereotypes in these poems seems the most psychologically damaging? Why?
“Black Boys Play the Classics”
9. Why does the poet offer a description of the boys’ clothes? Does it have to do with our stereotyped expectations?
10. How would you state the theme of this poem? Do you agree with it? Who is the “we” in the next-to-last line?
