Saturday, July 11, 2009
WEEK 3 QUESTION 6
In the poem titled "Heritage" the author Linda Hogan is stating "From my family I have learned the secrets of never having a home." I believe this is her expression of having an abnormal life. Hogan is trying to tell her readers by mentioning the word "secrets" that she does not really matter to her family, but rather the heritage is what is most important her them rather than her. My interpretation of "secrets" is symbolic. It symbolizes the fact that despite of the fact that she is nothing like her family, meaning that the things that her family does are not as important to her as they are to the rest her family, she still belongs to the heritage. Due to this situation, Hogan does not feel as though she has real home because of their different persepective on life.
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I really like your take on this poem. I never interpreted the speaker as not being important to her family, rather that the family was trying to impress on her the values of her heritage. It seams clear that the speaker was have Native American and half Caucasian and that she felt ashamed of her ethnicity, but the family does not seam to treat her any differently.Linda Hogan writes many poems about the Native American culture, which is interesting because although she has native American ancestry, her father was in the military and she didn't spend much of her childhood around Native Americans other than her immediate family.
ReplyDeleteI too pick up the idea that Hogan is different from the extended family members that she speaks of, being that she is of mixed race. However, I feel that the idea of "never having a home" refers to the idea that she is conflicted because she cannot identify 100% with one race - she is too light-skinned to be accepted as Native American, yet would feel guilty abandoning that heritage if she were to identify herself as white.
ReplyDeleteI like the symbolism you point to Taty. I did a little research on Linda Hogan and as Doug pointed out her father was in the military therefore they move around a lot, I simply thought the moving created this secrecy about family. In line 16 she states that her father was told not to remember, maybe because he left the reservation and joined the military. Linda Hogan moved back to her roots, heritage as an indian and is very active now with indian affairs.
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