From Mama Dot

536 Words3 Pages
Fred D’aguiar’s From Mama Dot tells the story of a woman in slavery. Starting out with her birth, and ending in her death, the life of a slave is a long, hard, unhappy one. Many of the Akan people were enslaved by the European people, and were treated very poorly. This poem tells the story of an enslaved woman as a tale, leaving the readers both satisfied with the tale, and educated. The poem starts off with the character being born, and she is sold almost immediately, as this woman was not worth anything more than cheap labour. The realism of this poem is brought to the reader’s attention by the lack of use of imagery and symbolism. Fred D’aguiar follows the traditional way of West Indian poetry by using stories that easily could have happened to the people of that time. He puts them into poetry as a way to inform people of the history of slavery for that race, while not making it very obvious that he is educating the readers. The readers read D’aguiar’s poetry to read a good story, but his poetry is always informative. D’aguiar is quite clever in the way in which he presents his poetry, he presents a situation for the readers to read, and presents it in such a way that the readers feel as though the story is being personally recounted for them, using the idea of oral storytelling. Another example of D’aguiar using traditional West Indian writing styles is when he has the woman in the poem run away and punished when she is caught. It is a very direct and honest way of telling stories of those that have lived long ago. The last two stanzas talk about the character’s death, and her freedom. The second-last stanza talks about the character being dropped and burned, exampling a common death of a slave who tried to escape their terrible misfortune. The last stanza talks about how the character was freed in a new century. Since the character has been punished via
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