help with these poems?

Question

i have to write a synthesis essay about these two poems
what things can i write about and what thesis statement can i make at the beginning?

Natasha Trethewey
White lies
The lies I could tell,
When I was growing up
Light-bright, near-white,
High-yello, redboned
In a black place,
Were just white lies

I could easily tell the white folks
That we lived uptown,
Not in that pink and green
Shanty-fied shotgun section
Along the tracks. I could act
Like my homemade dresses
Came straight out the window
Of Maison Blanche. I could even
Keep quiet, quiet as kept,
Like the time a white girl said
(squeezing my hand), Now
We have three of us in class

But I paid for it every time
Mama found out.
She laid her hands on me,
Then washed out my mouth
With Ivory soap. This
Is to purify, she said,
And cleanse your lying tongue.
Believing her, I swallowed suds
Thinking they’d work
From the inside out

second one
Learning to Love America

By Shirley Geok-Lin Lim

because it has no pure products

Learning to Love America

By Shirley Geok-Lin Lim

because it has no pure products

because the Pacific Ocean sweeps along the coastline
because the water of the ocean is cold
and because land is better than ocean

because I say we rather than they

because I live in California
I have eaten fresh artichokes
and jacaranda bloom in April and May

because my senses have caught up with my body
my breath with the air it swallows
my hunger with my mouth

because I walk barefoot in my house

because I have nursed my son at my breast
because he is a strong American boy
because I have seen his eyes redden when he is asked who he is
because he answers I don’t know

because to have a son is to have a country
because my son will bury me here
because countries are in our blood and we bleed them

because it is late and too late to change my mind
because it is time.

Answer 1

Refer to "Native Guard," collection by Natasha Trethewey:

The family romance in David Shapiro's oeuvre functions as a motif: autobiographical data is subsumed in music, real music: not rhymed prose, not enjambed journalism. Shapiro enchants.

But what of elegiac works that reject the premise of art's enchantment? At barely fifty pages, Native Guard nevertheless aspires to monumentality, memorializing both Trethewey's mother, murdered at the hands of her stepfather, and the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first black Civil War regiments.

Native Guard is structured like a dialectic, in three parts: the autobiographical as thesis, the historical as antithesis, and the intertwining of the personal and the historical as synthesis. First she limns her relationship with her mother, who dies; then she imaginatively reconstructs the experience of the Native Guards in the 1860's; finally, in the strongest section, she combines the personal and the historical in recollections of her childhood in the South in the explosive sixties. The dialectic is used to allegorize her very person: Trethewey is a synthesis of a black mother and white father. Their marriage was illegal in Mississippi, and her birth thereby illegitimate. But the illegitimate daughter refuses to give up her legacy, which encompasses the land and its history, its mess and its murderousness. She comes back again and again, rooted to the source of trauma, and in an act of equal parts reconciliation and defiance, creates a tribute for the Native Guards, whom the state has neglected to memorialize whatsoever.


**
Gather background info about Lim:

Lim writes as a diasporic Chinese woman of Malaysian origin, whose concern with diasporist discourse arises from a desire to advance interest in women's bodies, identities and transnational movements. By placing Malaysian women in the context of emigration and emotional/psychological journeying, Lim mimics and validates aspects of her own diasporic experience after leaving Malaysia to live permanently in America with periodic visits to her community of family, friends and colleagues in Singapore and Malaysia, which she documents in her autobiography Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist (1996).


Once you've this info, try to look at the poems.
One had a black mother and white father. The other was a Chinese Malaysian who migrated to America.

Lim's poem - emigration and emotional/psychological journeying - diasporic identity
Trethewey's poem - color and emotional/psychological isolation - mixed-race identity

The red thread is therefore marginality in terms of sense of identity. Refer to Natasha essay above to deduce how best to write the synthesis. The thesis statement should now be clear to you - Politics of identity: emotional/psychological for Lim -diasporic, for Natasha -mixed race (read Sen. Obama's life-story too).


good luck

Answer 2

Learning To Love America

Answer 3

Have you ever seen a donkey make himself into an @ss? Have you ever seen a monkey getting high on grass? Have you ever heard a birdy Singing to himself I tired to write a poem but I even bored myself.

Answer 4

Good discussion, just what I was looking for.