Brown girl dreaming

By Sandra Mikalsen

For this assignment, I will give a literary analysis on one of the many themes from Jaqueline Woodson’s book Brown girl dreaming (2014). The book is written as a memoir about Woodson’s childhood, consisting of a series of poems. Woodson is an African American who grew up in the 1960’s just after the fight for civil rights in the United States, and thus the book is strongly influenced by this movement. Some of the other themes recurring throughout the book is about family and home, religion, friendship and finding your place in the world. 

For my literary analysis I have chosen the theme about family and home. This theme covers a broad spectre of topics from birth to death, abandonment, friendships, religion and conflicts within the family. The book starts off with the telling of Woodson’s birth and an elaboration of her family, which puts the reader straight into Woodson’s life. It also gives us an idea of the book being a memoir of the authors’ life. Her family consists of the Woodson’s on her fathers’ side and the Irby family on her mothers’ side. Even though her parents live together in one place, each of the family sides are living in the opposite part of the country – her father belonging to the north in Ohio, and her mother to the south in Greenville. This creates an issue between Woodson’s parents because each of them wants to live near their own family, and thus causes them to have arguments and fights from time to time (Woodson, 2014, p.26-27). 

Only a year into Woodson’s lifetime her parents decide to separate, and so Woodson and her siblings move to the south with their mother. Woodson describes this separation “as though we were simply guests leaving Sunday supper” (Woodson, 2014, p.40-41), and so her grandfather in Greenville becomes Woodson’s new father figure because, as she puts it, “this is all we know now” (Woodson, 2014, p.50). From this point on, the main focus in the family theme of the book is the Irby-lineage which becomes an important part of Woodson’s life, identity and place of belonging – her home. She develops a strong bond with her grandparents, the grandfather in particular because he seems to understand and accept that Jaqueline is somewhat different from her siblings, but she also loves to hear her grandmother tell stories. The bond between Jaqueline and her grandfather is especially prominent on page 131 as they sit together outside on a cold winter’s night; “My head against my grandfather’s arm … You don’t need words on a night like this. Just the warmth of your grandfather’s arm.”, and also in the poem “what’s left behind” on page 287-288 (Woodson, 2014). 

During their time in Greenville, Woodson is slowly introduced to the Bible and religion. At first she loves to hear her grandmother retell the stories from the Bible and becomes fascinated with storytelling, but later on their religious training becomes more serious. Her grandmother belongs to a religious organization called Jehovah’s witnesses, and thus it is important to her to raise the grandchildren into the same believes. Throughout the book Woodson gives us some clues to her discontent about being a part of Jehovah’s witnesses. Her discontent mostly seems to be because it prevents her to do fun things, such as celebrating Halloween and Christmas or having birthday cupcakes in school (Woodson, 2014, p.164).

Even though friendship itself can be seen as its own theme in the book, it is also considered an important part of Woodson’s family life. After moving to New York with her mother and siblings, she becomes friends with a Spanish neighbour girl named Maria. This friendship is clearly stated in the poem on page 245 (Woodson, 2014) and when Maria and Jaqueline is covering the sidewalks with the words saying “Maria & Jackie Best Friends Forever” (Woodson, 2014, p.242). At page 256 (Woodson, 2014) it becomes clear that the friendship between Maria and Jaqueline is considered more than just a friendship – they see themselves as family; “When I ask Maria where Diana is she says, They’re coming later. This part is just for my family … Yeah, I say. This is only for us. The family.”

How and why use Brown girl dreaming for teaching

For this part of the assignment, I will focus on how and why use Brown girl dreaming in teaching based on competence aims from the English subject curriculum after Year 7 (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2013, p.9). 

Because of Woodson’s background as an African American, this book presents an excellent opportunity to give the pupils some cultural input and cross-cultural awareness (Munden & Myhre, 2015, p.106). Based on the competence aim “converse about the way people live and socialise in different cultures in English-speaking countries”, I would divide the class into smaller groups and give each group a specific part from the book for them to converse about, especially parts that shows clear differences in how other cultures live and socialise. Another lesson based on the book could be about using the books structure as a starting point for the pupils to create their own poems (Munden & Myhre, 2015, p.113). By giving the pupils a selection of poems based on the different themes from the book, they could get inspired to write their own poems about a chosen subject they find most relevant to themselves, such as friendship or family. Thus integrating the competence aim about “express oneself creatively inspired by different types of English literature from various sources”. 

To consider the pupils who struggle, I would use one teaching lesson to focus only on reading for pleasure, because extensive reading is important for pupils to improve their reading skills. Also, when the pupils can choose for themselves how many books or how much of the book they want to read, it helps a lot on their motivation for reading (Munden & Myhre, 2015, p.107). Since the pupils can choose how much of the book they want to read, and because the book is written as poems, I can base this lesson on the competence aim “read and understand different types of texts of varying length from different sources”. Still considering the pupils who struggle, another lesson to use could be asking questions about the book or given parts of the book. Simple questions with just one correct answer enables the struggling pupils to contribute orally and experience the joy of having the right answer (Munden & Myhre, 2015, p.118). Such a question could be “Who is Jaqueline’s best friend?”or “What religious organization does Jaqueline and her grandmother belong to?”, thus checking whether the pupils has achieved the aim “understand the main content of texts one has chosen”.

Sources

Munden, J. og A. Myhre (2015). Twinkle Twinkle, English 1-4, 3.ed. Oslo: Cappelen Damm AS

Utdanningsdirektoratet (2013). National Curriculum for Knowledge Promotion, English subject curriculum. Sourced 10.04.16 from http://www.udir.no/kl06/eng1-03/Hele/Kompetansemaal/kompetansemal-etter-7.-arstrinn/?lplang=eng

Woodson, J. (2014). Brown Girl Dreaming. New York: Penguin Group (USA) LLC