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  • Home
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  • Staff
    • Staff 2022-23
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  • Issues
    • See You in Another World (2023) >
      • Editors' Note (2023)
      • Voices of the Summer Night
      • Lightning Glut
      • All The Little Things
      • From a Distance
      • Confined
      • The Night Hours
      • A Contrapuntal for the Girl in My Dreams
      • Go Back (before they do)
      • Snippet of Thought
      • The Darkness
      • Her Nature
      • I Listen
      • Stranger In The City
      • What Music Does
      • Fallen Stranger
      • The Black Dress
    • A Fire of Words (2022) >
      • Editors' Note (2022)
      • The Floor Wallows Lower
      • Cornflowers
      • Erudite
      • That One Morning
      • mom, im afraid
      • selenophilia
      • Roses and Rainbows
      • If a poisonous snake bites itself, will it die?
      • Rochester
      • Crown of Branches
      • Stairs to the Sea
      • A Poem Written Entirely From Advertisements
      • Pyromania
      • silhouette of a bird against winter stars
      • thunderstorm in the bedroom
      • A Night in Recovery
      • sleeping gypsie
      • paper dolls&goodbyes
      • We Are Women
      • Village Air
      • Sunshine's Laughter
      • the male gaze
      • The Forensic Entomologist
      • Lacking
      • Drowning
      • Adelie
    • Create the Wonders We Dream (2021) >
      • Editors' Note (2021)
      • Zove
      • I'm Sorry
      • Fake Smile
      • My Friend the Balloon
      • Eyes Intertwined
      • Perfect
      • Only a Moment
      • A Dangerous Word
      • My Dreams
      • The Last 100 Meters
      • The Green Void (Villanelle)
      • The Whimsical Galaxy (Sestina)
      • The Silent Kindness
      • Pressure
      • Table on the Hill
      • The Yukon
      • The Shore
      • Repentance
      • Her and I
      • Infections of the Soul
      • Threads
      • Dream of a High Schooler
      • Empty
      • little flame
      • scars
      • black and white
      • The Cat
      • Joy
      • Sweet Honey Bee Stings
      • If There Were One Day
      • Delete
      • Our Hearts to Central Vietnam
      • him or Him?
      • Ocean
      • Es Llaner Beach
      • Sewn Together
      • Rain
      • Yes, I Like
      • The Legacy of the Moon
      • The Wind Whimpers
      • From Here I See
      • To Feel Clean
      • Red
      • Survival
      • Substance
      • Golden Lies
      • Midnight Tango
      • Ode to a Spleen
      • Modern Siren
      • The Night's Diamond Tears
      • Beats In Double Time
      • A Day in the Flight
      • Carved By Venus
      • Lifeline
      • Everest
      • Education
      • How Much of Reality Can Be Observed
      • What is a Spork
      • What is the difference between love and in love
      • What would you have wanted? me to say
      • Planet Caravan
      • The Journey of a Minute
      • The Circus of Scars
      • Mosaic
      • Color
      • Love and Acceptance
    • Colors I Never Knew Existed (2020) >
      • Editors' Note (2020)
      • Two Weeks' Notice
      • A Curious Man
      • An Eternity Swathed in Cobwebs
      • Hidden Memories: A Villanelle
      • A Better Place
      • Conscription
      • Just Breathe
      • Akko
      • The Hungry Dark
      • And Then Something Shuffled
      • Deodorants are a Girl's Best Friend
      • The Old House
      • Willow
      • Perfection
      • She Will Be Queen
      • Nothing But Space
      • a wicked thing
      • Anthony
      • Cheesecake
      • Za
      • Coco
      • Coexist
      • der böse Mann
      • Feeding
      • Catharsis
      • I HAD TO RENAME THIS POEM DUE TO COPYRIGHT ISSUES
      • For All The Kids Who Were Told They'd Never Make It... and Believed This
      • i Will Always Love You
      • Our 4
      • Rainy Day
      • Space
      • The Ocean Cares Nothing of Man
      • Sickly Sweet Love
      • I call the eating disorder hotline
      • Bright and Sunny Day
      • Grandma in the Moon
      • Interminable Education in Seventeen Syllables
      • Macrocosmic Creation
      • Middle Class Psyche
      • My Sister
      • From a Park Bench
      • Rain
      • A Recollection of Our Memories
      • Sadie Got Me in My Feelings
      • Uranium Rose
      • When I Grow Up - Paige Rhoads
      • Who am I?
      • 49-53
    • Words Become Reality (2019) >
      • Editors' Note (2019)
      • Bear Down: A Sestina
      • Kidnapped & Killed
      • Lemonade
      • Rise
      • Someone Who always Pays
      • A Simple Story
      • The King's Battle
      • Aftermath
      • Aging Population
      • Can we still be friends?
      • Carpe Diem
      • Coffee
      • Day to Day
      • Do Not Hold me Closer, Let me Go
      • Gift of Time
      • Love Everlasting
      • A Message to the Youth
      • Peach
      • Randy
      • The River & The Earth
      • The Show Goes On
      • Summer Love
      • Sundae
      • Waiting for the Bell
      • West Coast Wishing
    • Watch Every Second (2018) >
      • Editors' Note (2018)
      • White
      • eleven eleven
      • Growing Up
      • Claustrophobia
      • The Cage
      • The Soldier's Return
      • Spacing Out
      • Depression
      • Mona Lisa
      • Childhood Cancer
      • Puberty
      • Languish
      • A Magical Ending
      • Life
      • Barter
      • Descent into Space
      • Red Water
      • The Short Film
      • Starting Line
      • And I Am From?
      • Such a Foreign Concept
      • You Say
      • My Creator
      • The Most Common Illness
      • Reflection in Time
      • Ode to My Mirror
      • Time
      • See Me
      • Consequences
      • Where I'm From
      • Unstoppable
    • Her Voice Remains (2017) >
      • Editors' Note (2017)
      • Alone in the Halls
      • Ideal Love
      • Cliff at Dusk
      • I Will Never Forget You
      • Lost
      • OCD
      • Cannibal Animal
      • A Poem for Grandpa 2
      • Solvent
      • Risky
      • Shannen and Graces’ Long Road
      • Dear Bubbles
      • A Tree in the Air
      • Losing Myself
      • ABC's Poem
      • My Glorious Flight
      • Birth Giver
      • Flat Line
      • Eternal Beauty
  • Blog
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Book Review: Gorilla, My Love

5/20/2019

2 Comments

 
Picture
By Jolee Lindin
​
Gorilla, My Love is a collection of short stories written by Toni Cade Bambara. This collection was published in 1972 by Random House. Bambara is also the author of The Black Woman, Tales and Short Stories for Black Folk, and Junior Case Book on Racism.

Gorilla, My Love leans towards being a feminist collection, with a lot of the narrators being young girls. Throughout the collection Bambara indulges the audience in her female characters by giving them badass personalities and qualities. This includes more than just the narrators as well. Hazel is one of the narrators of the collection and she tells it how it is. One of the most memorable moments of Hazel’s narration is in the short story “Gorilla, My Love”. She emphasizes that if someone says something, they better mean it: “Cause if you say Gorilla, My Love, you suppose to mean it” (Bambara 170).

Another powerful female character, who isn’t a narrator, is Miss Moore from the short story “The Lesson”. Miss Moore is kind enough to take the children to different educational places to teach them different things. Although the children’s parents think Miss Moore is a little strange, they still allow their children to take these wonderful opportunities that Miss Moore presents to them. The children don’t always enjoy where they go, but Miss Moore doesn’t let the children get to her. She continues to use her patience to give the children a great experience.

Because female child narrators seem to be an ongoing theme throughout the collection there seems to be this idea of innocence, but also this feeling of tension between the generational gap throughout the collection. You see examples of both these things in the stories, “The Hammer Man”, “Happy Birthday”, and “Basement.” In “The Hammer Man” there is an incident between the narrator, a young girl, and Manny with the police. The narrator and Manny are at the park shooting hoops when the police come by and ask them, “Who unlocked the gate?” (Bambara 40). Although the narrator and Manny aren’t doing anything wrong the police try to get them to leave. However, the narrator stands up to the police saying, “this here’s a free country. So why don’t you give him back his ball” (Bambara 41). This shows the innocence of the narrator, but it also shows the tension between the generational gaps of the characters as well.

​This was a great collection to read and I really enjoyed learning about the cultures of different time periods for different people. Using children as narrators was a risky but rewarding idea. I could really connect to the stories and put myself in the shoes of the narrators. It allowed me to see from a different perspective that I really enjoyed diving into. Although this story collection was “straight-up fiction,” the events that took place and the themes that were present seemed very realistic. They took you for a journey while also staying connected and true to the whole collection. I believe many high school students would enjoy this collection because of the funny but simple stories included within the collection. It is also very focused on the younger generation at this time and the innocence of younger kids to teenagers that kids now might be able to relate to.

2 Comments
Steve link
9/10/2021 06:32:50 am

Thank yyou for sharing

Reply
MckinneyVia link
7/25/2022 11:56:59 pm

I very much appreciate it. Thank you for this excellent article. Keep posting!

Reply



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