http://www.hungermtn.org VCFA Journal of the Arts Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:15:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.hungermtn.org/the-malleable-morning-bruises-one/comment-page-1/#comment-1584 Jim Stallings Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:28:43 +0000 http://www.hungermtn.org/?page_id=1476#comment-1584 I won't try to be too "structural" or Levi-Straussian here...but in a quick read one gets the sense of being transported into the Proppian world of threes, the essential patterning of fairy or folk tales worldwide. There is in this a sense of a rite de passage for a girl Delia and boy Kwame, and the dreaming and its challenges enliven the liminal betwixt and between of growth toward newly learned stages of adulthood ahead: all reflecting a tension that requires responsibility to adult needs, like the food necessary for life or the language marks (the letters) that loom so central to the "laws" of this future thing called adulthood. These tales and rituals of dreaming and passage are possibly echoic of the author's African fieldwork and his appreciation of the playful and fearful nature of male and female children's growth through dreaming into and toward the uncertainties of adulthood. I won’t try to be too “structural” or Levi-Straussian here…but in a quick read one gets the sense of being transported into the Proppian world of threes, the essential patterning of fairy or folk tales worldwide. There is in this a sense of a rite de passage for a girl Delia and boy Kwame, and the dreaming and its challenges enliven the liminal betwixt and between of growth toward newly learned stages of adulthood ahead: all reflecting a tension that requires responsibility to adult needs, like the food necessary for life or the language marks (the letters) that loom so central to the “laws” of this future thing called adulthood. These tales and rituals of dreaming and passage are possibly echoic of the author’s African fieldwork and his appreciation of the playful and fearful nature of male and female children’s growth through dreaming into and toward the uncertainties of adulthood.

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