Lines of Poverty
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This piece is a collage I created after extracting numerous quotes from the book that had to do with poverty and its effects on Junior's life or a major insight he had regarding poverty and how it shaped him. I grouped them in loose categories and color coded them. Green deals directly with money, Red is used to characterize passages that pay close attention to death. Blue is relational, purple is has to do with alcohol, and yellow talks a lot about the systemic poverty ingrained in the lives of native Americans. Black in the most infrequent color is used for quotes that see the beauty of the world despite of the poverty that surrounds them. The piece is more about color and the multitude of instances where Sherman Alexie is explicit about the kind of cost poverty has on Junior, thus shaping the way he sees the world. It is best pondered and puzzled after. I have also attached the quotes I used. I shaped them in such away that they would echo the poverty found within the text in the same way a choir echos with overtones.
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Up In The TreeI wanted to represent two drastically different emotions that are present in the novel. The first image is one that talks mostly about the sadness and loss that poverty has pushed onto Junior. This piece accentuates the beauty that he is able to see despite all of the awful things he witnesses everyday. The quote comes at the end of the novel when Rowdy and Junior are up a tree near Turtle Lake, looking over their reservation. I noticed that it was a very similar sentiment to the last four lines of John Berryman's "Dream Song 1." Berryman's text has an explicit loss, where the quote from the novel does not carry the weight of loss at first glance. But reading the quote in context, after the majority of the novel, the loss that the Native Americans feel really comes through. Much of this project explore how poverty degrades. In many ways, however, at the end of all things, beauty can be found if we look hard enough in the right places.
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