However, the essays we read for class today are clearly rooted in personal experiences and seem to lend themselves to fewer different interpretations.  In Mitsuye Yamada’s “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster,” she gives personal experiences about her oppression and how she accepted society’s ways.  I feel as if the essays have more detail than the poems, such as, “I had assumed I was more or less free, not realizing that those who are free to make and take choices; they do not choose from options proffered by ‘those out there’” (32).  Yamada is realizing that choosing between two options that others lay out for her, is not truly freedom.  Freedom is being able to break away from what others have outlined for you and choosing your own path.

To elaborate upon a few examples, in Genny Lim’s poem “Wonder Woman,” she expresses a deep desire for connections with other women and a simultaneous fascination with the lives of women of all kinds. She is curious as to their similarities, as to the aspects of their lives that, despite differences, they may have in common; she additionally questions why these differences exist, why some women are more fortunate than others. This can be exemplified by the quote, “Sometimes I stretch my arms way above my head and wonder if/ There are women along the Mekong doing the same.” In Cherrie Moraga’s La Guera, she details a number of experiences, commenting on things such as her bleached upbringing, struggles to come to terms with oppression and privilege, and the internalization of racism and classism (etc). She additionally comments on, similarly to Lim despite the clear differences in the structure and contact of their stories, connections to other women, something she says is aided by her lesbianism. 

Thus, these stories, whether they be in the form of essays or poems, are all theories of flesh because they are the stories and the deeply personal experiences of these individuals told in their own words. Once these stories are placed together, general themes are able to be teased out and examined, which is a beautiful thing given how different these stories of experiences may initially seem to be from one another. 

Because it was these devices that piqued my interest in this poem, I want to focus this response largely on an analysis of them. To begin, stanza serves a different and well-defined purpose. Yet, despite these differences, they build on each other in an important way. The first exists so as to establish the connection that Chrsytos feels with women and with their people as a whole, with the extended metaphor of them embodying these other women being evident from the very first line's reference of "women locked in my joints" (1). Bodily references are continually made throughout this stanza and in lines 7-9 the anaphora of  “In my marrow” is used. The repetition of reference to this specific body part is incredibly important, as marrow is something that is deeply embedded within us. This demonstrates how deeply Chrystos is able to feel the pain of their people. The second stanza continues the extended metaphor of body parts by mentioning a scarred knee. This stanza, the shortest of the poem, calls out the Dawes Act and de jure assimilation, going on to associate the two with violence by stating that children were “torn” (13) from their families and “bludgeoned” (14) into government schools. At the end of the stanza, Chrystos calls their people “prisoners/ of a long war” (15-16). Thus, this paragraph takes the idea of the deeply connected body from the first stanza and introduces it to the idea of violence through the use of aggressive verbs and an allusion to war. With this in mind, this paragraph demonstrates the violence that the body has been put through. The third stanza takes the Wounded Knee reference and expounds upon it, describing an “infection” (19) and a constant limp. The final line is written with all the first letters capitalized, a deviation from the relatively ‘normal’ capitalization employed through the rest of the poem that is seemingly meant for emphasis. This line states “see/ How I Am Still Walking” (25-26). It demand that it be recognized that, although the body that has been described throughout this poem has been wounded, it is still alive, surviving, and walking. 

I’m sure that this story could have been effectively told via an essay, and maybe the main point and themes could have been made even more obvious that way, but the employment of a poem allows Chrystos to make their conveyance of their story deeply personal and emotional in a way that essays cannot.