The stereotype poems we read produced more of a feeling in me as they were read. A lot of the poems we read don’t create much emotion, but some of these poems did; which I think poems are supposed to do. One of the poems which did this was In Response to Executive Order 9066, by Dwight Okita. I think the emotion created was in part due to the extreme sarcasm. The speaker seems very calm and joking while explaining such a serious situation evident by the lines, “I am a fourteen-year-old girl with bad spelling / and a messy room. If it helps any, I will tell you / I have always felt funny using chopsticks.” A messy room, bad spelling and chopsticks are completely irrelevant to the situation but it shows her sarcasm. From line 15 on is where the emotion is really created. Here this little girl is treated differently by her friend; abandoned and put down because of her race when just the day before they were happy together. The final lines, “…told her / when the first tomato ripened / she’d miss me,” shows that it will take a while for her friend to realize the mistake she has made and that it will be too late. This is a sad but true account of how stereotypes occur in people of young ages.
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