"Tariff" by Michelle Boisseau

I have chosen the poem “Tariff” by Michelle Boisseau because, out of all the poems, this is the one which I pondered on the most. It left me wondering with concerns and questions. When I first came across the title I thought about taxes or something politically related. After reading the poem, I asked my self what it meant again and what I came to conclude is that in this poem, the word tariff means carrying something you did or when something follows you and you can’t just get away from it.

 This poem is about a friend that the narrator lost to suicide. As it seems, the narrator feels guilt and is carrying a burden. “After living a while you understand the ways you have to pay” (Boisseau 16-17). I ask myself what is the big secret that the narrator is keeping when he says, “What I did to hurt her I won’t tell you” (8). This is teasing the readers by making us contemplate about what makes the narrator feel as if her death is his fault.

The first line automatically lets me know that the narrator has been carrying a burden with him for a while. It says, “It takes time to appreciate how I once made a friend so unhappy the next night” (1-2). My guesses are that he has been carrying the death of his friend for a while now. He leaves us with a cliffhanger when he says, “you’re free to imagine any vicious, self-indulgent, hapless blunder or crime” (9-10). Reading this makes me think that maybe the author didn’t do anything severe, but then I recall that whatever he might have done was bad enough to the point where his friend committed suicide. I wonder what their relationship was, it was clear she had a boyfriend but there is always be a story behind. Maybe she was cheating and when she realized it was wrong she decided to steer her “Fiat Spider head-on into an on-coming truck” (4-5). I get the impression that these two-people met right before the incident and that is what makes the narrator feel guilty for maybe encouraging this act. These two people might’ve gotten into an argument or end on bad terms.

 I was surprised to find out this wasn’t the first time the narrator writes about this or speaks on this subject. What gave that away was when he said, “while I go about turning into this poem again” (11). If he writes upon it more than once it might be a subject that he constantly has in mind. When the narrator speaks about turning heavy marl I feel like it was a metaphor for saying he was outworking his mind. He might be thinking too deeply about what happened to his friend and it’s putting his mind at an intense vibe. The line I found hardest to understand was “what appreciate means is to price” (15-16). After reading the poem repeatedly and analyzing what is around this piece of text, I got to the understanding that the narrator meant that he’s paying the price of his friends’ death by remembering what he did to hurt her since he never valued his friend as much as he should have. 

The narrator says, “After living a while you understand the ways you have to pay” (16-17). When he says this, I get the impression that the narrator has faced a lot and that he has blamed himself for everything that has happened to him due to not helping the act of his friends’ suicide. The narrators' friend has been dead for more than 20 years and the way he talks about the suicide after so many years lets me know that whoever this person was, she was special to him. The message that I got from the poem is that if you do something bad, it will follow you.

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Unspoken Communication

My paper on Stitches; a memoir is going to be about unspoken communication. Unspoken communication can mean a lot of things. It can be when people speak through actions, or with looks. It can also be when they speak emotionally or physically. I am writing about this because this book speaks mostly through graphics than it does actual text. The thesis I have come up with states “Stitches; a memoir, argues that unspoken communication can sometimes speak louder than verbal communication in both a negative and positive way.

 I say negative and positive because although for the most part, David, our main character, is shown mostly negative unspoken communication, there are parts where he is shown positive unspoken communication. When I read this book, I did not expect the ending to turn out the way it did, I thought it would be like most books where you get your happily ever after. Even though David never really got his closure and he split ways from his family, I feel like his ways of coping and escaping his childhood will help him in the long run. I plan on organizing my paper in two different parts and if you didn’t guess already, it's going to be separated with one part talking about positive unspoken communication, and the other will be about negative unspoken communication.

This argument is relevant because the only way David and his family tend to communicate is with actions. They are not the type of family to sit together at the dinner table and talk about each other’s day. For example, the very begging of the book talks about everyone’s way of speaking. His mother would speak by sobbing or slamming kitchen boards. His dad would go down to the basement and thumped a punching bag. His brother, Ted, would beat on his drum. At last, there was David, and his language was getting sick. None of these show that they communicate in a verbal way. If anything, its shown they communicate physically or mentally. All of these are forms of unspoken communication.

 An example of positive unspoken communication was when his mother was dying, he went to see her and if you analyze the pictures correctly, David caressing his mother's face was his way of communicating with her and saying he forgives her. When David was sick, and he was on the verge of dying, his mom knew she had to make amends and by doing that she went up to his room in the hospital and she was willing to get him whatever he wanted, she didn’t say she cared about him or that she wanted to grant his last wish, but the fact that she was willing to do anything for him, with reason, means a lot. David’s mom also shows a positive way of unspoken communication when she feeds his him medicine and hands him his teddy bear to comfort him. She is showing she cares about his well-being in a physical and emotional way by doing the things she did in this part of the book.

The negative forms of unspoken communication come such a long way in this book. When David was being bullied for dressing up as Allice he does not let us know that he is sad, but he shows it through graphics when he tries to escape the outside world. When David went to visit his grandma, they got into it, David complained about supper. His grandma never said she was angry, but she showed it when she dragged David up to his room. When David finds out he has cancer he goes down and stares at his mother. In my ideal, he did this to show that unspoken communication has affected him. This part of the book means a lot because David looks at his mom with disappointment and anger for keeping the cancer news from him.

I’m very excited to write this paper because there is so much that this book says without saying anything at all. It is true when people say actions speak louder than words and this book proves it numerous times. It was very well planned out and it is easy to miss the best parts of the book if you aren’t careful.