Dustin Johnson

7/22/2016
ENGL 2610
Interpretation Project 2
Interpretation of For a New Citizen of These United States
When a person relocates to another country, they become two people instead of one.
Through assimilation of their new culture they become the resident that represents the country
where they currently reside. The second person, however, is left behind in memory: the customs
that are no longer practiced fade away; the events of a culture that incited the need to relocate
subside; a life once lived has retreated into the abyss with the absence of practice. In Li-Young
Lees poem For a New Citizen of These United States, he captures this sentiment of loss and
replacement of self with dark imagery, visual remembrances that are emphasized with
corresponding sounds, and with the way the narrator relates the story to the reader with the use of
pronouns.
The narrator in the poem uses many dark images to convey this loss of self, as if this idea
of self is subsiding into the back recesses of his mind or, as Masinelli stated in his analysis, to
convey a sense of darkness that surrounds Lees memories (2). In the beginning stanza, he
catches a black moth while mistakenly taking it for the irregular postage stamp of death. In
this example, it is as if the narrator is tethered by their culture identity and seeks to break free of
the superstitious aspects of it (Becker 2). Even though he is bound by this superstition, the
words he uses, black and deathone the darkest of words that signifies the absence of color and
light, and the other, a word that is typically surrounded by black with mourning. Even Death
himself, robed in black, ushers an individual out of life and into the next. This realizationthat
the narrator is confronting death at the beginning of the poemcan be signified as his
acceptance of death of his former self, a death of forgetting the life he has once lived.

Other examples of the narrator using dark images to convey this loss is with his use of
rain in both the second stanza and the fourth. Li-Young Lee could have used weather that has less
connotation as being dark and gloomy, like a sunny cloudless day, but the use of such weather
would be contradictory to the mood of his flashbacks. In the second stanza he states, there is no
need for sadness and the rain at the window, which darkens the emotion of this stanza and
draws the reader into a dimmed state as the narrator relates his previous life. The rain in the
fourth stanza is briefly mentioned when the trains came, then/ the rains, and then we got
separated. The use of rain precedes this harrowing event of separation: a separation that will be
analyzed shortly.
In the second stanza, the dark imagery does not end with the rainy weather. He brings in
cloud-shadow, wing-shadow, and father-shadow. Shadows themselves have an essence of
darkness and each one of these bodies blocked out the light or confused the light, as the
narrator puts it. After the shadows obfuscate the light, soldiers and flags deepened those
windows to submarine. This militaristic imagery beckons the absence of light yet again when
the windows are metaphorically represented as a submarine. A submarine, when fully submerged
which we can take it as such since these windows are deepenedis devoid of light as it is
blanketed by the sea.
Beyond the dark images that captivates the reader with the re-tellings of the memories of
the narrators previous life, the sounds within these retellings usher the reader to a solemn
silence. The second and third stanza both have heavy uses of the sh sound. This taken out of
the poem and into the context of everyday life, is understood as a sound made when one wants
another to be quiet. The many mentions to shadows in the second stanza subtly hint to the reader
with auditory cues into being quiet before the soldiers come to the house. The third stanza is

where this sound is very prominent and fits the mood of the situation. This part of the poem is
the memory recalled where the narrator and three others were in hiding and, after he mentions
the house where Chung hid, he uses the sh sound in languished, hush-hushed and
missionary. All these words captured the fragile sensation of the moment as the narrator relates
to the reader of the trauma that has led to the new life in the United States.
The most peculiar aspect to the poem is the narrators use of pronouns: me, I, you, our,
we, us, and my. Without knowing what this poem is about, the mention of these pronouns would
prompt one to think this involved multiple people, just as Matthew Masinelli suggested in his
analysis that Lee was the narrator and he might be speaking to a person who was with him
during this whole experience (1), but I would have to disagree. The pronouns change and alter
as the poem progresses from the narrators experiences from his homeland to his new citizenship
in the United States.
At the beginning of the poem, the narrator opens up with, Forgive me for thinking I saw/
and continues to use the personal pronouns of I and me when he is talking from his
current standpoint of the immigrant currently in the United States. Every mention of I is the
present representation that is holding back from mentioning the house where Chung hid, or
holding back from showing letters and a shawl, or holding back from recalling memories of his
mother. The I and me take the stance of the current narrator.
However, the I version of the narrator is forgiving the you, which is the aspect of the
narrator that is doing the forgetting. The you is part of the narrator that is still within him, but
is fading away due to a new setting that is no longer the place he experienced these memories.
This you isnt reminded by rain of the confused light next to the the window anymore. This
you doesnt remember the house where they all hid. This you doesnt recall the missionary/

bells chiming the hour. This you doesnt remember his mother preparing the narrator for
your own escape. This use of these two pronouns expresses the dualism within the narrators
own loss of his history and the replacement of memories, as Jake Becker stated, that one still
feels obligated to maintain even if they seem obsolete (5).
What cues the reader into seeing that these separate identities are indeed the same person
is the unification by use of we and our. After three stanzas of this back and forth between the
I and you within the narrator, the fourth stanza unites these elements when he states that
After all, it was just our life/ we stood with/ the other families on a crowded/ railroad
platform. It is here that the narrator ties these two aspects of self together and they, the I and
the you, will be united for the last time because to finish this stanza, the narrator relates: then
we got separated. After the separation, one of us faithfully penciled/ in a day-book the events
that occurred after the departure from the train station. There is only one aspect of the narrator
now, because the narrator has left behind the place that made up the memories of the you, and
is separated with the journey to new lands.
This poem, though short and quick to read, spans across a lifetime broken in two. With
the darkened imagery, the hushing alliteration, and the juxtaposition of the inner selves, this
narrator has brought to the reader the experience of being detached from his history and being
absolved into the security of his present situation. This security that he has found within the
United States, has given reason for the narrator to let go, but through the retellings, it is apparent
the narrator is not quite ready to, because, After all, it was only our/ life, our life and its
forgetting.

Works Cited

Becker, Jake. "Holy Toledo." Interpretation Project. 2016. Print.