Four Skinny Trees Maya Angelou Analysis

There are many choices that we had to make to write these two pieces. First, I needed to decide on what other work I wanted to use to base my writing off of. I ended up choosing “Four Skinny Trees” from The House On Mango Street and “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou. I also needed to figure out what figurative language I needed, and wanted to use. Lastly, I needed to figure out my over arching theme. Before I knew all of the guidelines for this project, I had started to write. I wrote whatever I felt like writing. Then I had to decide if I was going to keep what I had written, or if I wanted to get rid of it and start all over. I liked what I had written, and I wanted to keep it, but I had to figure out if it was possible for me to shape it into following the structure of a vignette from House On Mango Street. Instead of analyzing others writing, I had to analyze my work to find my over arching theme, and see if I was using any figurative language

Angelou used a lot of questions in her poem, so I chose to ask questions that I would want to ask the people that harassed us. I say that they are “frightening us from everything that we love, and we want to stay”. This alludes to how we moved to Austin because of all of this. I say that I am the prey and they are the predator because we never knew when they would come up with something new to do. Once they took our washer and dryer and just put them outside. They did some very strange things. I wrote that we were playing a “big game of cries” because it was almost like we were playing a game of monopoly with our lives. Also all of the children in my house were very young at the time, and I remember my brothers crying every single night. I wrote a lot about the drawing of the house in black. This is because my brother who was six at the time would sit down with a box of crayons and only draw our house, all in black. That's terrifying, that's a haunted