Loop Of Jade Poem Analysis

“When I discover who I am, I will be free.” ~Ralph Ellison

With a cultural identity as unclear as her own, Sarah Howe grew up questioning many aspects of her identity. But despite her great efforts in discovering what it means to have a bicultural heritage, her journey is forever ongoing.

This journey is inscribed in her poetry book Loop of Jade.

Howe begins her book with the poem Mother’s Jewellery Box. The poem acts as a gateway to the main topic discussed in later poems: the relationship between her and her Chinese heritage. Providing context for the rest of the poetry book through uses of stylistic features, Howe is able to enforce the idea of a spiritual journey.

In order to fully understand the poem, one must look at the context. Sarah Howe grew up in a bicultural family with a Chinese mother and British father. While one would assume this meant she had equal exposure to both

For the “silver chains” in stanza 3, she uses punctuation. In the second line of the stanza she writes “careful o’s and a’s”. Howe chooses to use apostrophes instead of quotation marks, which would be more appropriate for the literal sense of the phrase. By using apostrophes she is emphasizing possession: possession of the necklace and possession of her identity. The significance of the letters - ‘a’ and ‘o’- themselves is uncertain, possibly inferring that her poetry is to an extent esoteric.

The next stanza employs careful word choice and a rhyming couplet to bring attention to her neglect of her Chinese identity. “twisted” immediately denotes something that has been left to itself for a long time or something that is not kept well. Her choice of the word “flattened” is yet another example of her suppressing her oriental heritage. The rhyming couplet in the lines “flattened beads/lupin seeds” to further emphasize the