Tornado Child Poem Analysis

Essay 3- Interpretations from Influences (Tornado Child) Kwame Dawes, an author of poems, novels, and anthologies, was born and raised in Jamaica, later moving to the States in pursuit of his current employment at the University of Nebraska. He writes mainly about the themes of ethnicity, influenced by Jamaican culture and the musician Bob Marley. “Tornado Child” contains a storm of concepts. This poem is intriguing because of its ability to draw different ideas of the theme based on the reader’s experiences and influences. What is the intended interpretation, and what could be interpreted?
Dawes writes the poem, alternating between comparing the first person mentioned to a storm with the baby leaving the mother’s womb and the experiences between the first person and external individuals. Dawes writes this poem using his own experiences and other influencing factors in his

Dawes hints at the child being dark-skinned by repeatedly using “black” as a descriptive word. For example, he uses the key word immediately in line 2: “I come like a swirl of black” and again in line 9, “the black of a tornado night.” He references both skin color and the experience of transitioning from a color-dominated country to a white-dominated country by writing, “I hurtle into a vacuum of white sheets billowing and paint a swirl of color” this is an example of imagery and could be interpreted to represent himself becoming a drop of difference in a sea of consistency. Coming to a country having mostly white citizens who were raised in American culture, Dawes looked distinctly different. He comes from a different cultura background. He also references Jamaican culture, “The crazy of our hair, couldn’t tame if we tried.” This is a reference to the texture of an African-American’s hair. This is because the texture is often coarse and unruly, and African Americans will dread or tie back their