Summary Of The Poem By Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez once said, “I write to find out what I’m thinking. I write to find out who I am. I write to understand things.” Julia Alvarez, a world-renowned poet, has written many powerful poems through her life. She writes what she feels, what is on her mind, and what message she wants to get across. However, while writing her feelings down, she has connected and touched many people around the world. In Julia Alvarez’s poem, “Dusting,” she tells of a mother trying to shape her daughter, and a daughter trying to create herself. She writes of the external struggle between a mother and a daughter, along with a daily internal struggle the two of them face, and a young girl who is trying to create herself as an individual. In the first stanza, the daughter tells of the external conflict that she and her mother encounter each day. The daughter says that “Each morning I wrote my name/
The daughter says “She erased my fingerprints/ From the bookshelf and the rocker” (9-10). The fingerprints that the mother is erasing is the daughter’s individuality. Fingerprints are the one thing that allows someone to be an individual, and the mother is erasing the chance of that. The daughter says “My named swallowed in the towel/ With which she jeweled the table tops” (13-14). The mother is literally taking away her name, the one thing that makes her who she is, this is making the daughter feel trapped and restrained. She is unable to express herself, and exclaims “But I refused to with every mark/ To be like her, anonymous” (17-18). These are the most powerful lines in the poem, the daughter is saying to matter how hard her mother tries, and the daughter will still fight to be an individual. Through all the obstacles her mother creates, the daughter is still striving to be herself, and to break out of her mother’s