AP Literature and Composition Dialectical Journal
NAME:__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Instructions for Summer Reading 2013 Dialectical Journal:
 Read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.
 Either print out this document and expand it so that you have ample room to respond or download it to fill in electronically. You may
submit your completed DJ either hand-written or typed.
 For each of the passages in the template provide insights, significances, connections, relationships, and / or analysis. Connect the explicit
meaning to the implicit meaning. Consider tone, imagery, figurative language, rhetorical devices. Your commentary must be insightful and
analytical in order to receive optimum credit. Do not just paraphrase / summarize the passages.
 An excellent explanation of “How and Why to Annotate a Book” can be found at the College Board / AP Central site:
http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/197454.html
 These annotations are due on the first day of class. NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED! They will count as a QUIZ grade.
 In addition, there will be a 40-minute timed in-class essay on the novels which will count as a QUIZ grade.
 Please, do not hesitate to contact us but keep in mind that we may be unavailable at different times during the summer. Plan accordingly.
dbrodel@ycsd.york.va.us
tsallmon@ycsd.york.va.us
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Print.
Passage:
SAMPLE:
At last it is Independence Day, for Methuselah and
the Congo. O Lord of the feathers, deliver me this
day. After a lifetime caged away from flight and
truth, comes freedom. After long seasons of slow
preparation and truth, comes freedom. After long
seasons of slow preparation for an innocent death,
the world is theirs at last. From the carnivores
that would tear me, breast from wishbone.
Section /
Page:
“The
Revelation,”
pp. 185186
Analysis:
Methuselah symbolizes the Congo searching for its freedom. When freedom finally
does come to the Congo, the country is as ill equipped, as Methuselah is to live
independently in the jungle. Just as Methuselah is unprepared to live in the trees of the
jungle, so is the Congo unprepared to survive without an infrastructure.
You should then connect the correlation between the Congo’s dependence on Belgium
and Methuselah’s dependence on the Fowles and Prices.
 What other parallels exist between Methuselah and the Congo?
 What does Methuselah’s death by a civet cat foreshadow about the Congo?
 What role do the Prices play in each case?
 Remember, you must use textual support for each of your responses.
Finally, analyze how Kingsolver develops this comparison through such literary
techniques as tone, point of view, and language.
#1:
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have
happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its
conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are
columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular
animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space
is filled with life; delicate, poisonous frogs warpainted like skeletons, clutched in copulation,
secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves.
Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting
wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A
glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of
ants biting a mammoth tree unto uniform grains
and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous
queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching
their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life
out of death. This forest eats itself and lives
forever.
#2
We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty
Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and
I were all counting on having one birthday apiece
during out twelve-month mission. ‘And heaven
knows,’ our mother predicted, ‘they won’t have
Betty Crocker in the Congo.’
#3
We would all have to escape Africa by a different
route. Some of us are in the ground now and some
are above it, but we’re all women, made of the
same scarred earth. I study my grown daughters
now, for signs they are resting in some kind of
peace. How did they manage? When I remain
hounded by judgment? The eyes in the trees open
onto my dreams. In daylight they watch my
crooked hands while I scratch the soil in my little
damp garden. What do you want from me? When
I raise up my crazy old eyes and talk to myself,
what do you want me to tell you?
Oh, little beast, little favorite. Can’t you see I died
as well?
“Genesis,”
p.1
“Genesis,”
p.13
“The
Revelation,”
p. 89
#4
President Eisenhower spoke of having everything
under control; the Kennedy boy said Uncle Ike was
all washed up and we need look no farther than
the Congo---Congo!---for evidence of poor U.S.
leadership, the missile gap, and proof of the
communist threat. The likes of Eleanor Roosevelt
declared we ought to come forth with aid and
bring those poor children into the twentieth
century. And yet Mr. George F. Kennan, the retired
diplomat, allowed that he felt ‘not the faintest
moral responsibility for Africa.’ It’s not our
headache, he said. Let them go Communist if they
feel like it.
#5
Listen, Little Beast. Judge me as you will, but first
listen. I am your mother. What happened to us
could have happened anywhere, to any mother.
I’m not the first woman on earth to have seen her
daughters possessed. For time and eternity there
have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see
no way to have a daughter but to own her like a
plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain
down a dreadful poisons upon her. Miraculously, it
causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the
pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers
with heavy heads. You can shield them with your
body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but
they’ll still move toward him. Without cease,
they’ll bend to his light.
“The
Revelation,”
p. 95
“The
Judges,”
p. 191
#6
The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch
the end of the world. How simply things begin.
Maybe it was just a chance meeting. A Belgian
and an American, let’s say, two old friends with a
hunger in common, a hand in the diamond
business. A fly buzzes and lights. They swat it
away and step into the Belgian’s meticulously
polished office in Elisabethville. They’re careful to
ask after each other’s families and profits, and to
speak of how they are living in a time of great
change, great opportunity. A map of the Congo lies
on the mahogany table between them. While they
talk of labor and foreign currency their hunger
movers apart from the gentlemanly conversation
with a will of its own, licking at the edges of the
map on the table, dividing it between them. They
take turns leaning forward to point out their
moves with shrewd congeniality, playing it like a
chess match, the kind of game that allows civilized
men to play at make-believe murder. Between
moves they tip their heads back, swirl bloodcolored brandy in glass globes and watch it crawl
down the curved glass in liquid veins. Languidly
they bring their map to order. Who will be the
kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at
a distance? Which sacrificial pawns will be swept
aside? African names roll apart like the heads of
dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and
forefinger---Ngoma, Mukenge, Mulele, Kasavubu,
Lumumba. They crumble to dust on the carpet.
#7
It is a grief to see the best of Zairean genius and
diplomacy spent on bare survival, while fortunes in
diamonds and cobalt are slipped daily out from
under our feet. ‘This is not a poor nation,’ I remind
my sons till they hear it in their sleep. ‘It is only a
nation of poor.”
“Bel and
the
Serpent,”
p. 317
“Exodus,”
p 453
#8
The white men mostly spoke of the glorious days
of the previous king of Belgium, King Leopold, who
first made the Congo into what it is today.
…
After the King and the other white men spoke, they
inaugurated Patrice Lumumba as the new Prime
Minister. I could tell exactly which one he was. he
was a thin distinguished man who wore real
eyeglasses and a small, pointed beard. When he
stood up to speak, everyone’s mouth shut. In the
sudden quiet we could hear the great Congo River
lapping up its banks. Even the birds seemed taken
aback. Patrice Lumumba raised his left hand up
and seemed to grow ten feet tall, right there and
then.
…
Patrice Lumumba asked us to keep this day, June
30, 1960, in our hearts forever and tell our
children of its meaning. Everyone on the raft and
the crowded banks would do what he said, I knew.
Even me, if I ever get to have any children.
Whenever he paused to take a breath, the people
screamed and waved their arms.
…
He is saying we despoiled their land and used
the Negroes for slaves, just as long as we could get
away with it,’ she [Mrs. Underdown] said….He’s
very mad about all the nice things they said earlier
about King Leopold. Who was a bad egg, I’ll admit
that.”
“The
Revelation,”
pp. 181183
#9
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive.
It is different, though. You could say the view is
larger.
On another day the same woman leads her
children through a market. Now she has white hair
and only three daughters. None of them walks with
a limp. They do not stay in line, as they did before.
One of the daughters often strays away to handle
bolts of fabric and talk with the merchants in their
own language. One of the daughters touches
nothing, and clutches her money to her breast. And
one daughter keeps her hand on the mother’s arm,
guiding her away from dusty craters in the
pavement. The mother is bent and betrays the pain
in her limbs. They are all surprised to be here,
surprised at themselves and each other. These four
have not been together in one place since the
death of the other. They have come here to say
good-bye to Ruth May or so they claim. They wish
to find her grave. But in truth they are saying
goodbye to their mother. They love her
inordinately.
“The Eyes
in the
Trees,” p.
539
#10
We’re on the premises of what was formerly a
plantation, so the house is surrounded by
lovely groves of orange trees and coconut
palms. The mansion itself has been converted
to twelve comfortable rooms of various sizes,
all quite luxurious, with two full baths on each
floor. The restaurant is in a large open portico
on the ground floor shaded by bougainvilleas.
There is nearly always a breeze. We recently
put in a second small covered patio with a bar
so that while my guests are enjoying a meal,
their chauffeurs “will have a pleasant place to
bide their time. The restaurant is for paying
guests only, which is, needless to say, whites,
since the Africans around here wouldn’t earn
enough in a month to buy one of my prix-jixe
dinners. But I certainly am not one to leave
anyone sitting out in the rain! So I built them
that shelter, so they wouldn’t be tempted to
come in and hang about idly in the main bar.
I’m famous for my love of animals, too, and
have created quite a little menagerie in the
compound between the garden and the
restaurant for everyone’s amusement. Any
time of day you can hear the parrots
chattering in their cages. I taught them to say
“Drink up now! Closing time!” in English,
French, and Afrikaans, though I have to admit
they’ve picked up a few despicable phrases
from my guests, over the years. The clientele at
the Equatorial is always the highest caliber
but, nevertheless, they are men.
“Exodus,
pp461-462
Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.
1.
Chapter 1,
Mariam was five years old the first time she
p. 1
heard the word harami.
It happened on a Thursday. It must have,
because Mariam remembered that she had
been restless and preoccupied that day, the
way she was only on Thursdays, the day when
Jalil visited her at the kolba.
2.
Chapter 2
In Nana’s account of the day that she gave
p. 11
birth to Mariam, no one came to help… She lay
all alone on the kolba’s floor, a knife by her
side, sweat drenching her body.
“When the pain got bad, I’d bite on a pillow
and scream into it until I was hoarse. And still
no one came to wipe my face or give me a
drink of water. And you, Mariam jo, you were
in no rush. Almost two days you made me lie
on that cold, hard floor. I didn’t eat or sleep,
all I did was push and pray that you would
come out.”
“I am sorry, Nana.”
“I cut the cord between us myself. That’s
why I had a knife.”
“I’m sorry.”
Nana always gave a slow, burdened smile
here, one of lingering recrimination or
reluctant forgiveness, Mariam could never tell.
It did not occur to young Mariam to ponder
the unfairness of apologizing for the manner
of her own birth.
3.
In the handful of seconds that she was in
Jalil’s garden, Mariam’s eyes registered seeing
a gleaming glass structure with plants inside
it, grape vines clinging to wooden trellises, a
fishpond built with gray blocks of stone, fruit
trees, and bushes of brightly colored flowers
everywhere. Her gaze skimmed over all of
these things before they found a face, across
the garden, in an upstairs window. The face
was there for only an instant, a flash, but long
enough. Long enough for Mariam to see the
eyes widen, the mouth open. Then it snapped
away from view. A hand appeared and
frantically pulled a cord. The curtains fell
shut.
4.
“You know nothing, do you? You’re like a
child. Your brain is empty. There is no
information in it.”
“Chup ko. Shut up.”
It wasn’t easy tolerating him talking this
way to her to bear his scorn, his ridicule, his
insults, his walking past her like she was
nothing but a house cat. But after four years
of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a
woman could tolerate when she was afraid.
And Mariam was afraid. She lived in fear of
his shifting moods, his volatile, temperament,
his insistence on steering even mundane
exchanges down a confrontational path that,
on occasion, he would resolve with punches,
slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make
amends for with polluted apologies and
sometimes not.
Chapter 5
pp. 34-35
Chapter 15
pp. 98-99
5.
He put his pencil, laced his fingers together,
and leaned forward the way parents do when
they want to convey something to a toddler.
“You do realize, hamshira, that it is a crime for
a woman to run away. We see a lot of it.
Women traveling alone, claiming their
husbands have died. Sometimes they’re telling
the truth, most times not. You can be
imprisoned for running away, I assume you
understand that, nay?”
“Let us go, Officer…” She read the name on
his lapel tag. “Officer Rahman. Honor the
meaning of your name and sow compassion.
What does it matter to you to let a mere two
women go? What’s the harm in releasing us?
We are not criminals.”
“I can’t.”
“I beg you, please.”
“It is a matter of qanoon, hamshira, a matter
of law,” Rahman said, injecting his voice with
a grave, self-important tone. “It is my
responsibility, you see, to maintain order.”
6.
“Downstairs, the beating began. To Laila the
sounds she heard were those of methodical,
familiar proceeding. There was no cursing, no
screaming, no pleading, no surprised yelps,
only the systematic business of beating and
being beaten, the thump, thump of something
solid repeatedly striking flesh, something,
someone, hitting a wall with a thud, cloth
ripping. Now and then, Laila heard running
footsteps, a wordless chase, furniture turning
over, glass shattering, then the thumping once
more.
Chapter 36
Pp. 265266
Chapter 36
p. 268
7.
Rasheed wasn’t bothered much by the
Taliban. All he had to do was grow a beard,
which he did, and visit the mosque, which he
also did. Rasheed regarded the Taliban with a
forgiving, affectionate kind of bemusement, as
one might regard an erratic cousin prone to
unpredictable acts of hilarity and scandal.
Every Wednesday night, Rasheed listened to
the Voice of Shari’a when the Taliban would
announce the names of those scheduled for
punishment. Then, on Fridays, he went to
Ghazi Stadium, bought a Pepsi, and watched
the spectacle.
Chapter 38
p. 28
8.
Chapter 45
But then his upper lip curled back into a
pp. 348spiteful sneer, and Mariam knew then the
349
futility, maybe even the irresponsibility, of not
finishing this. If she let him walk now, how
long before he fetched the key from his pocket
and went for that gun of his upstairs in the
room where he’d locked Zalmai? Had Mariam
been certain that he would be satisfied with
shooting only her, that there was a chance he
would spare Laila, she might have dropped the
shovel. But in Rasheed’s eyes she saw murder
for them both.
And so Mariam raised the shovel high, raised
it as high as she could, arching it so it touched
the small of her back. She turned it so the
sharp edge was vertical, and as she did, it
occurred to her that this was the first time
that she was deciding the course of her own
life.
And, with that, Mariam brought down the
shovel. This time, she gave it everything she
had.
9.
“They chop off hands for stealing bread,”
Mariam said. “What do you think they’ll do
when they find a dead husband and two
missing wives?”
“No one will know,” Leila breathed. “No one
will find us.”
“They will. Sooner or later. They’re
bloodhounds.” Mariam’s voice was low,
cautioning; it madeLaila’s promises sound
fantastical, trumped-up, foolish.
“Mariam, please---.”
“When they do, they’ll find you as guilty as
me. Tariq too. I won’t have the two of you
living on the run, like fugitives. What will
happen to your children if you’re caught?”
Laila’s eyes brimming, stinging.
“Who will take care of them then? The
Taliban? Think like a mother, Laila jo. Think
like a mother. I am.”
Chapter 46
p. 357358
10.
Chapter 47
Near the goal post, the man behind her
pp. 370asked her to stop. Mariam did. Through the
371
crisscrossing grid of the burqa, she saw his
shadow arms lift his shadow Kalashnikov.
Mariam wished for so much in those final
moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was
not regret any longer but a sensation of
abundant peace that washed over her. She
thought of her entry into this world, the
harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended
thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed.
And yet she was leaving the world as a woman
who had loved and been loved back. She was
leaving it as a friend, a companion, a
guardian. A mother. A person of consequence
at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam
thought, that she should die this way. Not so
bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of
illegitimate beginnings.