Remeber BY ALICE WALKER

Remember

Remember me?
I am the girl with the dark skin
whose shoes are thin
I am the girl
with rotted teeth
I am the dark
rotten-toothed girl
with the wounded eye
and melted ear

I am the girl
holding their babies
cooking their meals
sweeping their yards
washing their clothes
Dark and rotting
and wounded, wounded.

I am the woman: Dark,
repaired, healed
Listening to you

I would give
to the human race
only hope.

I am the woman
offering two flowers
whose roots
are twin

Justice and Hope

Let us begin.

This poem is very characteristic of Alice Walker's style and subject matter. The poem is written in free verse; therefore, it does not contain a regular rhythmic pattern. As you can see, this poem deals with a transformation of some sort from bondage to freedom. In the first two stanzas, there is an allusion to Walker's experience as a child. For example, as a result of a BB gun accident, her eye was severely damaged. The stanzas continue their description of how the persona physically appeared and the effect it had on her outlook in life. This unsightly description is paired with the image of a person in bondage in stanza two. The persona relates how she is "holding their babies / cooking their meals / sweeping their yards / washing their clothes" with complete and utter disgust. I believe that she associates this time in her life with the physical abhorrence she describes as appearing in the first stanza. Walker ends the second stanza by emphasizing her plight in life as "dark and rotting / and wounded, wounded" in order to suggest exactly how horrible the plight of the African American can be.
However, the tone of the poem shifts drastically after these two beginning stanzas and becomes more optimistic about life. One of the repeated stanzas now enters and becomes the central focus of the poem. In stanza three: "I would give/ to the human race / only hope, " the persona asserts that she is no longer going to allow racial oppression to rule who she really is. She doesn't want to forget what has happened in her past life, but she strives to present all African Americans with the gift of hope. This gift alone creates the person that is introduced in stanzas four and five.
In these lines, hope has allowed this woman to recreate her self-image, making it more positive. She now proudly asserts that all the badness that once over-shadowed her life as a child has turned into a gift. She can know hear and understand the cries of the African American people.