18 pages • 36 minutes read
Aimee NezhukumatathilOn Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Fake-Lemon Antiseptic
The setting of the poem is a classroom, full of “mopped floors and wiped-down / doorknobs” (Lines 3-4) and blue-eyed students with “freshly soaped necks” (Line 4). However, the speaker immediately, although perhaps subconsciously, recognizes a sense of false security. The scent of “fake-lemon antiseptic” (Line 2) permeates the room. This description conveys a familiar classroom scent but also sets up the juxtaposition between the “fake” (Line 2) world of the classroom and the natural world that would house a real lemon. The scent of real lemons is clean and sweet. The classroom world, personified by the teacher, while it “means well” (Line 5) houses danger in the form of the microaggression towards those who are different. The mess of the teacher’s mispronunciation of the speaker’s name has a gory element that no antiseptic can cover —“he butchers your name like / he has a bloody sausage casing stuck / between his teeth” (Lines 6-8). Further, the stain of the teacher’s “handprints / on his white sloppy apron” (Lines 8-9) contrasts the clean classroom with its “freshly soaped” (Line 4) students. An antiseptic prevents the growth of disease-growing organisms, but here, its artificial scent suggests it cannot work.
Water
During the speaker’s trip, when her “family [takes her] to the China Sea” (Lines 14-15), the speaker sinks her head under the water “to gaze at baby clams and sea stars” (Line 16). This immersion into the literal water is also an immersion into the imaginative world of memory, which functions as salvation. The speaker, an outlier in her classroom, is—in the memory—a part of the family unit and thus, not alone. In the vision, the speaker is also part of a larger world, personified by the ocean and its wondrous creatures whom the speaker feels akin to. The speaker draws a connection with the “sea stars / the size of [her] outstretched hand” (Lines 16-17). There is a baptism by water here. The speaker realizes she is part of a blessed natural order rather than the sterility inherent in her classroom. The speaker’s view shifts as she emerges from the memory: She recognizes that the other students are as insensitive as her teacher because they all hold psychological blades to tear her apart; however, she is aware of her own potential as a “pearl” (Line 22), despite the hostile environment.
Pink Pearl Eraser
Near the end of the poem, the speaker imagines the students’ “pencil cases / […] full of sharp pencils” (Lines 21-22). The poem ends with an image of “their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade” (Line 23). Buried between these two images is a third casually mentioned but important notation. The pencil case contains a “pink pearl eraser” (Line 22). The students, each holding their “tiny blade” (Line 23), are set to mimic their teacher’s butchery earlier in the poem, albeit in perhaps smaller ways. Their aggression seems directed at the speaker, and the reader is left to imagine the ways the other students hurt the speaker. However, if the classroom is reminiscent of a “scallop” (Line 13), then the “pink pearl eraser” (Line 22) takes on a more hopeful meaning. The shell of the mollusk is rough and ugly, as is this classroom, but it can produce something valuable. When an unwanted foreign object irritates a scallop, it begins to form a ball around it, and this eventually produces a pearl. Many scallop pearls have a maroon to plum color of variegated depth, generally in the pink family. In this case, the “pearl pink eraser” (Line 22) represents the speaker, coming out of the situation as something of worth. In other words, the school situation cannot defeat the speaker. As an “eraser,” the power of identity lies with the speaker: The eraser can eliminate the words, or misnomers, spoken or written that might hurt her.
