Mill 4 June 2018 1101

Margarita Engle’s poem towards social inequality

Our world is full of inspirations. It influences and provides people the creative ideas. The

more inspired motivation of the creator is, the more magnificent of the creation is. Margarita

Engle is a Cuban American poet and author of books for children, young adults and adults. Many

of Engle’s works are based on her Cuban heritage. Her father was born in Los Angeles,

California and her mother in Trinidad, Cuba. Even though she was born and raised in California,

she spent many summer holidays with her relatives in Cuba. There were diplomatic relations

between the U.S. and Cuba broke down when she lived in California. The Soviet Union placed

nuclear missiles in Cuba. People were full of fear and chaos on the island. This inspired her love

of writing about young people. She indicated that writing is a chance to communicate to young

readers. Her poems, “Drum Dream Girl”, “Counting”, and “More Dangerous Air” are

specifically about children and their life experiences. Engle describes how the inequality of

society affects the thoughts of young people and their feelings about unfairness in her poems by

using repetition, simile, and hyperbole.

In “Drum Dream Girl” (Engle,2015), Engle uses repetition to show the spirit of a

character to step over a traditional rule. The poem was inspired by the girlhood of a Chinese-

African-Cuban girl, Millo Castro Zaldarriaga. Zaldarriaga was being told that only boys can play

drums. However, She believed in her dream and practiced playing drums in secret. When

Zaldarriaga was fifteen, she played drums at a birthday party for U.S. president Franklin Delano

Roosevelt. Finally, she broke the Cuban traditional rule against female drummers. Engle uses

repetition of the words “and she practice” (2015) three times to describe the endeavour of the

character, which means she doesn’t give up and tries to prove herself among people on the
island. Many islanders enjoy while listening to drum beats in her first performance, which refers

to a success of a drum dream girl. She changes her apparently impossible dream to be true. She

does not only prove herself among the islanders but also reaches the gender equality. From this

poem, the poet tells the readers that you can pass through a difficulty or the tough situation that

seem to be impossible and convert it to be possible if you keep trying. In a small society, gender

inequality is seen to be the serious problem. However, in the worldwide, inequality among

people is hidden in any social level. The most serious issue cannot be refused to be ‘racism’.

Engle applies the technique of simile to explain the difficulty of census duty. "Counting

(Harry Franck from the United States of America Census Enumerator)" from Silver People:

Voices from the Panama Canal. Engle centered her story on the non black protagonist that is

unhappy, as majority of the workers on the Panama Canal were black islanders. The author

expresses the notion of discomfiture during the job process by comparing the feeling of doing

this job as turning solid mountains into a ditch as she states, “Counting feels just as impossible as

turning solid mountains into a ditch” (Engle, 2014). She displays how hard of his duty is by

using the symbol as mountain. Then, she compares the result as a ditch which has opposite

appearance to the mountain. Thus, she wants to state that how Black people make the

protagonist’s life becomes difficult. Half-Bloods make his life confuses. In the poem, the

protagonist says that Black people are angry to see other work for gold while they work for

silver. It shows that there are an inequality between Blacks and Whites people. Black people

don’t have rights much as White people does. This idea straightforward to argue about racism. In

1962, there was proxy war around Cuba. The USSR set the missile war in Cuba as the third

territory. Many Cuban people were in fear and feeling of unfairness about their lives.
 In “More Dangerous Air”, Engle (2015) uses hyperbole to demonstrate her fear of missile

crisis in Cuba when she was young. A conflict between US. and Cuba caused an issue to herself.

It was hard to find a balance of culture as she is a Cuban-American. While, there was a Cuban

Missile Crisis, she was standing on American land. In her poem, she writes, “Teachers say it's

the end of the world” (Engle, 2015). Even though the threat of bomb attacks were seem like the

end of the world for many people who lived in Cuba during the nuclear missile. However, they

cannot end this world. When the teacher talk overrated to US. students about the current situation

that Engle faced to the feeling of fear, many of city kids were laughing because they didn’t

experience it and they don’t believe that. They didn’t understand what was the death look like.

They didn’t know feeling of losing and worried something who they love that were facing in the

crisis. Unless the bombs fell onto their house like Engle had encountered, they never

comprehend what Engle feels.

Engle writes her poems by using repetition, simile, and hyperbole to illustrate feelings of

fear and inequality of society among young people. Moreover, Engle use repetition to illustrates

an idea about diligence that affects young people’s lives in order to succeed their gender equality

goals. She also uses simile to states that Blacks people make the protagonist’s life becomes more

difficult. Exaggeration can cause human’s fear and depression as Engle faced in the poem. Thus,

many young people are depressed by inequality in society by affecting on their thoughts of fear

and unfairness.
 References

Engle, Margarita(2015). Drum Dream Girl. The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141837/drum-dream-girl

Engle, Margarita(2014). Counting. The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141840/counting-58ffa05c87f7d

Engle, Margarita(2015). More Dangerous Air. The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141882/more-dangerous-air

Engle, Margarita(2018). Biography. Margarita Engle. Retrieved from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarita_Engle

Macmillan (n.d.). Author on the web. Margarita Engle. Retrieved from

https://us.macmillan.com/author/margaritaengle/