This posts focuses on an annotation idea for Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi. You can read more about this collection, including a review and more light analysis, on yesterday’s post.
Tabbing the four poems that mention “little god[s]” is an easy, satisfying annotation project, requiring only four tabs. These are the titles of the poems to mark:
- “what if my mother met mary” p 3
- “what if mary auntie called me on my birthday” p 19
- “what if mary auntie explained mortality” p 34
- “what if my family came to the hospitals” p 45
Why Annotate This?
Mary’s “Character”
Noticing and annotating the repetition of the phrase “little gods” was helpful in my analysis of this collection for a few reasons. First, the annotation allowed me to see that “little gods” only appears in the “mary auntie” poems, which prompted me to home in on Mary and how the speaker created her in their imagination. I pondered questions like this:
- Why does the speaker (who is reimagining Mary, Jesus, Joseph, and Magdalene in the present day) choose these words for Mary four times?
- Why does Mary, as a character in the speaker’s imagination, need to say these words?
- Why does the speaker need to hear her say them?
It Appears At The Beginning and End
“Little gods” appears in both the first and last poems, which are often places of honor and emphasis in books. Writers know that readers tend to pay extra attention to the beginnings and ends of things. So, it’s significant, to me, that Emezi placed this phrase in the opening and closing poems.
Other Observations
The phrase “little gods” clearly establishes the speaker’s divinity, which is important to the collection’s storyline of resurrection and transfiguration.
The repetition of the phrase is important too. We aren’t meant to forget this moniker or the speaker’s divinity, if the speaker reiterates it at the beginning, middle, and end of the book.
The phrase tells us a lot about how the speaker sees Mary. Her word choice is endearing, so it informs us (with just two brief words) of the easy, loving relationship the speaker imagines they have with her.
The contradiction in the phrase is part of the collection’s overall tone. “Little” is sweet and diminutive, but being a “god” is an enormous, even frightening concept. I think this says a lot about the speaker and the story they tell in this collection.
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