Central ideas: storytelling, memory, identity

     Both poems express ideas of storytelling. Both poems have a component of storytelling in them. The stories she hears and reads are a part of her. In “hair night,” she says “As my sister reads, the pictures begin forming.” The stories her sister is reading to her makes her picture the setting the stories describe. In “believing,” she is telling the stories, making them up. “Jack and Jill went up a hill, my uncle sings. / I went up a hill yesterday … ” When her uncle sings the nursery rhyme, and says she has been to a new place. These places she went to in her imagination are stories she is telling about herself and what she did.
     Both poems talk about memory. Both poems are just made of what she and other people remember about what happened. She remembers when she or another talks about a story. In “hair night,” she says “Grainy black-and-white photos come slowly at me / Deep. Infinite. Remembered.” By this, she means that the stories her sister reads to her are remembered because she really enjoyed the way her sister read to her. In “believing,” she tells us that this story we’re reading consists of her relatives’ memory as well as her own. “Maybe the truth is somewhere in between / all that I’m told / and memory.” She doesn’t fully remember the event, so she is also relying on other that might remember the past better.
     Both poems express feelings of identity. Both poems say that the imaginary places she goes are places she really went to. The places in the stories she hears and reads are a part of her. In “hair night,” she says ” … I have never seen the ocean / but this, too, I can imagine—blue water pouring / over red dirt.” By this she means that the stories her sister is reading to her makes her imagine a new place. In “believing,” she herself is telling the stories, making them up on the fly.  After her uncle reads a nursery rhyme, she chimes in saying, “I went up a hill yesterday … ” She hears her uncle start the nursery rhyme, and says she has been to a new place. These places she went to in her imagination are part of her identity, because she becomes a storyteller (author) with her uncle’s encouragement and the ability to come up with stories on the fly.