Annotate and label with text boxes: Assonance, Consonance, Alliteration, Rhyme, Off-Rhyme, Imagery (all types), Metaphor, and answer all questions in the side bar.

Student Name:

Dominant Genes by SJ Sindu

Fro m the wo m bsof true believers,I came out faithless

a godless decadentheathen but somewherein my foggy ancestral memoryI recall that womenused to worshipsnakes. We’d put out

milk for cobras hoping they’d leave the baby in the crib aloneand if they drank from our offering, wewere guaranteed good

luck for a week, but that was long ago before the Eve-hating white men came with injections of snake fear shot right into

our pagan faith. Now when we see a cobrain the house, we scream and the neighbors run over with hoes and machetes. One time when I was little I saw one the sizeof my arm slithering on our verandaand I got to screamcobra! cobra! snake!

Questions 1. Before reading, look at

how Sindu has structured the poem. How long are the lines? How long is the poem? Why are there stanzas? How does it relate to the title?

2. What allusions is she making in the third stanza?What is she juxtaposing?

3. In your own words how is Sindu using the snake to to mirror the poem itself?

Stanza 1:Assonance of O Consonance of M

Annotate and label with text boxes: Assonance, Consonance, Alliteration, Rhyme, Off-Rhyme, Imagery (all types), Metaphor, and answer all questions in the side bar.

everyone! and theyall came, men yelling to save me, my grandfather wielding a kitchen knife and hacking the cobra

to bits right there in our backyard garden. My mother’s mother’s mother lived to be one hundred, insisted on sleeping in her

own house until the very end. But my mother is afraid of snakes and as a child tormenting her was a favorite

pastime. I’d beg snaketoys from relativesand chase her. I’d twist snakes out of newspapers and oldscarves. Watching my mother

scream and run away, I laughed. I know now that it’s a phobia,that she had no control over her reactionbut back then her

revulsion was asign of weakness, and I could feel like thestrong one. I guess I’vealways had a serpenttongue, though I learned early

4. Why do you think Sindu included the tidbit about her grandmother’s age?

5. How is the narrator juxtaposed to others who use snakes to frighten others? What effect does it have on the reader?

Annotate and label with text boxes: Assonance, Consonance, Alliteration, Rhyme, Off-Rhyme, Imagery (all types), Metaphor, and answer all questions in the side bar.

to silence its bite. This, too, is a gift from the women ofmy family. Ican cut through alover’s blood during

any fight. This is a liability,this abilityto destroy a person. When I told my mother I wanted to be

a writer, she said nothing. She didn’thave to. We come from a country where writer means dead child. In Harry Potter, speaking

serpent tongue meant you were evil, but really Ithink JK Rowling couldn’t imagine herself out of her Christianity-addled brain, like how Ray Bradbury could think up LCD wall TVs, but nota world in which women had careers. My mother

tells me to write nice stories, to keep my serpent tongue caged. This is her wisdom: in this newworld my ancestral power is to be feared. I’m 

young and I ignore her, but she still goes to sleep every night thinking dead child dead child dead child

6. Why would the speaker say that “this is a liability”?

7. Do you think the speaker means that the word writer literally means “dead child”? why/why not?

8. Explain in your own words why the examples of Rowling and Bradbury are relevant:

9. Why do you think the speaker’s mother says this “power is to be feared”? Does she mean by the world or that the speaker

Annotate and label with text boxes: Assonance, Consonance, Alliteration, Rhyme, Off-Rhyme, Imagery (all types), Metaphor, and answer all questions in the side bar.

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