November 8, 2017 - 23:22
The first thing I think of as I reflect on the movie, is Aneta's decision to refuse an interpreter at her first big poetry slam. Her desire for the audience to focus on her motion and decipher the meaning of her poem from that at first struck me as a poor decision, because it seems as if she purposefully witholds her meaning in the poem from the mostly hearing and non-ASL fluent audience. However, as I think of it more I see that what she did is actually in the true spirit of poetry. Poetry is something that people constantly try to decipher and produce a universal meaning when that is not at all what poetry is about. There is too much personality from the author, too many indescribably aspects of the emotion and technique that go into poetry for there to be a universal meaning in any of it. Of course, there can me universal messages, but the meaning will likely be slightly different to every reader, and that was what I believe Aneta was counting on.
A second part that stood out to me was when Aneta expressed her distress about what she would do after high school. I realize that she went to a good school and that her career path is in important work that is meaningful and fulfilling to her, but I must wonder about deaf people who want to work in fields dominated by the hearing population and are never granted an equal opportunity to pursue such fields due to the fact that they do not hear. It also troubles me that the director only told the stories of the people from the school who went on to have success in higher education. What about the other students from Lexington? How did they turn out? If they did not go to college what did they end up doing? What do they assess their quality of life to be? Now that they are no longer in such a tight knit group such as the Lexington school, do they continue to thrive?