Karis Edwards

Mrs. Weaver

5th Period

27 April 2011

Missy Elliot’s Cultural Imprint

Melissa Annette Elliot is a strong, independent African America woman in a society that has little or no respect for the
females in the present and poorly influenced world. She is known as Missy Elliot, a popular

Throughout the poem she is discussing struggles and how they are always overcome and
compares them to all different kinds of inanimate and animate objects. In the first two stanzas
she begins with ordinary things like strawberries, hedgehogs, and star fish. Even things this small
and that seem like they would have nothing to struggle over, have things they overcome. In the
fourth stanza she begins talking about more magical and unordinary things like rubber plant
leaves of kok sagyyz stalks these less ordinary things also face struggles. In the 6th stanza she
talks about barbed wire and how the prickley pear leaf can still work around one of the worst
man made things. In the 6th through 9th stanza she compares very common things like carrots to
the powerful, magical mandrakes and goes into how the grape tendril surrounds a twig with man
knots and so it cannot stir. In the last two stanzas she says everyone is weak and they all have a
menace but the will overcome their struggles because of the cherry red sap that runs through
them.

War is often stereotyped as a simple multitude of battles that produce the simple outcome of a

winner and a loser. Those who do not actually experience war may feel as if war does not

actually exist, as if it is an event that occurs in an imaginary far away land. But these

assumptions and mind-sets are overwhelmingly false. War is much more than a battle between

two opposing forces. It is much more than a simple count of casualties and wounded soldiers.

War is a story that can only be explained by those who have experienced and felt the pain of

watching men die. These war stories have been made public through movies, journals, pictures,

and books in hopes to make the war come alive and to make the stomachs of those who are
unable to experience the realities of war believe. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,

Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers Once and Young, Yuri Kozyrev’s “Talismans”, Earnest

Hemingway’s “A New Kind of War”, and John Steinbeck’s “Why Soldier’s Won’t Talk”,

A true war story demonstrates that emotions are universal, but personal stories are

unique. It addresses the conflicting feelings and emotions of fear, guilt, embarrassment, and

disparity. War brings about both physical and emotional pain.

War affects men not only physically, but emotionally and psychologically as well.

*detachment, loss/change of self

A true war story demonstrates the relationships built through the harsh times of war.