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A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance"
A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance"
A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance"
Ebook34 pages23 minutes

A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 28, 2016
ISBN9781535818285
A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance"

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    A Study Guide for Garrett Hongo's "And Your Soul Shall Dance" - Gale

    13

    And Your Soul Shall Dance

    Garrett Hongo

    1977

    Introduction

    And Your Soul Shall Dance is a poem by Garrett Kaoru Hongo dedicated to Wakako Yamauchi, one of the first Japanese American fiction writers and a mentor of Hongo's. The poem portrays Yamauchi as a teenage girl walking to school in 1930s California. Hongo first met Yamauchi, who is a generation older than him, in 1975, when he was twenty-three. After reading a mesmerizing story of hers, he realized that they lived in the same town, Gardena, just south of Los Angeles. He called and introduced himself, and she invited him over at once for breakfast. They forged an intellectual and even familial relationship, and Hongo grew intimately acquainted with her stories and plays, staging her most famous play, And the Soul Shall Dance, with his theater group in Seattle. Hongo's poem And Your Soul Shall Dance thus carries a distinguished pedigree, with the title both paying homage to Yamauchi's landmark play (and the story the play is based on) and also hinting at the postmodern reconstruction of Yamauchi's life and work that the poem represents. But the reader need know nothing of Yamauchi to appreciate the poem, in which a maturing young Japanese American woman ponders the rural world around her and the course of her destiny. And Your Soul Shall Dance was published first in the winter 1977 issue of the Journal of Ethnic Studies and subsequently in Hongo's 1982 collection Yellow Light.

    Author Biography

    Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaii, on May 30, 1951, to an electrical technician and a personnel analyst, both of Japanese descent. Hongo is a fourth-generation Japanese American, or yonsei, but by age he associates with the sansei, or third generation. Hongo's family moved to Oahu when he was eight months old, then to the greater Los Angeles area when he was six, settling in Gardena, California, home to a substantial Japanese American community. Hongo's grandfather,

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