Ghazel Sultan

When I first started writing my poem, I began jotting down all the events in my life that I remembered as being funny, silly or even sad. I came up with a huge list but I felt like my poem was not going anywhere and did not really tell much about me. A lot of my memories consisted of many cultural aspects and I did not know how to describe them in English. Through writing down a series of things, I came up with one topic I felt would be easiest to explain. I took that event and I realized how exciting the times of Eid, a religious holiday had been. These memories took me back many steps and I began to notice how different things were now. That little event left an enormous impact on my life. This is ironic since my Uncle’s car accident had been a very big deal to me but I never thought about how different things had gotten from that time on. Instead of moving my family closer, a lot of us had parted from each other and it reflected a lot on the little things we shared with each other.

When reading I Remember I got an idea of the author making all his memories flow in a certain way. Even though some of his ‘I remembers’ did not have anything to do with one another, there was still a flow of memories in each line that somehow related. I got a notion of his personality through each line and that notion still existed in each of his ‘I remember’. Brainard’s book also help me think back to my own memories by reading his, I found myself relating to his own memories, such as old sayings he brought up, which caused me to think about the superstitious or the sayings I had been growing up with.