29 pages • 58-minute read
To Da-Duh, In Memoriam
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.
Tin Pan Alley Songs
The narrator seeks to impress her grandmother with renditions of Tin Pan Alley songs, or popular American tunes. During the Great Depression, when the majority of the action of “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” is set, these songs were at the height of their popularity. The narrator enthusiastically sings these songs for her grandmother, whose response is ambiguous: “Da-duh stared at me as if I were a creature from Mars, an emissary from some world she did not know but which intrigued her and whose power she both felt and feared” (102). Nevertheless, she gives the narrator a penny to buy candy, indicating that she got some pleasure from the performance. In this way, the Tin Pan Alley songs symbolize the urban modernity of New York City and its relationship to the narrator’s sense of self, developing the theme of Environment as a Source of Identity. Da-duh’s response to the songs symbolizes her fear of this industrial modernity and how it makes her granddaughter so different from herself.
Sugar Cane and Other Vegetation
Just as Da-duh is somewhat frightened of the narrator’s environment, the narrator is made uneasy by Da-duh’s environment, particularly the sugarcane and the other vegetation on the island. She routinely uses symbolic language that emphasizes violence and intensity, as when she describes “the canes clashing like swords above [her] cowering head” (100). Later, she describes a “small tropical wood” as “a violent place […] the branches of the trees locked in what seemed an immemorial struggle” (101). Besides suggesting the narrator’s discomfort with the tropical abundance of Barbados, this language hints at the island’s violent colonial past.
By the time she is an adult, however, the violence of this vegetation has become a source of pride. She transforms the palm trees into “Tutsi warriors,” a reference to her African ancestors who strode across the landscape. This reflects her understanding of her grandmother’s own strength as something positive, even as it was frightening.
The Empire State Building
The Empire State Building and other tall buildings are a motif that reflects the changing, modernizing world and its transformation of the environment. The Empire State Building opened in 1931 and was the tallest building in the world until 1970. In 1937, the year the story is set, it was a novelty and a sign of the United States’ growing strength and technological prowess. When Da-duh learns of this building, “all the fight [goes] out of her” (104). The narrator recounts that later, it is as if Da-duh can no longer see the agricultural environment of which she was so proud because “some huge, monolithic shape had imposed itself […] between her and the land, obstructing her vision” (105). This “monolithic shape” is an allusion to the Empire State Building, which has cast a shadow over Da-duh’s environment just as it blocks the sun on Fifth Avenue.
Da-duh’s final words to her granddaughter capture her obsession with the building, as she urges the narrator to send a postcard depicting the skyscraper, transforming the building into an emblem of their budding relationship. However, it becomes a source of guilt for the narrator when Da-duh dies before receiving the postcard, much as their relationship is cut short.
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