To Da-Duh, In Memoriam

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.

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.