65 pages • 2 hours read
Lynn JosephThe Color of My Words
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Middle Grade | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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The Power of Words
Much of the novel’s plot relies on Ana Rosa’s interpretations of the importance of words and language. Words are both the substance of Ana Rosa’s daily life as well as the way for her to shape her vision of her identity and her future. Ana Rosa’s hyper focus on words is outside of the norm in her community, heightening the thematic presence of words throughout the text.
Lynn Joseph’s characterization of young Ana Rosa as a writer appears throughout the text, from the poems at the start of each chapter to long descriptions of how Ana Rosa feels about words. Subsequently, as the novel comes closer to the climax, Ana Rosa becomes even more self-aware about how words can be powerful in her life. When Ana Rosa discovers the truth about Papi, after a brief internal struggle, she asserts: “But I was a writer, wasn’t I?... Papi was still my Papi… I had a power over [words]. I could make words into anything I wanted” (92). This is an important moment for Ana Rosa as she begins to see more clearly that she can define her own life and experience through the words she uses. By emphasizing Papi’s name, Ana Rosa is able to illustrate her new understanding that she is in control of the way she uses words.
As a 12-year-old girl, Ana Rosa is also portrayed as unable to control much of what happens around her; in this way, her use of words becomes her only way to wield power. As tensions rise between the government and the villagers, Ana Rosa’s words are what bring the reporters to the small town. Even though she cannot fight like Guario, she is still able to use words to have a small amount of power. As the novel concludes, Ana Rosa’s resolution is that she is able to honor Guario’s memory with her words, which “can’t be blocked with rocks or guns or wishes or tears” (137). This critical realization seems to be Lynn Joseph’s purpose all along: though Ana Rosa is young, a girl, and living in poverty, she is able to have power over her own story and over the impressions of other people through words.
Family Relationships and How They Affect People
As a young adult novel, The Color of My Words has a clear underlying purpose of portraying family relationships for readers. By giving an in-depth look at Ana Rosa’s large family, including conflicts with her parents, Lynn Joseph sets up a narrative that gives readers an opportunity to understand how family dynamics work and opportunities for growth in family relationships. Several of Ana Rosa’s relationships are shown as being especially important and as having the strongest impact on her overall development as a person.
As is characteristic for many young adult novels, Ana Rosa’s primarily relational conflicts are with her parents, who are in control of much of her life. The book opens on a scene where Mami tells Ana Rosa not to be a writer, and this tension develops over the course of the novel, as both of Ana Rosa’s parents alternate between supporting her and struggling with her decisions and desires. Despite some of the conflicts between Ana Rosa and Mami and Papi, however, primarily their family relationships are portrayed as positive. This is an important, if somewhat implicit, aspect of Lynn Joseph’s text: families can be complicated, but it is good if they are overall supportive to one another.
Joseph explores this supportiveness in a more explicit, tense way through Ana Rosa’s discovery that Papi is not her biological father. As Ana Rosa struggles to process this information, she wonders, “If Papi was not my father, then did I still have a family? And what about Guario—was he my brother?” (89). The stability of Ana Rosa’s family unit and described history is critical to her understanding of what family is. She is eventually able to resolve this conflict for herself, naming that it is about who she decides family is, not what someone else says. In the end of the novel, Ana Rosa’s family is able to fully support her, with Guario’s support, to “be a writer” (135). This is a vital shift in the family relationships portrayed through the novel, and it operates as a parallel plotline to the larger conflicts in the book.
The Government Versus the People
Although it’s not an explicitly political text, Lynn Joseph makes some more subtle points about the interactions between the Dominican government and Ana Rosa’s community. Joseph also references the broader historical context of the Dominican Republic in a few brief moments as she portrays the unfolding conflict through Ana Rosa’s perspective. The central thematic element of these descriptions is the ways that the government tries to control the populace, and what the people can do to resist these incursions.
Much of what Ana Rosa learns about resistance to the government is shown through Guario’s character. At first, this is through Ana Rosa’s remembering of the story of Guario’s name, which comes from a story of a Taíno chief, Guarocuya, who had resisted the Spanish colonizers. When Guarocuya eventually forced the Spanish into saying “okay you can have freedom” (102), it turned out that “Guarocuya had had it all along, it wasn’t something for them to give” (102). This is a key moment in the novel as Ana Rosa narrates this thematic idea: freedom is inherent and internal, it cannot be given or taken away by anyone, including the government.
Later, Ana Rosa understands this lesson more poignantly, when after Guario’s death she reflects on the government’s action, thinking to herself: “But [the government] didn’t realize that it wasn’t theirs to give or to take back. We had it all along and had never given it up…because of Guario” (130). Ana Rosa’s conclusion about her village’s ability to keep their freedom in the face of the government trying to take their land is a strong reminder of Joseph’s overall purpose in including this theme.
