Some Meanderings on Darkroom, but it's what I've got before midnight tonight

 What are 3 words to describe how you felt when you were reading Darkroom?
 -Curious        -Impressed        -Pensive

Dark Room’s significance lies in who, where, and when the narrator was when the story takes place: an Argentinian immigrant girl child in the segregated South of the United States. Like most kids, the narrator is an ardent observer obsessed with looking and finding truth. The author’s advanced drawing skills help her tell her story; their clarity mimics photographs her father took throughout his life. She uses historical information to balance out her subjectivity and throughout the book reminds us of history we may have never learned.This technique helps inform us and contextualizes both her story and our reading of it, we are placed back there, with her, in time.

On page 84 she even goes back to show how her lineage connected to the “Original Americans”, and as Darin pointed out on other pages, uses maps to make her point.

Another example is page 134, that reminds me of Persepolis' "The bombings had begun." 

The caption at the top reads, "February 1965. It had begun." We read the newspaper headline to see what she means: "Negroes launch voter registration drive." She goes on to tell us that voter suppression against Blacks was happening and her family was in the middle of it: "We lived just one block from where everything happened"(136).

Quintero Weaver's ernest honesty was refreshing and unpretentious, mimicking the observational affect of a child. "Sometimes I felt a lump in my throat for Poor Old Joe"(190). She intermingles this tone with adult voice reconstructed data: "Ever since our arrival in Alabama, we'd heard plenty of klan stories: INTEGRATIONIST GROUP CONTINUING TRIP AFTER BRUTAL BEATINGS HERE. They'd beaten up freedom riders in a Birmingham bus depot"(194). Her attention to reconstructive detail Quintero Weaver is phenomenal. This takes so much work. Luckily, she had her father's photographs and must have researched old newspaper headings (not to mention her old textbooks). Throughout the book, I wondered about her process of gathering information about her family, her town, and the greater society from when she was a child and before she was born. (Pages 21, 25, 111, 115...)

I wondered why were letters between her parents in English if they mostly spoke Spanish at home? (98)
I wondered if on page 118, she drew pictures for things whose words might look undeciferable to an Anglo-english speaker: milanesas, medialunas, matambre...
How did she conform/acculturate to dominant forms of storytelling in order to get her point across?
What did she leave out?

I got most involved in the text when Quintero Weaver took us to the grey area, the spaces  where she was caught between black and white, school and home: "More and more, I found myself on my own, shuttling back and forth between my two worlds"(122).

She repeatedly shows herself as a child experiencing obliviousness amidst segregation, which acknowledges the relative privilege she had as a non—Black child in her town: "For me, February 19th was just another school day...my parents had other concerns"(170)

At the end, on page 235, Quintero Weaver  shows how trauma impacts memory: “Eventually Johnny told me the rest of the story, but I can’t seem to place that conversation. Was it somewhere around the house, out of earshot, swallowed up by the sounds of normalcy?” Then she chooses to craft an alternate ending starting on page 236 where she says what she would like to tell the ringleader in response to his racist comment. Choosing to include an alternate ending is a way of speaking through the silence that she has carried with her.This textual act shows those of us who have stayed silent or perpetrated acts that caused others to be silenced that events can be transformed after the fact, even decades later.