Name: Ngoc Thanh Giang Nguyen

Student Number: 7974498

Assignment: Poetry of Resistance

The poem “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” was written by Canadian poet Margret Atwood
in 1968, when the U.S. military was involved in the Vietnam War.

In the poem, the speaker describes her images of her childhood as well as her experience when
she read the news to create a utopia within a dystopia. The pictures of her childhood are
“building neat castles in the sandbox”, “the hasty pits were filling with bulldozed corpse”, “I
walked to school washed and combed”, or “my feet stepping on the cracks in the cement”.
Atwood also brought the pictures that she read in the newspaper like “jungles are flaming” and
“the underbrush is charged with soldiers”. Those bright, peaceful images were juxtaposed with
pictures of war from the newspaper creating two different worlds for the speaker. One is all
beautiful, vivid, and peaceful pictures while the other one is the cruelty of war where
catastrophes were created by humans as she is. Two evident contradictions appear to the speaker
when she reads the news. The more peaceful the speaker had as a child, the more disastrous she
read from the newspapers. As a student, she was “washed and combed”, or oblivious to war, to
conflict, or even to death. However, the speaker had to witness the “black and white of a war
photo” of lives lost through media when she grew up, destroying her innocence. It might be
Atwood’s intention to create a utopia within dystopia or her hope for a future where no war
exists.

As a speaker of the poem or maybe Atwood herself, “It is Dangerous to Read Newspaper” is a
means of denouncing the war but with a hopeless voice. By reading the news, the speaker saw
pictures of war, she could not ignore. As a writer, Atwood used her words to oppose the war:
“Now I am grownup / and literate.” Those black-and-white photos and news of the war made her
“as quietly as a fuse”. It might. Be her fear of what she just read or the complicity inside the
speaker to encourage her to do something. However, no matter how hard the speaker tried, she
still could not be against the war, many and many news as well as pictures were posted. People
might not stop reading news and that is the reason why “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers”
was written. Atwood’s hopelessness is clear through two contradicted images: speaking of
peaceful trees” and “another village explodes. The speaker considered ignorance or doing
nothing evil by saying how everyone thinks they are a threat, even a small gesture: “I am a
stockpile of chemical”, “toys, my body/ is a deadly gadget” or even “I reach out in love, my
hands are guns/ my good intentions are completely lethal”. The speaker positions herself as a
stereotyped person who initiated the war in other parts of the world. Besides the powerlessness
of the speaker, she also thinks that she is a threat, destroying the world.