Isabelle, Holland, and Graham are reading the book First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung. We will be searching for the motif of the colors red & black.
Graham Red and Black motif in FTKMF In chapters, 21-22 Loung and two of her siblings are "adopted" by another family. This turns out to be an enforced labor situation and not an adoption. Loung has dark thoughts about her family and the community around her and feels safe nowhere. She stops to trust the Youn soldiers after one of them attempts to rape her. The underwear of the Youn soldier is bright red, this is something Youn remembered more than other details. When he assaults her his face became darker and sinister. This fits with the theme in FTKMF about black being a color of evil and sadness.
In the next three chapters, the motif of “red and black” appears many times. In the chapter titled “child soldiers”, Lounge and Chou struggle at their new camp. Loung is sent to work in the rice patties where leeches bite her, “Black and slimy, they attach themselves to my flesh with suction cups, sucking my blood” (Ung 134). The leeches are a metaphor for the Angkar: clothed in black, sucking the life/blood from the Cambodian people. Later in the chapter, Met Bong forces Loung to leave Chou for a different camp, where she will be trained as a soldier. Loung misses Chou, and the nights are the worst when she has nightmares where a monster with “Coal black eyes” is chasing her until she turns around and kills it. Black shows up with the mention of the black sky and the eyes, as well as red, when describing the blood of the monster. There are many other references to the dark sky, and it is understandable why it scares Loung, as black symbolizes death and darkness. It seems...
Black and Red in FTKMF In these chapters, Loungs father is actually killed by the Khmer rogue. We are given vivid descriptions of the two soldiers propagating evil and dressed in black escorting "Pa" away into the red and orange sunset. The sunset is described many times, as this was the last time Loung saw her father. Later on, Loung has visions of hair and red matted on the end of a hammer, as she thinks about her father being clubbed to death in front of a pit of bodies. The family is given hope when Loungs 12-year-old brother finds a reliable source of food through stolen corn, but that too is taken away in the final sentences in chapter 14 as the guards catch and capture the boy.
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