Valerie Dorisca

This monologue reminds me the kind of conversation my mother used to have with me when I was an adolescent. At that time I found her very annoying, trying to control every single move that I was making. I think that is a normal reaction for a girl. When we are young, we don’t want to listen to old people’s lecture. I assume that will be the same reaction for this girl in the text. We can see that she does not understand the point that her mother tried to make by advising her to not sing benna in Sunday school. Innocently she replied: “but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school.” By responding like that she showed that she did not understand that her mother tried to explain that there are some comportment to adopt when you are at church which is a sacred place or in public areas. Singing a song like benna that talks about sexuality, bad taste, and open rebellion; shows that you are an uneducated girl. As a young girl, she does not find important the things that her mother talks about because at that age those advices don’t really matter. What matters is to hang out with friends, play, and enjoy our adolescence. She probably thinks that she will learn those things by getting experiences while making her own mistakes. Thus she does not really pay attention to her mother’s words, and will forget most of them by the time she finished to speak. However as she will grow up and face to certain situation such a struggling to iron a kaki cloth, she will remember some of the instructions that her mother gave to her. Those hints given in the text are some clues that are usually transmit from mothers to daughters to prevent a girl to become a slut as it says in the monologue. For the girl those things don’t make any differences until she will join the society.