Lit Log #2, The Missing Pieces

This is my art piece. What inspired me to put all these components together to make this final product was the quote in chapter 7. “ Where is she? What have you done with her? There was no night or day: only a flickering. After a while, there were chairs again, and a bed, and after that a window. She’s in good hands, they said. With people who are fit. You are unfit, but you want the best for her. Don’t you?” Pg. 39. This quote is Offred having a memory of her daughter. She visualizes the people who took her daughter, and she imagines them saying that she wasn’t fit and that now her daughter is with a fit family. I chose this quote because I felt like it was a good quote to express Offred’s emotions. I also feel like her daughter is a key person in this chapter. A breakdown of my art piece is a photograph of Offred, her daughter, and Luke. The deeper meaning and idea of this is that the photograph signifies her memory, which could be due to trauma or drugs, and the person in this specific quote was her daughter, but Luke also appears throughout the book. As you can see, the photograph isn’t complete. The reason for this is that, as we have seen throughout the book, Offred has vivid flashbacks but doesn’t completely remember. This signifies trauma and memory loss, which prevents her from remembering everything. And the pieces that are present are the memories that she remembers. In this chapter, it’s the memory of her daughter and also her mother. She talks about her mother saying, “or in a park somewhere, with my mother. How old was I? It was cold, our breaths came out in front of us, there were no leaves on the trees: gray sky, two ducks in the pond, disconsolate.” Pg 38. It’s memories like this that make my art piece come to life. Another definition of the photograph is that it represents the destruction of Offred’s family. The second part of my story is the black background. I didn’t take this picture with a black background just because. In my art piece, this background signifies the emotional distance and the unreliability of her memories, the reason for continuing to fight and staying alive. It also represents the memory of her daughter being particularly painful. Overall, the main concept I want viewers to get out of my artwork is how Offred went through a mental warfare to remember some of her memories, but she struggled to regain all her memories due to her life events and trauma. She also remembers her daughter, but the thought that her daughter was taken away from her still haunts her. She doesn’t know when she’ll see her daughter again and doesn’t even know if her daughter is alive. But the thought of her family is what’s keeping her moving forward. Although she´s unsure, she still has a bit of hope and faith that she’ll reunite with her family and that her daughter is waiting for her.