Dorothy Allison's This Is Our World

In Dorothy Allison’s “This is Our World”, Allison describes how art has had such an impact on the way that she views different aspects of life. She started her essay by describing a Jesus mural behind a baptismal at a Baptist church when she was only seven years old. The mural became a very important piece of work to her and it allowed her to view art in a different way. Allison uses very descriptive language when it comes to explaining art. Later in her life she compared writing to art. In her mind writing is a form art in itself. Just like art, writing should “provoke more questions than answers and, most of all, should make us think about what we rarely want to think about at all.”(Allison 35) “We know if we say anything about what we see in a work of art we will reveal more about ourselves than the artist”(Allison 40). In turn it says that no matter what the artist is trying to say we will always see something different and it most likely reflects us. Art does not reflect itself the same to every person, …show more content…
In my personal experiences, people tend to listen to music that reflects something going on in their life or something that has happened. For example, when someone gets there heartbroken they tend to gravitate towards depressing or angry music. In Allison’s essay when she looks at a magazine ad with a father throwing his son into the air and the words “Your father will always catch you”; she views this as a horrible thing. The reason for this interpretation is because she was raped by her step-father when she was a child, so she reflects this in her interpretation of the ad. When she read the words, she may have thought about her step-father trying to catch her and about never being able to escape from him or the trauma that he has caused her. When Dorothy shows her friend Jackie, she is told “It was supposed to make you make feel safe.”(Jackie