Since last year, I've been helping a family friend (in highschool), whom I will call "the Royal Shrimp" [her choice of pseudonyme]  improve her English. This year, I helped her mostly with her "final tasks", a special homework that English teachers ask their pupils to do at the end of a thematic "sequence".

One of those final tasks came at the end of a sequence about the American dream, and her teacher asked the class to express what "American dream" meant to them or what they understood about it... in an artistic way! A lot of them made drawings, and my pupil got afraid because she's not an artist.

I therefore tried to reassure her and explained that art is not only about drawing and painting. What matters is what you express and how you do it. This was a homework for an English class after all, and what do we - she and I - master best about it? The English language and what's somehow linked to it.

That's how I convinced her that we could write a poem. And here it comes!

Once upon a dream

by The Royal Shrimp and Myself

They had a dream

An American dream

They came from far away

They reached the bay

To escape the misery

Of their own country

They were supposed to find a land

But instead, they found an island

They discovered of a new place

Where there was not enough space

They showed their passport

To get a transport

But realized they had no support

To reach their Neverland

As soon as they left Elis Island

Their dream would come to an end.

He had a dream

An American dream

That his “four little children”

Would live in a nation

Where the skin colour

Doesn’t matter.

They walked peacefully

Three times in Montgomery

To make a change, hopefully

And they got it, eventually.

44 years later,

Despite the hater(s)

They cast their ballot

And not their bullet

They chose a black president

Thinking only of his talent.

The idea was to work on themes that the Royal Shrimp is very much interested in: the Civil Rights Movement and Elis Island (mostly because she's been to New-York several times already). She is also interested in the characters of Barack and Michelle Obama, so we tried to draw a comparison of something that went wrong and something that can be thought of as a good consequence of the Civil Rights Movement.

Beforehand, in order to convince her to write a poem for this "artistic" task - which poem was very much praised by her teacher anyway  - I decided to pretend that I had to complete the assignement as a student, and here's what I came up with:

I also provided a detailed explanation for the choices I made here:

- the map shows that I have understood the historical roots of the American dream: the colonisation of the New world and the conquest of the West

- the map is about the past, but the goal is about the present/future: a girl who dreams of ninjas and CAN become President, that's what feminism aims at. And indeed, isn't gender equality a new form of the American dream? (ie shouldn't everyone be able to access it regardless of gender, just as it was originally supposed to be regardless of origin?)

- by using 3 colours, I can convey two messages with only one text: the title, and what I think it means or how I understand it (cf. "I can" + the colours of the American flag)

- this may be Route 66, another American symbol for ''going westwards''

And what about you? If you were asked to express yourself about the American Dream in an artistic manner, what would you do?