Sex as Anointing
"On him and on the bed and on me; and, in the dim light and against our dark bodies, the effect was as of some strange anointing" (81).
This image shows what is left after Tish and Fonny make love for the first time. Tish uses descriptive words such as "dim," "dark" and "strange" to give the reader a good sense of what it looked like at that moment.
Fonny's face
"His face looked as though it were plunging into water" (5).
In this passage, Tish uses evocative language to show the reader what, exactly, Fonny's face looked like when he learns the news that he is going to be a father. Instead of simply saying that Fonny is in shock, Tish chooses to describe his emotional response to the reader by imagining what his face would look like in a similar context.
The subway
"When the train came, I pushed in, with the others, and I leaned against a pole, while their breath and smell rolled over me. Cold sweat covered my forehead and began to trickle down my armpits and back" (114).
In this moment, Tish describes how deeply uncomfortable she feels without having to tell the reader that she is uncomfortable. She brings the reader into the feeling of being on the subway with her in that moment, as part of the collective. She is intimately honest about what is going on in her body so that the reader can be made to feel what she feels.
The favela
"There must be two thousand transistor radios playing all around them, and all of them are playing B.B. King. Actually, Sharon cannot tell what the radios are playing, but she recognizes the beat: it has never sounded louder, more insistent, more plaintive" (167)
The overpowering music of the favela reveals Sharon's true discomfort in this moment. The sounds that she hears puts her on edge, even though she is able to find some cultural common ground between this music and the music she listens to at home.
