We Are Hard
We Are Hard - meaning Summary
Truth as Interpersonal Weapon
Atwood explores how honesty and deception operate within intimate relationships, arguing that facts can be wielded like weapons. Speakers criticize each other’s ‘‘truths’’ as chosen and aimed, while lies are reinvented and sometimes more tolerable. The poem questions whether declarations of love are objective facts or strategic acts, and distinguishes bodily presence from verbal truth, ending with the simple, physical claim that the body is either here or not here.
Read Complete Analyses1. We are hard on each other and call it honesty, choosing our jagged truths with care and aiming them across the neutral table. The things we say are true; it is our crooked aim, our choices turn them criminal. 2. Of course your lies are more amusing: you make them new each time. Your truths, painful and boring repeat themselves over & over perhaps because you own so few of them 3. A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon? 4. Does the body lie moving like this, are these touches, hairs, wet soft marble my tongue runs over lies you are telling me? Your body is not a word, it does not lie or speak truth either. It is only here or not here.
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