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Don't Call Us Dead Quiz

Danez Smith

This Study Guide consists of approximately 53 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Don't Call Us Dead.

Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

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+Chapters Summary and Analysis

Symbols and Symbolism

Themes and Motifs

Styles

Quotes

Order our Don't Call Us Dead Study Guide

Don't Call Us Dead Quiz

Danez Smith

This Study Guide consists of approximately 53 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Don't Call Us Dead.

Buy and print the Don

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Take our free Don't Call Us Dead quiz below, with 25 multiple choice questions that help you test your knowledge. Determine which chapters, themes and styles you already know and what you need to study for your upcoming essay, midterm, or final exam. Take the free quiz now!

Directions: Click on the correct answer.

Questions 1-5 of 25:

1.

When the speaker of “last summer of innocence” says that he played football “& believed its salvation, its antidote,” what does he mean (29)? (from Pages 23 - 36)

Football is associated with masculinity, which the speaker’s burgeoning sexuality seemed to undermine.

Football offered the speaker and his friends innocent play before they had to grow up and face the world.

Football is an American tradition in which both white and black people can participate freely.

Football offered a safe alternative activity to the more dangerous ones available in the speaker’s community.

2.

Why is Shakespeare’s Othello an appropriate allusion in the poem “O nigga O”? (from Pages 23 - 36)

The play Othello and the poem “O nigga O” both depict interracial relationships.

The text of the play addresses racial prejudice and sexuality, but the play’s performance history has been frequently problematic.

The play is one of the sources of a long-running cultural depiction of black male sexuality as aggressive and dangerous.

The play’s composition and the early use of the n-word coincide historically.

3.

Why does the speaker of “every day is a funeral & a miracle” ask the reader to burn the poem if their grandmother reads it? (from Pages 53 - 72)

She does not approve of her grandchild’s choices.

She does not know her grandchild is gay nor HIV-positive.

She does not understand her grandchild.

She does not accept her grandchild’s artistic side.

4.

Why is it meaningful that the shortest section of the poem is the speaker’s response to his killer? (from Pages 1 - 22)

The speaker knows these questions will never be answered.

The answers to his questions are so obvious that they do not require answers.

The brevity emphasizes the bewilderment and anger behind the speaker’s questions.

Even in the setting of the speaker’s own poem, the police officer denies his right to speak.

5.

What is the “red shadow” in “elegy with pixels & cum” (48)? (from Pages 37 - 52)

Blackness.

Queerness.

Sex-work stigma.

HIV/AIDS.

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