1/2 Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern, Cheyenne, Comanche

The collection of poems in the book Sin by Ai is a meditation on power and male abuses of it, and where God belongs in the midst of it. She takes on the personas of various figures in her poetry, such as the Kennedy brothers or a priest who falls to sexual temptation or a child killer not in a personal theraputic manner, but almost like a vengeance. Her writing is primarily intended to be a reflection on the people of the world and her political feelings, but as with most works of art, the process she chooses to follow when creating a work exposes her self. 

All information on the internet about Ai is fixated on the changing of her name. I've decided that this is quite possibly because the tension of Ai's being is condensed within her name change (from Florence Anthony to "Ai," which means "love" in Japanese) and exploded in her poetry. As the only child born as the result of a love affair, Ai states:

 "I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father's identity from me; I feel that I should not have to be identified with a man, who was only my stepfather, for all eternity."

Ai's mother met her lover, a Japanese man, at a streetcar stop. If Ai resents the connotations of her conception, why did she choose to change her name to a Japanese word? After reading a good amount of her poetry, I've decided that it has something to do with her unusual ability to empathize. The poems in Sin that are the most powerful are consequently the most disturbing. In the case of this collection of poems, Ai writes to expose the cruelties of human nature and her confusion about God's justification of it. This intention translates to an overall fury within her, but it also speaks to her supply of compassion. Ai's name change parallels the altering of her identity in writing in that both have been done out of empathy in order to prove a belief. 

Aside from the blatancy of disguising her physical self in foreign personas, Ai's writing style disguises her inner strength and allows it to escape into the minds of her readers.