I remember the first day of World Lit last semester. I sat down in the not-so-standard classroom, awkwardly shifted back and forth in those cushy chairs, and debated whether or not to make eye contact with my classmates or just pretend they didn’t exist until class began. Then class began, and we introduced ourselves, (I inwardly critiqued my introduction) and eyed the clock until 12:30—or, as I found out then, 12:15 to my pleasant surprise. “What am I going to do in this room for an hour and a half twice a week?” I thought. I liked everybody that I had met that day, but I didn’t really know what I would have to say to them for an entire year, and I wondered what I had gotten myself into. The next few days were the same. Then class began to really pick up and along with that classwork picked up, and (I’m sorry Professor Bump) we started to complain about writing DBs. And after that we talked about other things and slowly (or maybe quickly I can’t remember at this point) we all became great friends.

Aww look at our class!

(Bump's Website)

And isn’t our group the greatest, really? I love answering the question, “what World Lit are you in?” because I have so much pride in being associated with all of you guys. (I know this DB doesn’t require sappiness, but it’s just sad to think that we won’t all be together in just two class periods.) Just think about all we do...we are in Student Government, service organizations, fraternities and sororities, sports, and all other sorts of organizations across campus. Five of us got elected into P2SA this year (that’s almost 30% of the organization for all you math nerds like me out there!), and I feel like half the time I meet an upperclassmen I really like, I find out later that they were a former Bumpster. Alice and I went to FaceAids’ Condom Couture fashion show last Thursday, where Ryan designed the winning and audience favorite dress, that Jenny modeled, and it just hit me once again that Bumpsters are everywhere and so involved on campus! I wonder if it’s something about the class that churns out such dynamic and active UT participants or is it just the people who want to be there that take this class. Is it a combination? For the last part of my DB I want to try to figure out what this class has done for me, in terms of leadership and ethics, and figure out an answer.
When I thought about the two topics, ethics immediately came to mind as the one which influenced me the most in this class. I have always been an ethically conscious person (if I can say that without sounding presumptuous), but I’ve realized that until now I never really put my thoughts into action. Yes, I’ve always been the girl who couldn’t kill a fly (I seriously can’t), but what does that even mean when I ate meat every day with relish and didn’t really think about how my actions affected animals? I sometimes felt like a contradiction whenever I sat down to a steak meal, but I never had the courage. Earthlings gave me that courage...or at least the nausea I got whenever I saw meat long enough to stick to something that I feel right about. I’m still tempted—for some reason every time I see taquitos, which I never even liked that much before, I’m just ready to give it all up—but I’m strengthened by the fact that I shared my experience with all of you guys. I would not want to let myself or the ideas I felt in class down by giving that up—at least not yet. I think what was most important about our approach to ethics in class was the wide breadth of issues we were exposed to. It’s not enough to just say “discrimination,” talk about some standard examples of prejudice and move on. Sure, we all care about ethics and social justice—we wouldn’t be in this class if we didn’t—but we all can’t proclaim that we understand or that we’re really even going to act on this understanding unless we give each issue some real attention. I really liked reading the gender and immigrant short essays the past few weeks for this reason. They opened my eyes to issues that I would have never thought about: what does it really mean to be biracial and how do some people react to their children coming out? In the looking glass world, it seemed like everything was backwards and strange to Alice, but she often figured out that things were really not as different as they may seem. When she first saw the Jabberwocky book, for example, “she puzzled over [it] for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her,” (Looking Glass, 148), and she realized that all she had to do was read it through a mirror! Like Alice, I want to be able to figure out how to “read” people and ideas that I don’t understand. What this class most taught me about ethics was to think about issues in much greater detail and to try to think about them through other people’s perspective.

Our class is inspired to be active members of our communities.

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My leadership experience in this class is most instrumental in helping me to respond and act upon my ethical values. Our in depth look into the issues we addressed in class reinforced in me a confidence to express my opinions, even if they are not what everyone else thinks. Many times in our discussions—what it means to be human for example—each of us had a different opinion, but we were all able to respect to and listen to what our classmates had to say. Furthermore, in being exposed to so many controversial issues, I was instigated almost into wanting to act. Action is not a solitary act, however, and I was made aware, through the community we built in class, how much group effort and believing in a cause or condemning a wrong together does to strengthen one’s belief that something may be done to correct society. It’s easy to read a startling article about sweatshops for example, feel terrible for the people involved, but just close it when you’re done because there’s “nothing you can do.” It’s another thing entirely, however, to research sweatshops as a class, really look into what they are, and talk about what needs to be done as a class and not at least try to do something about it. In true leadership fashion, when I leave this class I will be inspired to bring this understanding of ethics to others and to voice my opinions about ideas or practices that bother me and that I want changed. I’m young, I still don’t know the answers, but all I can do right now is act and try and have courage to support what I believe in. I disagree with Alice when she says, “I think you might do something better with the time [...] than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.” (Alice, 72) That’s exactly what I need to do: ask myself the questions that I don’t yet know what to do with!

Woman Warrior 3

Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoirs in The Woman Warrior are not the American ideal. As Americans we have been trained almost to believe that all the stories of immigrants or their children are going to be hopeful and heroic, of people overcoming hardships and leaving a hard life in their home country to come to America—the place they and all of their families and friends have been dreaming of since they were born. We don’t think of the difficulties they really go through when they come here. I’ve realized after going through the past few readings in class that I don’t really think about what immigrants are going through either.

Most of us think that anyone would be happy to be American, but we don't think about what it means to adapt to American life.

http://images.onset.freedom.com/ocregister/kpj2pb-24citizen2large.jpg

We expect them to want to be here more than anything else, to pick up American culture and place it before their own the minute they arrive. We don’t think about the difficulties of adjusting to American culture and the American people, who would arguably be a hard, perhaps even arrogant, group to deal with if you stepped back and thought about it. I remember that when I finished this book in high school, I didn’t really see it as a memoir for Kingston and read it more as a testament to her cultural experience only. I failed to see that her cultural experiences were her experiences and that they colored everything that she did. In telling her story, Kingston needed to explain No-Name Woman and the background stories of her mother and aunt. We wouldn’t be able to understand her struggles in the final section as well without this information. The final chapter is the most personal and what I was expecting when I knew I’d be reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s “memoir,” but what I’ve come to realize after reading through the whole book is that this is just a sum of all her family’s experiences. She explains No-Name Woman to illustrate the difficulties girls in her culture can be faced with and then relates it in the last chapter to her difficulties being a girl in America. She describes her mother, a strong and headstrong woman, who comes to live a radically different life in the states then she had in China as a respected doctor. Finally, she describes Moon Orchid’s life to illustrate the disparate differences between American and Chinese marriages: Moon Orchid is eventually sent to a mental institution where she became “thinner each time,” Brave Orchid visited her, “shrunken to the bone.” (Kingston, 160) All of these experiences allow Kingston’s readers to understand her more completely and react more appropriately to her personal memories in the last chapter than if we had to read it immediately. Kingston is unafraid to show herself in a strange and very unflattering light in this book. She has difficulty as a schoolgirl trying to fit in and associates some of her difficulties with her culture. In class for example she attributes her silence to being Chinese and says, “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.” (Kingston, 166) She describes her need to confess her “sins” to her mother and brutally harasses the “silent girl” in her class, all experiences that anyone telling a memoir would be hesitant to describe.

I always feel strange putting up random people's pictures on my blog, but this shows how people's lives aren't lived in a vacuum but are shared with others.

http://www.hoagy.org/people/graphics/fam1.jpg

Kingston’s organizational structure in her memoir, as well as her honest writing style, allow her readers to more easily understand the immigrant experience and the experiences of those intimately connected to non-American cultures. We all profess to a culture other than just being “American,” but I for one don’t realize just how different my American experience is from others’. Kingston’s book describes the complications of an immigrant experience and just how much culture pervades our every action.

Maxine Hong Kingston.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithwj/2259310/

The first two chapters of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior illustrate just how little power and place women have in society. By providing both a historical and modern example, she shows that even though the treatment of women has improved, it is still not ideal and is deeply rooted in human behavior. In “No Name Woman” Kingston’s aunt, a woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock and ills herself and her baby, is a graphic example of what happens to a woman who makes a mistake. When her aunt—who doesn’t even deserve to keep her name anymore, after death—proves to the other people in her society that she is no longer able to fulfill her gender script and serve as a faithful wife and mother, she literally has no place in society. Unable to tolerate the life people would give her after the shame she caused to her family, her aunt feels that she has no choice but to kill herself. Kingston’s mother buys into society’s treatment of this aunt and tells Kingston, “Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt.” (Kingston, 15) Similarly, Kingston provides a real-world example of women’s lesser place in society in the second chapter, “White Tigers.” The first half of the chapter is an example of a very strong woman, a woman warrior, who protects her family and exacts revenge. It gives the sense that Kingston’s life is going to be different than her no-name aunt if she has such a strong woman as a role model. Then Kingston brings it back to her real life and family which is less than empowering for women. Kingston says, “I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, ‘Girls are necessary too;’ I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession.” (Kingston, 52-53) Kingston has almost as less control over her treatment and fate as her aunt. Nevertheless, her family expects her to be perfect.
This paradox—of a worthless woman with high expectations—is an interesting one and one which I find difficult to understand or at least to understand its origins. The article “Girls Need to Be Perfect” further explains this fact, even though it is less about discrimination and more about the unfair expectations placed on women. Children are already expected to do more than I think should be required of them: The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation [...]: ''Our children start where we finished.'' But it seems as if women have the added task of living past the reputation they’ve had for millennia of being incapable of performing as well as men. The high-performing girls discussed in the article reminded me so much of the girls in my high school: we all worked from the moment we got up ‘til the late hour we were finally able to go to sleep, and squeezed in as many extracurriculars as we could. Generally, girls at the girls school did much, much more than the boys at our brother schools, but it wasn’t a point of pride for the girls as much as just something we did—and it may even be something we were made fun of on top of that. In this way, perfectionism is both an expectation and a “disease” for women. I’d be interested in class to talk about how other girls think about their personal expectations.

http://www.onemag.org/teach_all.gif

Girls are expected to do it all.

Georgetown Readings 2

The themes from this DB’s readings are vast and when listed out, almost seemingly disconnected. Although each author discussed issues of race, culture, and sexuality in great detail, other issues seemed to drive them: acceptance by society and friends and most prominently parent-child relationships greatly influenced each of these men’s lives and the struggles with either their race or sexuality. I want to go through each of their stories individually (sort of like what Lauren did, I think) to address how culture, sexuality and family dynamics impacted their lives individually. By writing down their stories shamelessly, each of these authors have provided a glimpse into the lives of those many of us (myself included) would not be able to comprehend fully. I, for one, was shocked by how Johnny Lee’s parents responded to his homosexuality and was also introduced to the delicate problems of being multiracial that I had never thought of before.
Anthony R. Luckett, Multihued
Anthony’s story is all about boundaries. He mentions the way people see him as “Korean” by describing the “38 parallels I’ve seen folks draw on me...” and reveals his “Black” categorization by talking about “treading the Mason-Dixon poverty line” “alone.” (Luckett, 861) Luckett’s story was a sad one in that he never had a solid family or group. He writes that “now Jazz is my mother and Hip Hop my sample of what daddies be like.” (Luckett, 861) Luckett struggles with accepting and embracing his multiracial background because I’m sure he wanted so badly to belong to something but felt that he was never able to. A particularly illuminating example he gives is when he describes how ashamed and confused he felt when his mother was speaking to him in Korean on the subway. Although his mother meant it as an affectionate action, he could only imagine his fellow passengers questioning why a boy who was obviously not fully Korean could be spoken to in that language. Luckett’s story is an example of what it means to be multiracial, obviously, and the challenges that involves, but it is also more than that. His struggle to reconcile his constant abandonment culminated in an understanding that his mother was actually doing whatever she could to save him, but not before the issues he had with his parents spilled over into his relationships with members of the opposite sex. In attempting to embrace some sort of cultural identity, Luckett initially failed to do either justice. His mother taught him that he needed to handle his cultural expression differently when she told him “You don’t always have to wear your culture out like that” (Luckett, 866) in response to his cornrows. I thought Luckett’s piece was beautifully well-written and very insightful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTVvmT2bioo

This video is about the two sets of twins who were born black and white. The related videos on YouTube surprised me because they were for other "defects" or "abnormalities" like "animals without heads" as if the thought of a family so obviously of mixed race was so unnatural.


Johnny Lee, No Such Thing...

Johnny Lee’s first sentence is a deep insight into how culture affected his life. “The church is an integral part of being Korean, at least in my family,” he says. (Lee, 869) Johnny’s experience with his Korean culture is at once global—with his parents following Korean customs and practices very diligently—and personal in that much of Johnny’s experience is shaped by his parent’s and family’s personal opinions. As stated above, I was incredibly surprised by the extent to which Johnny’s parents rejected his homosexuality. Even Johnny says, “it is very easy, as an outside observer, to react with amazement and anger at what my parents have done.” (Lee, 879) I’m not totally naïve and understand that people wholeheartedly denounce homosexuality or believe that it can be “cured” by doctors or therapists, but it was still very much a shock. I was impressed by Johnny’s strength in keeping true to himself in the face of so much discrimination but also impressed (no that isn’t the right word...saddened) by the force of that discrimination and how much it can cause people to fracture their relationships, even the relationships within their own family.

I was surprised to the extent some people let hatred rule their lives.
http://glothelegend.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/protestors-anti-gay.jpg

Vincent Ng, Farewell My Tung-Tew

Vincent’s reading reminded me a lot of our class discussion on Cholly from The Bluest Eye because he tried so hard to understand what made his father the man he was. Vincent obviously has issues with his father and went so far as to have negative feelings about his culture because of it: “to me,” he says, “the notion of being Chinese encompassed everything bad about living with my father.” (Ng, 883) Vincent doesn’t stop there, however, and explains that his father is merely a product of his upbringing, growing up with a physically abusive father. Vincent also talks about how his views of his culture affected his sexuality. He talks about how “being a Honger meant having no confidence, interpersonal skills, or leadership abilities.” (Ng, 883) Eventually, Ng is able to overcome his difficulties though a liberal acceptance or approaching new ideas or experiences as they are with as little discrimination as he can muster.

http://www.understandthetimes.org/inthenews/109_ec.shtml

Vincent used the theater to help understand his issues in the same way that he tried to understand his father.

Culture

I always used to get jealous whenever somebody I knew had to speak to their parents in another language because I wanted so badly to have this “other” culture outside of being “just an American.” To this day I hold fiercely onto any fragments of my heritage, however small they may be. I will complain loudly about how much I hate pierogis and sauerkraut, traditional German food—even though we maybe have them only twice a year. I try to sing along with the Polish side on my family every time they sing “Happy Birthday” in Polish, but I hardly know the words. I pretend like I feel at home in Frankenmuth, Michigan, a somewhat campy German town we visit every year or so; I will tell you backwards and forwards the story of my dad’s relatives getting locked in a barn by Nazis when they went back home to visit family, and I feel attached to that Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen for no reason other than the fact that it’s Danish. (It is in Copenhagen, right? I’m not even sure...) But other than these little teensy examples, I don’t feel like I have much of a culture, and I’ve always regretted that.

This is about as close to my Danish roots as I get.

http://www.orangesmile.com/destinations/copenhagen/img/little-mermaid.jpg

Most of my family came to America in the nineteen-teens (if that’s even an expression). My dad’s grandparents, who spoke only German, settled in Brooklyn with two of their children, and my grandfather came shortly afterward. I have always loved thinking about them living there and imagining my grandfather growing up in such an incredibly diverse environment. My dad doesn’t really say much about his family’s culture. His mother was one of thirteen so he has stories of enormous family get-togethers, certainly, but nothing much about culture. He’s said before that he can remember his grandfather sitting in his armchair and barking at him, half in German to give him his newspaper. He was mainly afraid of him, and he says he can never remember his dad speaking to either of his parents in German. It seems like, at that point, everybody was just hurriedly trying to become Americans and leave their former cultures in the dust of barbeques, baseball and the Fourth of July. I know even less about my mother’s family’s immigration story. All I hear about is that her big Polish-Catholic family seemed to have all appeared out of thin air to settle into the same Dearborn, Michigan neighborhood. My grandmother spoke Polish fluently but never was able to teach it to my mom. My mom said that she was afraid of being called a “dirty Polack” by some of her classmates and tended to pretend that she wasn’t Polish at all. The main theme, I suppose, of my family’s cultural history is “just forget about it.” I’ve always wished that that wasn’t the case.

This is probably what my grandfather's neighborhood looked like. I just wish I knew about his family's history during and before this time.

http://www.laguardiawagnerarchive.lagcc.cuny.edu/PhotosVirtualExhibit/Photos/02.003.19542.jpg

Reading through the three stories of children of immigrant parents, I realized just how much different cultures can affect the American experience. All three people expressed a sentiment that I didn’t agree with entirely, or perhaps didn’t understand well at all: the idea that they didn’t fit in anywhere, that like Miguel Ramirez said, “I will always be an outsider.” (Anthology, 843) What about the descriptions of their vibrant and strong families? Didn’t they exist completely within them, maybe just being a little different as American citizens? Why would Norma Andrade’s relationship change with her family about which she says, “No space, however small could confine the life and energy of mi familia” (Anthology, 846) just because she is an American citizen? It seemed like the more each of these authors attempted to assimilate themselves into either their family’s and their country’s culture, the more different they felt. I respect that, and I can understand it to a certain extent, but it still confuses me. When Alessandro Melendez, explores the Latino community and black fraternity of Dartmouth he writes, “my worst fear came true: I was not part of any [...] group and never will be.” (Anthology, 858) But what about the community of his family, of the friendship between he and Ben or the strong bond he had with his brother? This may come across as insensitive when I don’t mean it, and I’m having a difficult time wording myself, but I don’t see the benefit in expressing these feelings so futilely and without any apparent pride in their unique position. I think these people could have also lovingly embraced the fact that they are different, fortunate enough to have parents with such a rich culture who left it behind to better themselves and their children, and are able to incorporate the cultures of so many into their lives. As far as experiencing diversity in college, I have loved getting the opportunity to meet people of such different backgrounds, cultures, and lifestyles.

Morrison 3

Wow. The end of that book. After reading it, I needed some answers and was pleased by Morrison’s honest and surprisingly thorough analysis of her own work. I needed to know why Morrison could blind a “poor little girl” (Morrison, 190) like Pecola Breelove and leave her insane, friendless, fatherless—childless, even—talking to (what I assume was) herself for the rest of her days. I needed to know who did it to her. Was it her own perverted desires? Was it what society told her? Was it Soaphead, her town or her father? Was I or people “like me” to blame? Morrison didn’t answer any of these questions, but she wasn’t supposed to. By carefully constructing a story in the “language worthy of [her] culture,” (Morrison, 216) Morrison is able to open our eyes, blue eyes or not, to a world many of us don’t understand.

Pecola's pride at having blue eyes at the end of The Bluest Eye is one of the more horrific passages.

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One strategy I was impressed by was Morrison’s ability to write her story in such a disjointed yet complete way. (Maybe, like what Soaphead said in his letter, not a complete story, but a complete story.) She presented characters, allowed us to judge them and then completely changed our minds. Cholly, for example, went from a wife-beating, alcoholic and inept father to a laughing, irresistible young man and back again. He transforms into just a young boy who is then “’rape[d]’ by the whitemen [sic]” (Morrison, 215), becomes a man who commits an unspeakable crime but is eulogized in a sense as the only one who loved Pecola enough, “enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her.” (Morrison, 204) What are we supposed to do with that? Morrison’s writing style has the beautiful and at times frustrating effect of forcing its readers to figure out what we want or need to think about what we’ve just read. In the way she’s structured the time in her narrative, she can start a passage “so it was on a Saturday afternoon, in the thin light of spring” (Morrison, 161) and have her audience tense at the anticipation of a scene they’ve wanted to avoid for the entirety of the novel, Pecola’s rape scene. And, echoing this sentence, she can sum up the entire depressing, hopeless conclusion of that young girl’s fate with another “So it was,” (Morrison, 204) and the sense that Pecola’s story is only one sad (albeit extreme) story of many. So, although Morrison writes that it was music alone that could have expressed Cholly’s freedom as a young, runaway, she shows just how much writing can say. That in Cholly’s case, for example, not “only a musician” but a writer “would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free.” (Morrison, 159) Morrison’s writing is lyrical, at times musical, “speakerly, aural, colloquial,” (Morrison, 215) but above all it is powerful. Morrison’s writing as “the disclosure of secrets, secrets ‘we’ shared and those withheld from us by ourselves and by the world outside...” (Morrison, 212)—writing she wasn’t even fully satisfied with as she mentions throughout her afterword—had the ability to share an entire town and its hardships and encourage all those who read it to think not only about what they were doing but to look at the “stories” of their lives from all angles.

How different would The Bluest Eye have been if we were only given the perspective of one person? As disjointed and unclear as this picture of this one man?

http://solo1y.com/postsatire/post901.jpg

I couldn’t read The Bluest Eye without thinking about its impact on the world and all those who read it. I couldn’t forget the “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature” on its cover and my impression of Morrison as a highly contemplative, calculative and soulful writer. But what about the impact of other books or writings? What about those pieces that never get published or even read by anyone but the author? A good example is Soaphead’s letter to God, which is presumably a reflexive letter written in actuality to a man highly discomforted by his present state and feelings. Soaphead’s letter is therapeutic: it explained his past and current situation—he even says “it is necessary that I identify myself to you clearly” (Morrison, 177); it revealed his and his family’s failings; and it granted him the opportunity to explain something that no one would ever listen to, not “the newspapers” or the “people [who] whispered.” (Morrison, 181) His letter ends with him feeling proud of his accomplishments, however misguided and twisted they may be. And although many people would say that Soaphead doesn’t deserve this strange redemption, his writing was able to give him that. In this way, writing is something which helps us to bare our own souls, air our own problems, reveal things about ourselves that even we didn’t know. I think this is what is most important and what both Morrison’s and “Soaphead’s” writings come to: the ability of writing to say something you could never just say. It’s the mindset you get in when you sit down and read, ready to be changed by what you’re reading or the way you feel when you get ready to really write anything and everything that you’re thinking. Writing is an honesty that comes out of deep thinking mixed with spontaneity and a desire to show what you really mean. I’m glad Morrison was able to show me the world and ideas of The Bluest Eye so beautifully.

Post Secret is kind of like Soaphead's therapeutic writing practice. People anonymously write anything they're thinking and send them in for people to read. In this way, they can write things they'd never say to anyone else. (I don't agree with this one, but I thought it was kind of funny for our class!)

http://solo1y.com/postsatire/post901.jpg

The Bluest Eye 2

First of all, I’ve really enjoyed reading The Bluest Eye—as much as one can enjoy a story like this, anyway. Toni Morrison’s voice and writing style is incredible and expressive. She has this way of capturing emotions and details that would escape even the people living the experience. I’ve never had much difficulty visualizing a book playing in the back of my head while I’m reading, but the vision Morrison brings up is more complete than most. There were a few phrases I wrote down among my notes while I was reading through this most recent section, not because they were particularly relevant to our topic but because the way they were crafted was so...beautiful or right that I didn’t want to forget. Like this one—“But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.” (Morrison, 74)—about Pecola after she’s been teased by the group of boys surrounding her “like a necklace of semiprecious stones.” (Morrison, 65) Every page or section of Morrison’s book has something to it, and I’ve enjoyed (that word again) being swept away both by her writing and her story. Enough about my writing crush on Toni Morrison.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awsan0a9JDc


Toni Morrison talking about some of the problems she faced as a female writer


I think it’s her writing more than anything that brings her understanding of racism and judgment into focus. To be honest I wasn’t excited to read The Bluest Eye in the first place because it was a book about race. Race again. For the most part, I feel like I’ve heard it all before and understand. I heard all about it in school. I read about every young adult book on the Holocaust that Barnes and Noble carried when I was younger. I didn’t want to read the same old things again and again. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but I really wasn’t too happy to pick up The Bluest Eye a week ago. Morrison has such a thorough eye for detail, however, that she is able to bring so many issues to the forefront at once in ways that I hadn’t thought of before. From a deeper understanding of the character’s backgrounds and the by knowing the details of their daily lives, we may begin to have a better understanding of what it truly means to be the “minority,” where sometimes even your own race doesn’t want to be associated with you and lives with a self hatred. Like Professor Bump wrote in his essay, “Morrison did not want Pecola to be pitied...” but causes us to feel “compassionate grief” for her character, (Bump 331) an arguably more “complete” feeling of empathy for Pecola’s plight. In the next paragraph I’m going to try to outline just a few of the ways Morrison presents racism and judgment in such a complete context.

Writing as a medium of explanation and understanding

The most astounding example of racism that Morrison describes in The Bluest Eye is what I guess would be described self-racism, “us v. us”. The black boys taunting Pecola in a circle because she’s black too. Geraldine, the picture-perfect housewife who seems to be trying to remove her association with her race, and only allowed her son junior to play with “white kids.” (Morrison, 87) Her obvious discrimination against the people like Pecola, girls who knew “nothing of girdles,” who “broke things in dime stores,” and “hovered” “like flies.” (Morrison, 92) The complete disgust she held for these people, the people she was trying so hard to separate herself from, was completely evident in Morrison’s rant on page 92—people whose “grass wouldn’t grow where they lived.” (Morrison, 92) It’s ironic, then, and powerful that her son was so terrible to Pecola, killing his mother’s cat and blaming it on her. When Geraldine tells Pecola, “you nasty little black bitch,” to “get out of [her] house,” (Morrison, 92) would her world have been shattered knowing that it was actually her son’s fault...or does she already know? In addition to self-racism and in the vein of the unfair stereotype that Geraldine holds for the disadvantaged members of her community, Morrison gives us a glimpse into why the people of Lorain came to be as they are. After reading the terrible fight between Mr. and Mrs. Breedlove, we are given Pauline Breedlove’s life story—how she loved Cholly and cared for her family before forming her own, why she and Cholly began to fight. So much of judging is not understanding and deciding that it’s far easier to dislike someone because they “just are” that way. Mrs. Breedlove shows the differences that can arise in even (somewhat) friendly interactions when she recounts her experiences with her employer. When her employer asked her a question and Mrs. Breedlove replied, Pauline says, “She just sucked her teeth a little and made out like what I said was dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was.” (Morrison, 119) In addition to focusing on explaining the differences among people, Morrison explicitly gives instances of how people respond to these instances, the classic “us and them” dichotomy. In the first reading, we read about the man behind the candy counter who was clearly judging the girls, and in this section we meet the “yellow-haired” girl who stops, slightly terrified when she sees Pecola, Claudia and Frieda in her house. Finally, Morrison gives examples of a type of judging that goes beyond and works in addition to race and shows how ready people are to judge. Claudia and Frieda “looked hard for flaws” in Maureen Peal because she was so respected by her teachers and peers and at first had to settle with “uglying up her name.” (Morrison, 63) Additionally, Mrs. Breedlove drastically changes her opinion of herself, love and her life after receiving “her education in the movies” (Morrison, 122) and learning about physical beauty. Morrison clearly has a deep understanding of race and does an excellent job giving a description of how it is treated in the lives of these people of Lorain.

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, the people Mrs. Breedlove watched in the movies and hwho determined her sense of beauty.

Family Dynamics in The Bluest Eye

I opened The Bluest Eye determined to read it optimistically, as hard as that may be. I read searching for signs of family dynamics that worked and reasons why they didn’t. The families we read about in The Bluest Eye are far from desirable, but they are real and familiar in some ways and not totally dysfunctional. As Professor Bump mentions in his piece, only 5 percent of black families researched in a psychiatrists’ study were determined to be “severely dysfunctional.” (Bump, 350) While that observation may be taken to be severely naïve if anything—at least that’s something. Similarly, I liked Professor Bump’s observations about the complaint that some African American writers, “Toni Morrison among them—have betrayed the black family by failing to shoulder responsibility for restoring it to an image of wholeness and unity.” (Bump, 350) I think it’s important that Toni Morrison and other writer’s “report” families the way they want to. It’s honest, if not in the sense that it’s literally true but from the idea that these families are somewhere within these writers, within their communities, their consciousness. (After all, The Bluest Eye, is set in Toni Morrison’s childhood hometown as it says on the back of the book.) As she says within the first few lines of the book, “Here is the family.” (Morrison, 5) There’s no use in glamorizing something to make any of us feel better. Families aren’t perfect; they aren’t all “optimal.” (Bump, 350) Here they are.

Not all families are like this, but that doesn't mean they're all bad.

http://www.tagnwag.com/forsale/dick_jane_pages/matted/NWLS/013a.jpg

So what about the opening section? I took it to mean that there are all sorts of layers to a family. Each family has the potential to be any variant of these stories. There’s the Dick and Jane variety, perfect, clean and meant to bring up children positively (after all, the books were meant to teach children to read). The next extreme is the space-less, hurried, messy and overwhelming case of a family, without structure, without a true consideration for others. I took one look at that representation of a “family” and decided that I didn’t want to take the time to go through it or pay it any attention. Finally, there’s something in between. Like I said before, any of these forms can become the next. The ingredients are all there to build the “ideal” family, but just as quickly everything can be taken away and the overwhelming blob of a family can take its place. I first took this passage to mean that families are irredeemable, dysfunctional—that no sort of ideal Dick and Jane family exists. But I think there’s more to it. Morrison could’ve shown the two extremes and created a direct contrast, but she did not. She included something in between.

While Morrison’s pictures of family life in Lorain, Ohio are grim, there’s plenty of good, plenty of bad and a lot of in between. There is obvious value placed on the family. When Claudia talks about the fear some people have of being placed “outdoors,” or kicked out, the thought of placing your own kin outside of the house is “criminal.” (Morrison, 17) Similarly, the threats and fighting—while terrible—are largely hollow and probably just serve as a response to their undesirable conditions, not some true hatred of their family members. The book even talks about Mrs. Breedlove’s need for arguing and illustrates an example that shows that it is not so terrible. During a particularly intense fight between Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove—which appears to be a typical occurrence—their son shouts, “Kill him!” after which Mrs. Breedlove yells back, “Cut out that noise, boy!” (Morrison, 44) Of course this is not a desirable family situation, but is not one that is hopeless. I understand that it’s dangerous to take the position that these families are normal or redeemable in this book, especially because we know something terrible that is going to happen, but I think Ms. Morrison wants us to feel the same way. Endearing qualities of Claudia’s mother are found throughout the book—Claudia loving her singing, her mother taking care of her when she’s sick, and feeling genuinely sorry when she misunderstood the girls for helping Pecola outside. Similarly, clues point to the reasons behind the families’ troubles: poverty takes the forefront, certainly, while a general understanding of love and the man’s role (Claudia thinking that a man leaving is a necessary part of the love cycle, for example) differently than what we’re used to allow us to better understand the family dynamics in The Bluest Eye.

While Claudia's mother is not an ideal mother figure, I know she still loves her children.

http://blogs.click.ro/diana_nicolae/files/2009/05/a_mother__s_love_by_prettyfreakjesper.jpg

Black Elk 2

The second half of Black Elk Speaks was shocking to say the least. To be honest I felt a little betrayed by Black Elk. He had set himself up as a redeeming, heroic figure. Much of his language seems Christ-like in fact, such as in this passage: “After this, I went on curing sick people, and I was busy doing this. I was in doubt no longer. I felt like a man, and I could feel the power with me all the time.” (Black Elk, 29) The ending sentences, then, were a total surprise. Black Elk seems to have given up completely. I understand his reasoning, but I don’t necessarily approve of his response. Sure, sometimes reality is tough. Nobody can blame Black Elk for feeling terrible and having difficulty knowing how to respond after seeing the destruction of his people and such harrowing and disturbing images as a, “a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead….” (Black Elk, 34) But from what I had come to believe about Black Elk from the first half or so made me think that he would be able to jump up from this traumatic experience and work to protect his people. After all, isn’t that what his visions had been telling him to do all along? I felt that his final sentences, his lifelong reaction to the events that he had witnessed, were complete and total contradictions to all that he had said before. Is this a powerful message of how devastating trauma can be or just a mistake that should have been corrected?

What Black Elk was forced to experience is terrible.

Black Elk says two things in particular that stuck out to me as direct contradictions to his final reaction. (Again, I don’t think the way he responded was intolerable but perfectly natural under the circumstances. I just think a lesson can be learned from the difference between what he says and how he ultimately acted.) First, he says that, “You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping.” (Black Elk, 25)

This statement reminded me of the Greek drama masks.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsevis/2677658118/

This was a powerful message to me that there are important lessons to learn in suffering and that regardless of our circumstances we always have the potential to laugh or cry. In this way, I think Black Elk should have understood that life can be hard but it can also get better. Instead of committing himself to the idea that his people may be doomed and lost forever, he could have envisioned a brighter future for them and himself, like the many ones we heard about throughout these selections of Black Elk Speaks. Second, Black Elk’s strong statement that “It is from understanding that power comes,” (Black Elk, 29) was a message that I think he forgot to listen to himself. Black Elk could have taken this situation, viewed it in a different, less final and devastating, way and taken a position of power to help his people get back on their feet.

While I feel it may seem harsh to criticize Black Elk’s actions, I still wanted to grab his shoulders after I read the end of this piece and ask him what happened. How any of us would respond to such a difficult situation I don’t really know, but I think if you are willing and so prepared to be a leader like Black Elk presented himself as, you should be able to take action. Throughout his visions, he learned so much about the world and what his people needed. He helped them. He became less afraid of the dangers in his world and was ready to face him. Difficult situations shouldn’t end our sense of leadership but try them and make us stronger as a result. I don’t think that Black Elk was meant to be, “a pitiful old man who has done nothing.” (Black Elk, 35) As we prepare ourselves to be leaders, I think that we should keep in mind the trials leadership brings and develop an indomitable mindset, ready to tackle any task.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD1MNHy2S2M

Black Elk Speaks 1

After all we’ve read about and discussed concerning unity, speciesism, and respect in class, I still felt that the ideas and themes of this selection of Black Elk Speaks were completely unfamiliar, alien almost. It sort of made me sad. The size and scope of Black Elk’s world is at once very contained and epic, contained because each sentence is centered on nature and spirituality and epic because our world is so....real and matter of fact in comparison. There’s really no other way to put it.
Black Elk speaks of a world so centered on dreams and visions that he sometimes has a hard time distinguishing whether his experiences are real or not. I believe that our world has something to learn from this mindset. When I have a dream, I am often cautioned to find a more practical version of it or am told to throw it out entirely. I’ve never understood why we are encouraged to “settle,” especially in a country full of people who came here searching for something better than they had before: shouldn’t we be listening to that cheesy phrase that’s been floating around since we before we can remember—shoot for the moon, and if you don’t make it you’ll land among the stars? (Or something like that...) Black Elk’s world is not like that, at least I don’t think it is. He listens to his dreams so completely that they shape all of his future actions and he holds great stock in their power. While I was reading through Black Elks’ vision (specifically “The Great Vision” chapter), I kept comparing it to the leadership vision we were supposed to have thought about for P4, and I tried to pinpoint a few things that I thought were the essential ingredients for his leadership vision.
1. Outside powers. Black Elk receives the aid of many things throughout his vision which show that he cannot go through with it alone. He has the advice of the Six Grandfathers, for example, and is given the powers associated with the various objects like the bow and arrow. The section in this chapter about the war is a particularly vivid example of the power these objects have on conquering problems. When Black Elk transfigures into rain, for example, he is able to defeat a great force: “it was drouth [sic] that [he] had killed with the powers that the Six Grandfathers gave [him]...” (viii) (I’m assuming that means drought?) I thought the battle section was a little graphic and out of character until I realized what he was vanquishing: drought, a force we are not able to defeat. I think Black Elk’s reliance on these powers can be taken to illustrate the importance of help, in whatever form, when we are trying to lead or tackle problems.

Black Elk was able to use the power of the rain cloud to tackle a great problem: drought.

http://www.treklens.com/gallery/North_America/United_States/photo522650.htm

2. To know his future. Black Elk also is able to gain some perspective in a way that we do not have the privilege to hear by speaking to his future self, the man who as he said he knew, “was myself with all the years that would be mine at last.” (vii) While we are not able to receive advice from our future selves as Black Elk did and learn that everything is going to turn out alright, we can achieve similar results with confidence and a mind centered on our goals and the type of people we want to be. Just as we were given the opportunity to do with our leadership visions, we should constantly be thinking about where we’re going in life (not forgetting to enjoy the present moment too of course!) and look forward to what the future brings. Black Elk was able to achieve his vision through the wisdom of his future self and the knowledge that he was going to become a good person. We can achieve our visions through a similar understanding, with foresight and faith in ourselves.

Ugh I could not find the picture I wanted, but this sort of gets it across. We should keep in mind our "future" self after the actions we take.

http://www.speedysigns.com/images/decals/jpg/H/406/439.jpg

While I thought a lot about speciesism and how different cultures can be as I read through this selection of Black Elk Speaks, what jumped out to me the most was a reminder of our leadership vision. We weren’t able to discover our leadership vision in the same, grand way Black Elk did, but there are still many lessons we can learn from his experience.

P4

**Any suggestions for cutting this monster down a bit would be a big help. Sorry this got so long!

Living in Character

Would you have been surprised if my leadership vision wasn’t about respect for animals? So just a warning, don’t get up out of your chair trying to find that scratchy, familiar sound you hear as you’re reading this. That’s not a broken record...just me. I’ve written a lot about respect for animals, but I’m still not sure what I’m going to do to help. Whether I’m studying them to provide the “evidence” some people need to more easily respect animals or to find ways to help them, working for a non-profit, or trying to effect change through the legal process, I know that there is one thing I will always need: a strong character.

***

When I first decided that I was going to write about character, theater popped into my mind. “No, Katherine,” I kept reminding myself, “Not that kind of character, but character. You know...developing yourself? Becoming the person you think you need to be...? Ring any bells?” But the only bells that were sounding were The Bells of St. Mary’s, and that’s when I realized—acting and finding your character on the stage (or on camera) is exactly like finding it in the real world! It wasn’t until The Crucible that I discovered what acting in character really was. Before that, I just went through the motions—Ok, so Helena is supposed to be love struck (as always) at this point, so I guess I’ll make my voice sound like...this! It got the job done, but it wasn’t what I really wanted. When I played Elizabeth Proctor, however, I really absorbed myself in her story, trying to understand her suffering, the family’s dynamics, her temperament. After I internalized all that and got on stage, I changed my actions to match what she would have done. I began thinking like her. And when I had an audience, Elizabeth came out to an even fuller degree. I had found (somewhat) what it was like to act in character and embody another life so completely. This parallels quite nicely to living life in character. Sure, I can just go through the motions and make decisions from day to day without a real guiding force. But wouldn’t it be better to have a strong character, one which would direct and determine my every action, one which would allow me to live my life in a positive and helpful way? And if I ever have people looking up to me or watching me for guidance—an audience—my character could come out even stronger. Finding this character, wherever she is, is what I need to do to become a leader. I want to be someone that others look toward and respect, someone that people want to impress, and a person who inspires others to action by my example. Unlike acting, however, this character cannot be found on stage or in a script: I need to find the best within myself.

When I acted in character, I was happy when my character was happy and sad when she was sad. (In My Fair Lady)

That cheesiness aside, I’m going to look at some of the other “characters” in my life—my cousin; my godmother, Frannie; and Jane Goodall—as examples that will help shape my character. Like Siddhartha, I’m one of those people who doesn’t like to acknowledge that I can be influenced, but I cannot deny the impact of these (and other) influences that have helped develop my character.

I used to think that rationality and conviction were what created change and made good leaders but looking back on how I handle my cousin—let’s call him the Devil—has shown me that a strong character must be in place before anything else can work. Like David Letterman and Sarah Palin, the Devil and I have never gotten along. It’s quite monumental. I think he’s spoiled, rude, sexist, bossy, demanding...the list unfortunately goes on and on. I feel bad that I think this way, but I just can’t get around it. At the beginning of every few weeks that I’d spend with the Devil at my Aunt’s house near Lake Michigan, I’d try to get along with him. But his treatment of my aunt’s five cats and one very spoiled Labrador was the straw that broke this camel’s back. He tricked them, yelled at them, chased them around her property, and treated them roughly. And I, in turn, got in his face and yelled at him about it: “You can’t do that!” I’d scream. “Don’t you ever treat animals like that again!” It was a routine repeated like clockwork—and almost hourly at that. I thought that if he’d only listen to me, he’d realize what he was doing was wrong and stop. But of course he never did. Who would want to listen to someone screaming in their face? Whether my sister was just trying to have someone to play with over the break or if she was actually giving the Devil a chance, she had the right idea when she treated him like a friend. I should have tried harder to be friends with him, and, if I had, I may have been able to make some changes in the way he thought about animals. The few times I treated him nicely, he became softer and was more likely to listen. After all, I was older, he was an only child and lived in a sparsely populated area of Michigan—he probably just wanted some attention. Looking back on my summer stints with the Devil, I’ve realized that just having strong ideas—and even standing up to them—is not all it takes to lead. I needed to be someone the Devil respected and even looked up to, his friend but also his role model. And he needed to be influenced by my character, not my words.

I thought this approach would work for the Devil: it didn't.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_OQJOqSI4X4c/SoYVACEzUfI/AAAAAAAAKsI/eGP6_gdLcrs/s1600-h/yelling.jpg

As opposed to the Devil, my godmother, Frannie, is a saint. For two lovely weeks every summer, I live in her home in a suburb outside Detroit, acting like a kid with my sister, her son, and her triplet daughters. While I don’t spend very much time with Frannie, I am still able to learn from her positive example and follow her lead. Frannie is incredibly nurturing and sweet and instills in her children a sense of kindness to all people. When I’m around her family, I find myself smiling at everyone and making pleasant conversation with people I don’t know more often—all things that Frannie and her husband, Gary, do with ease. Because I respect Frannie so much, her very example tempers my actions: I could never do or say anything wrong in her presence. Frannie is also a very real person, funny and easy to have a nice conversation with. By the strength of her character, she is able to lead and influence others in a simple and effortless way. As a leader, I need to possess these traits—kindness, respect for others, and approachability—in order to inspire those I am working with and create a positive environment. If I am a person that others can admire or even just enjoy spending time with, then I may be able to influence people’s actions just by my example, as Frannie does for me.

Although I’ve never had the privilege of meeting Jane Goodall, I am still very influenced by her character and her role as a global leader. In many ways I identify with her, and I feel that if I were to lead, it should be like she does. When she first came to Gombe and began working in the field, she did it her way, naming the chimpanzees, acknowledging their personalities and turning the scientific community on its head as a byproduct. She has continued to stand up for herself, her ideals and for others, protecting chimpanzees in the wild, championing their rights in captivity, and promoting peace and conservation through her Roots and Shoots program. She has an incredible inner strength, and the way she sticks to her moral convictions has created a force that would be hard to try to overcome or cross. As a leader I would need to possess the self-assuredness and fighting spirit that Jane Goodall has.

Jane Goodall's strength and perseverance are something to emulate.

http://images.ted.com/images/ted/1433_253x190.jpg

A combination of these traits is how I see myself as a leader for animal protection in the future. Animal ethics is a very hard topic to tackle in that its moral base is not as established as in other issues. For most of the people in the United States, for example, it is perfectly acceptable to wear leather—fashionable even—natural to tuck in your napkin for a big steak dinner (delicious!), and morally obligatory to perform biomedical experiments on the great apes. Many people don’t question their actions toward animals due to Descartes’ lingering assertion that animals are machines or are at least believe they are not as functional as we are. In short, there is a lot that needs to change even in people’s mindsets in order to effect workable and realistic change in the way we treat animals. Leading like Frannie is ideal for gaining people’s support and inspiring them to change, while Jane Goodall’s eternal persistence is essential for fighting an issue that will probably never truly go away. It is through developing this multi-faceted character that I hope to begin making a difference.

***

So what? I know how I want to lead, but what am I actually going to do? What a good question! Can I get back to you? It’s very hard to know how to make “real-world” difference when I haven’t really lived in it all that long, but I think my college years will serve as the formative ones which teach me how to lead, assert myself, and “play nicely with others” in preparation for the rest of my life.

In World Lit I’ve already begun to learn how to lead in ways that are different from what I’ve been used to. In an obvious way, we lead our discussions and through the process learn the importance of listening to other’s opinions and questioning what we are given to study. In class I’ve been exposed to some very controversial issues, ones which are hard to handle and have been inspired to take personal action and tell others outside of the class what I have seen and what should be done. In this way I have been encouraged to question the world, learn from my peers, and make tough moral decisions. One way in which the class discourages leadership, however, is the amount of DB’s. I don’t think I’m revealing any class secrets when I say we’ve become lazy trying to finish twice weekly DB’s, and as a result we suffer by a community which is unlikely to take our work to the next level and challenge ourselves.

That being said, let me take this opportunity to challenge myself over the next four (or maybe five) years with a list of manageable college goals.

1. Become involved with the CEC (Campus Environmental Center). In trying to protect animals, I think it is also very important to help the environment which is not only our habitat but everyone else’s. Maysie sent me a link to apply for a CEC officer position which I definitely think would be valuable to complete. The organization has so many things to become involved in: I am particularly interested in the Gardening, Students for a Sustainable Campus, Outreach and Recycling committees. Now that the Green Fund has passed, I can also get involved in environmental projects.
2. Volunteer at an animal shelter. Now that the Plan II Perspectives class and my BDP seminar are over for the semester, my Wednesdays are much more open than they were before. I think I should take that time to begin volunteering, which will enable me to work with animals and build relationships with people who work for them. (Plus it would also be a lot of fun!)
3. Get an internship at a non-profit organization. The BDP program requires that I have a “connecting experience” (either an internship or research), but I believe this is an essential experience regardless. Working at a non-profit for animals would allow me to learn how the organizations are run and what a career working for one would involve.
4. Join P2SA and work to create animal-related service opportunities. I hope to run for a P2SA position this spring (with Alice, actually), and I hope that I would be able to use my influence there to create and run animal-related programs for the Plan II community. Perhaps I could organize a trip to a shelter, start a can drive, or even get a showing of Earthlings or a similar movie in the Joynes Reading Room!
5. Research primates with a professor. I spoke to a professor last semester about studying some of her primates, and she said that if I took her methods class in the fall I would be able to study them. While I wouldn’t want to do lab research in the future, this would enable me to actually study primates and see what life as a researcher entails.
6. Work on building my relationships with others. This final goal is at times the hardest but is the most necessary. While I can be shy, college has really opened me up to other people. As a leader it is so important to be able to speak to and work well with others.

I don't know yet what's in store after graduation, but I hope I will be able to use what I've learned in college to make a difference.

http://etribute.lib.utexas.edu/media/ut/images/large/hook%27em-graduation.jpg

Once I graduate, I may still be at a complete loss as to what I concretely want to do. That’s the scary part! But what’s exciting is what I may be able to do with myself. So, in the spirit of those lists we made when we were kids that had those cute and crazy aspirations, I can make some stretch goals to look toward in the coming years which will help guide my future actions. I hope to...

1. Help pass a bill in Congress supporting animal rights.

2. Become a major executive at a non-profit. (Or maybe even start one!)

3. Hold hands with one of the residents at a chimpanzee orphanage in Africa.

4. Fight a case about animal rights to the Supreme Court—and win!

5. And shake Jane Goodall’s hand (just for fun!)

My goodness what a mouthful! (I cut this down from over 2,500 words!) Obviously, there’s a lot to be said about leadership and the role it will play in my future. All I know is that it will take a life lived in character—a character poised to protect animals, happy to lead and deal with others, and ready to take on any task.

Word count: 2,435