Ishmael Reed. See him read
here. Check out an animation of his work
here.
Lucille Clifton's Poets.org page is available
here. She passed away last month and her obituary can be found
here. See a video of her reading
here. See her reading "homage to my hips"
here.
Check out Amiri Baraka's homepage
here. Read about his play "Dutchman"
here. See him read on Def Jam Poetry
here. Also check out an amazing exhibit on Amiri Baraka in LA
here. It's also worth seeing him work with the Urban Music Coalition
here.
Clifton's "miss rosie" paints the image of the fallen world; a fallen world where the day has not been seized. As she ages, "the rose", an old symbol of love and beauty, withers and becomes like a pile of garbage--worthless in the eyes of those around her. In "Homage to My Hips", she further discusses the sexually enthralling powers of the young woman. Her voluptuous hips have never been enslaved, but they have cast a spell over men. As it is historically, the power to "spin...like a top" is a masculine trait: the Jewish "spinner" woman--the perfect size to spin on your lap. Though the women of this age are empowered by their sexuality, as the selectivity of mating has been the woman's choice, they are still bound by the cruel fate of lost looks.
ReplyDeleteI found Amiri Baraka's "An Agony, As Now" really interesting. The first stanza is easy to identify with. Baraka is able to put the reader into the poem without really making it uncomfortable to read. We could all identify with "I am inside someone who hates me." Regardless of the circumstances, it is human nature to wonder about what it is like to be someone else. To think how they think.
ReplyDeleteAfter the first stanza interpretation gets a little messy. The way I read it is that the speaker gets trapped while trying to understand the world. The poem goes through several ways in which one could be trapped, through pain, flesh, beauty, etc. It ends saying that whatever it is, "it has no feeling." "And that thing screams." To me, Baraka is saying that we shouldn't waste our lives trying to understand other people, or the way that they think. It only causes us to suffer or get caught in unhealthy obsessions, and we are trapped by this idea.
Of the two selections assigned for Monday, I found the excerpt from Julia Alvarez's Yo! The Mother to be particularly intriguing. In it, there are elements of motherhood that have not been introduced into the course until now. The mother uses lies,God,myth and fear to produce results in her warring children. Her actions are driven by fear. Even when she is trying to prove to her children that it is only her inside that massive mink coat, she seems afraid that her daughters don't have the sense to understand, "After a few times, what I was really trying to do was see if my girls had any sense at all. I thought for sure they would catch on" (3110).
ReplyDeleteWhen her family is in America and they no longer have the legions of intermediaries to change "You bitch" into "Pass the mango dish, please." The mother shows just how overwhelmed she is by locking her children into closets- there are no maids to care for them now and less space to avoid this "nuclear family"
Another aspect I found intriguing and a bit confusing at first was the shortening of Yolanda's name. Yo is, as I am sure most everyone is aware, the Spanish pronoun for "I." Consider this sentence with that in mind "And this was true for Yo and me" (3109). I believe that Alvarez did this very consciously especially as the two are set against each other. The mother in constant fear of what the daughter will say, and the daughter saying what she is afraid of. The mother, instead of being able to communicate how she feels in precise language must resort to "the howling of the bear [she] used to impersonate" (3116). On the other hand, her daughter is able to tell stories about "kids locked in closets and their mouths burned with lye. Bears mauling little children" (3115). In Yolanda's world, it is her mother that is the dictator, the one enforcing this "torture." So, she tells of them- her form of escaper where her mother's was to run away.
Also, when Laura says "Who knows where Yo got the need to invent?" she is ignoring that Yo inherited it from her mother. Who was it that wanted to invent a bear to drop off gifts instead of Santa Claus? Who relied on her daughter's fears of El cuco? Who called upon Yo's belief in God and adherence to the ten commandments to demand truth? Who was inventing a few of her own tortures to describe to the social worker? All of these stories tie directly back to Laura who is telling her stories because of her fears. This is what Yolanda does, she tells stories of her fears (much of which have to do with her mother) where the only difference is that she is telling them in a language her mother cannot speak well. An outlet of expression denied Laura. In this need to tell stories to escape fear, Laura and Yolanda are one- both the "me" and the "I."
ReplyDeleteWhat stood out to me most on every page of the Alvarez reading was Alvarez's ability to quickly and compellingly create a situation of complexity and ambivalence. In the biographical introduction, it is noted that Alvarez had to accept and explore double identities due to her dislocated Dominican background and her difficulty gaining acceptance as an American. As this same introduction alludes to, we see the murky complexity of identity faced during Alvarez's upbringing in her characters. She uses "heteroglossia," which after I looked it up in the dictionary, discovered it meant conflicting discourses within a single text. She also creates a "carnival of language and language's many contexts," which is mentioned in the above blog's regarding Alvarez's playful usage of the nickname "Yo," standing as both a nickname and a metaphorical expression of identity (meaning "I" in Spanish). What I found most ambivalent and refreshing in these few pages of "The Mother" was my inability to assess the mother's parenting skills. Despite a horrendous approach to parenting--locking kids in closets, popping valiums, coercing the kids into behaving through fear--I could not view the mother as simply bad. I sensed that her actions were the product of desperation caused by the tumultuous political situation of Trujillo's dictatorship. That under normal circumstances, the mother would not use such extreme measures to control her children, but because the threat of death loomed over her daily, she had to resort to desperate measures to keep the kids in line--a form of tough love. I also sensed that my cultural frame of reference did not qualify me to evaluate her parenting skills. She makes clear in her narration that the "nuclear family" I grew up in is drastically different than the "clan" of cousins, aunts, nannies, in-laws, parents and grandparents who all took a shared role in raising children. Despite my sympathies for the mother, I don't think we can view the assessment written on the social worker's page ("family bonds strong/mother devoted") as entirely accurate. Were I the social worker (with access to a Norton anthology), I would have appreciated the traumatic circumstances facing the family but also noted the oppressive parenting style employed by the mother, regardless of her best intentions. In a time where most complex situations are treated in the news with 30 second black or white assessments, I enjoy Alvarez's depiction of the complexity underlying most every day situations.
ReplyDeleteSo, I'm not sure if we are supposed to continue posting here for the readings for Monday... But, here goes nothing. Louise Elderich's "Fleur" was particularly fascinating for me. The elements of a "shadow girl" acting as a narrator, silently watching the events unfold while being oddly passive except for a single explosive act: that of locking the men within the locker. But even in that act, the narrator remains fairly passive, unseen and unnoticed by all- most especially the men whose deaths are a result of that act.
ReplyDeleteThis short story reminded me of A Streetcar Named Desire, at least in the sense of violent men and card games. Fleur enters this masculine world, crosses those drawn boundaries and not only plays smart but wins. Consistently. Game in, and game out. I'm sure almost everyone has heard the saying "Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off." And it's odd, that although men generally resort to calling women liars, that the one trick that the card players never suspected Fleur of doing was being a good liar. They try to defeat her when she refuses to be beaten, they rape her. But, even then, she is not defeated. She lives, while they die. A frozen, watery, stormy death.
I have to agree with Whitney on the "Fleur" story. The narrator seems so passive, every actions are passive etc, however, I interpret the act of the narrator locking the men in the locker as a strong feminist action: She is passive, however she does something very strong as she takes the men's LIBERTY away; something that men traditionaly took from women really when they got married. I did not think of A Streetcar Named Desire while reading it though, but now that I'm reading Whitney's comment, it definitly makes sense...
ReplyDeleteHowever, I prefered "Do not Go Gentle".. which unfortunately we didn't get to comment on! NOooo!...
Benjamin Bertrand