Hello Melanie

Although you probably know this already, my first blog posts are actually at the bottom of the blog, although there is little connection between the different posts, with the exception of my series on The Qur'an. 

You'll probably chuckle or roll your eyes at my initial posts, which will reveal that I had hoped to share this blog with you much sooner, but I let it get away from me. 

Here is an outline of the posts, in order, from the bottom: 1) The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2) The Odyssey, 3) The Book of Genesis, 4) The Qur'an (in three posts), 5) Things Fall Apart, 6) Strange Pilgrims - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 7) Transfer - Naomi Shihab Nye.

Transfer

Reflections on Transfer by Naomi Shihab Nye

I. Summary

This recent collection of poems is intended to be a sort of dialogue between Aziz Shihab, Nye’s dead father, and Naomi, so she herself says. The book is split into five sections, some of which are spoken by Nye herself, or her poetic voice, and others by the voice of her father, although all the poems are written by her.

The first section is a sort of exposition, a scene setting in which Nye’s voice establishes what I can only describe as a tonal context for the poems to come. The first poem, “History,” begins and ends with a scope as wide as the universe and our planet. The final poem of the section, “Storyteller,” evokes the distance and catharsis of storytelling, establishing the coming poems as a both a telling in itself and a telling about a teller.

The second section is entitled “Just Call Me Aziz” and is a compilation of 11 poems Nye wrote in the voice of her father. The poems, in a less than narrative way, tell of Aziz’s experience of leaving Palestine and becoming a refugee in the American Midwest. To offer a sample of this section, “My Life Before America Had No Toilet Tissue” presents the struggle for identity in the process of transplantation, and “We Did Not Have Drinking Water in the Middle of the Ocean” approaches the American dream from a refuge’s perspective.

Nye’s voice returns in Section III and carries through the end, through Sections IV and V. These poems are Nye’s part of the dialog that her father’s voice initiates in the previous section. As the sections progress, the poems seem to move farther and farther away from the international controversy that surrounded her father’s life, though it is never lost. As poems pass, the reader realizes that “Transfer” is about the loss of the father, and whatever political or cultural message infiltrates the collection is in connection with her father’s life and identity as a refugee.

II. Response

When I began reading Transfer, I expected the work to be much more political and much more ethnic. This was in part due to my unfamiliarity with Nye. I did not expect to find an intimate, reflective journey of memory, an almost whispered dialog between the author and the memory of her dead father. Because of this, the segments and poems I latched onto the most, the ones I felt that I understood the most, were those that addressed a postcolonial existence. I targeted these poems with a postcolonial reading, imposed that upon them. What I found were poems that didn’t care about my reading, poems that had nothing to do with a worldview beyond what the speaker experienced. Because I am reading this collection as part of a study of world literature, I felt obligated to search out as much political and cultural significance as I could, but upon a second reading, I think I would get more from focusing on how the speaker’s dialog with her father evolves across sections. Once I became more familiar with that aspect of the story, I suspect more of the history would be more meaningful  

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Transfer is the only collection of poems that I have read as part of this study, and consequently, it would seem that I have nothing with which to compare this work. One way to solve this problem would be to do research on other Palestinian-American and Iraqi-American poets and study how their works treat the same subjects and themes as Nye’s work. More generally, I could place Nye’s work in the context of any large-scale religious or political strife that has been expressed in literature. This would seem less appropriate, as Transfer offers a perspective on the Israel/Palestine conflict and American occupation in Iraq that would be opportune for teaching “literature of current events.” In other words, Transfer would be a great resource for teaching how current events become literature, and for teaching this collection of poems in contrast with the variety of other media – articles, newscasts, blogs – that address the same issues.

Transfer belongs in American literature. Transfer is the work of a woman whose father was a Palestinian refugee, whose mother was an American, who was born in St. Louis, and whose name is every bit from the Middle East. She writes entirely in English, and yet her subject matter (in Transfer) spans the cultures of America, Palestine, and Germany. Nye does not simply transfer her voice across cultures, she writes poems about what it means to transfer cultures, asking the questions “What is lost?” “What is gained?” “By whom? for whom?”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short stories were more intimate than Chinua Achebe’s novel, and Nye’s poems become infinitely more intimate than Garcia Marquez’s stories. If The Odyssey had been told in the form of page-length poems written by Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, Homer may have written a collection similar to Nye’s.  

IV. Teaching and Learning

What I would emphasize to my students about Transfer is the focus on Aziz, Nye’s father. From both a literary criticism standpoint and a creative-writing standpoint (although I see them as one in the same), I want students to understand that these poems, as a whole, are about a daughter and her father, just as Things Fall Apart is about a man, and The Odyssey is about a father and a son (and maybe a wife/mother), and The Epic of Gilgamesh is about two men that are closer than brothers. There are stories in Genesis that seem to be more about man and wife, or father and son, than they are about God. Even in The Qur’an, the most distant of the works I’ve read, contains passages recounting intimate stories between man and his God.

I would want to teach these poems after students are familiar with the postcolonial lens, perhaps after a Things Fall Apart unit. After students have had plenty of practice with postcolonial analysis, I would give them Transfer and challenge them to use the tools they learned how to use. I predict students would latch onto a small number of poems that do provide a fertile arena for those tools, poems like “Fifty Years Since I Prayed or Thought in Arabic” and  “Member of the Tribe” early on in the book. But as students progressed, they would find fewer and fewer poems that allow a strict postcolonial reading, and eventually, poems that refute such a reading. It might seem like I am trying to impose my own preconceptions about the book onto my students, but I do think the book is structured in a way that is more “postcolonial” toward the beginning, and more intimate in the end. One criticism of teaching critical lenses is that it narrows students’ reading, and teaching Transfer as a follow up to the postcolonial lens could show students how to not let themselves be restricted to a certain reading, or even worse, restricted to their own preconceptions of a work. 

Strange Pilgrims

Reflections on Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I. Summary

Strange Pilgrims is a compilation of short stories about Caribbean émigrés in Europe, mostly contained to Barcelona, Spain and Italy, with a few stories taking place elsewhere.  

Below I offer a brief summary of each of the twelve stories, but first, allow me to identify the concatenations that Garcia Marquez delicately weaves throughout the stories. Listed in no particular order, but numbered for the sake of clarity, they are 1) beauty, 2) deception, 3) dreams, 4) Italian singing, and 6) ignominy. These themes peek in and out of different stories with all the playfulness of a rubix cube, sometimes appearing for deliberate manipulation, other times seen merely on the oblique, as if in a passing turn. They appear as themes, as motifs, and as tools throughout the stories, but underneath them each of the characters experiences a greater problem. Reading story after story, all of the characters confront an inescapable loneliness that is the result of obstinate life, life surrounded by death but insistent on living.

More on this in the summaries and following section:

“Bon Voyage, Mr. President”

An overthrown Caribbean president lives in poverty in Geneva, where he discovers he needs a surgery to continue living. A couple from his home country befriends him and helps him to pay for his surgery, despite their original intention to con him out of his money. After the couple nurses him back to health, he leaves Geneva, and writes back that he decides he will attempt to regain his presidency, but only after leaving the couple and their family more impoverished than they had been before. The story is really about Làzara, the wife, and how she is deceived by the president. 

“The Saint”

Margarito Duarte carries his dead daughter around the Vatican in a cello-sized display case. Not only has she not decomposed, but she looks alive and has become weightless. Told from the perspective of a film student in Italy who befriends Margarito, this story intersperses youthful Italian gallivanting with Margarito’s failure to canonize his daughter. Only in the final few paragraphs do you realize the story is more about the narrator’s perspective than Margarit’s struggle.

“Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane”

A tragically comic story about a beautiful woman who manages to sleep through a twelve hour plane ride from Paris to New York and the twisted man who spends all twelve hours contemplating her. Would be good for teaching a gender lens.

“I Sell My Dreams”

When a flood in Cuba crushes a woman wearing a distinctive ring, the narrator reminisces about a woman he knew who made a living interpreting her own dreams.

“’I Only Came to Use the Phone”

The first genuinely disturbing story. Marìa’s car breaks down, and the only ride she manages to hitch is to an insane asylum, where she is forced to stay for months, not allowed to use the phone to call her husband, Saturno the Magician, who in the meantime assumes his wife has run away with another man.

“The Ghosts of August”

Who believes in ghosts? A family inadvertently spends the night at a castle in Arezzo, Italy, a castle supposedly haunted by the troubled spirit of Ludovico, a crazed genius who stabbed his wife and had his own hunting dogs kill him. Awakened by the bright light of the rising sun, the narrator is about to dismiss his worries about Ludovico’s ghost, when he realizes he and his wife are lying in bed on the third floor of the castle. They went to bed on the first…

“Maria dos Prazeres”

Maria dos Prazeres is a well-to-do but now elderly prostitute who thinks she is about to die, and so she buys a plot in one of the most noble graveyards in Barcelona and then trains her dog to cry at her grave. Time passes, and Maria lives on, well beyond when she thought she would surely be dead. One day, returning from her grave, she and her dog, Noi, are trapped in the rained and driven home by a young man, who asks if he may come up to her room afterwards. Honestly, I am not entirely sure how to interpret the ending of this story, but my impression is that the story ends with her experiencing the ecstasy of anticipating this new, young lover. If my interpretation is accurate, then the ending is an exemplary scene of an obstinate life hanging on despite the certainty of death.

“Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen”

Tells the story of an elderly woman who travels from the Caribbean to Rome to gain an audience with the Pope. The story is not about that audience, but rather about her harsh exposure to post-war (WWII) Italy. The title comes from seventeen Englishmen who are poisoned from eating oyster soup in the dining of the hotel in which the woman almost stays.

“Tramontana”

“Tramontana” is a haunting story. The title refers to a powerful land wind that rages through Barcelona and nearby towns for three days. Tramontana is so powerful that one cannot walk in the street while it blows, and one would be unwise to leave the house at all. By the end of the story, Tramontana causes two suicides.

“Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness”

Of the twelve stories, this is the only other one that I have difficulty with on a superficial level, along with Maria dos Prazeres. Miss Forbes is a German governess hired to educate two South American children, living in Europe, in the manners of European high society. When the boys discover how hypocritical Miss Forbes truly is, they try to poison her. Miss Forbes dies, but to the boys shock, her dead body is not placidly poisoned in her bead, but on the floor, riddled with 27 mortal stab wounds. 

“Light is Like Water”

A fascinating, almost metafictional story about two boys in Madrid who earn a small boat and diving gear for doing well in school. How do they use their rewards in land-locked Madrid? They flood their apartment with light.

“The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”

Nena Daconte and her husband of three days, Billy Sanchez, drive across the Spanish and French countryside to their honeymoon location in Paris. Nena, however, has cut herself on a rose-thorn, and her finger will not stop bleeding. By the time they get to Paris, she has lost most of her blood, and is admitted to the hospital. Because she must go to intensive care, Billy is turned away until visiting hours the following Tuesday, almost a week later. Billy checks into an apartment and tries to return to the hospital multiple times, but is unable. When next Tuesday comes around, he returns to the hospital, but does not find Nena. Instead, he finds the doctor that admitted her, who reveals that Nena bled to death the previous Thursday and all of Paris has been looking for Billy since then.

II. Response

I thought these stories were brilliantly executed. What Garcia Marquez does so well is he makes the reader realize, early on, that something about the situation in the story is not right. In most cases, however, the reader does not discover what is awry until the very end of the story. The example that sticks out most to me is the second story, “The Saint.” At first, the reader might think the story is about Margarito and his quest to get his daughter canonized, but quickly the focus of the story drifts. The reader asks, “Why have we drifted from Margarito and his daughter?” But at the end of the story, when the narrator says, “Then I had no doubt, if I ever had any at all, that he was Saint Margarito […] he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization” (53), he is merely repeating what the reader already knows. In the narrators last few paragraphs, the reader discovers that the story is more about the narrator and how jaded his worldview has become upon his return to Rome. The real question to ask is, “What has happened to this once blissful film student?”

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Reading through these stories, I was reminded of the Caribbean-American novels I read last Spring for my Caribbean literature course. While Garcia Marquez tells a different sort of emigrant experience, the struggle for identity, for sense-making in a new place, for sacrifice, and for maturity are much the same. They are personal struggles, not the broader societal struggles that Achebe treats in Things Fall Apart. It may seem inappropriate to compare Things Fall Apart to Strange Pilgrims, but I think for the purpose of this study it can be beneficial. Short stories tend to be a more intimate genre compared to the novel. It makes sense that Garcia Marquez’s stories would be more about the characters he follows and their reactions upon being transplanted, and less about the idea of colliding cultures.

Another theme to highlight in these stories in the context of world literature is the role of travel, which in these stories is inherent and often accomplished by the exposition. What does traveling do to these characters? Why are they traveling? A few of them travel for recovery from illness. Others travel for vacation or sightseeing. Still others travel for much more peculiar reasons. But are any of them traveling for battle, like Odysseus or Gilgamesh and Enkidu? How has the notion of travel changed over the years? What historical developments have made this possible? From here, one could also address globalization and the interactions between Caribbean and Latin American countries and other western nations like America and European countries when commercial travel and economic interactions are becoming increasingly international.

IV. Teaching and Learning

I could justify using Strange Pilgrims to meet a variety of educational objectives. The stories could be used to scaffold “theme” across a full-length work of literature. Even though SP is a compilation of short stories, the same themes are blatantly incorporated across stories, if only as reminiscent of previous tales, to remind the reader she is still reading the same book. But simply tracking the different themes and images would be inappropriate. I would have students reflect on how images appear differently across stories, how they change, how they evolve or devolve, increase or decrease in significance. Practicing this with short stories would cater to adolescents relatively short attention spans by allowing them to progress story by story, gaining the reading skills necessary to focus their attention throughout one full-length narrative, like a novel.

The moves Garcia Marquez makes in setting up and telling these stories are so transparent that they would be ideal for teaching students how to write short stories. Specifically, “Light is Like Water” is a playful example of how to establish a metaphor and run with it, carry it to fruition. The narrator in the story even says, “This fabulous adventure was the result of a frivolous remark I made while taking part in a seminar on the poetry of household objects” (158).

I also noticed in the introduction that many of the stories in this collection were originally screenplays, journalistic notes, taped interviews, and other media. Knowing that many of the stories originated in other forms, I would encourage students to pick a story and rewrite it in a different medium.  

Things Fall Apart

Reflections on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I. Summary

“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (3), the opening line of Chinua Achebe’s widely acclaimed and studied novel, establishes a certain status and prestige that the author allows to be picked apart piece by piece, layer by layer, with each chapter.

Things Fall Apart is set and remains almost entirely in the village of Umuofia, an intimate setting for a story that seems to be invaded by the topic of colonization and imperialism. In the first few chapters, Achebe introduces Okonkwo, his father Unoka (a dead failure), and first problem, Ikemefuna. Ikemefuna is a boy from the neighboring village of Mbaino. He is traded to Umuofia in an exchange for peace between the two villages, which are on the brink of war due to a Mbaino man’s murdering a woman of Umuofia. The elders of Umuofia put Ikemefuna in Okonkwo’s charge. Ikemefuna becomes like a son to Okonkwo, but when the elders, after three years, decide that the boy must die, Okonkwo, despite an intimate warning from the elder Ezeudu, joins the party and kills Ikemefuna with his own hands.

 The body of Things Fall Apart exposes the reader to multiple snapshots of life in Umuofia and Okonkwo’s compound. There is the extended episode of Ekwefi, Okonkwo’s wife, and their daughter, Enzinma, the strangest part of which is when Ezinma identifies the location of her iyi-uwa, a stone that her spirit supposedly buried deep in the earth. The medicine man hired to find this stone indeed finds a relic where Ezinma tells him to dig, and there is no logical explanation for the coincidence. While other scenes of Umuofia’s customs and rituals could easily be dismissed as barbaric by the western reader, the episode with Ezinma insists on the legitimacy of the village culture. Like the other events of the story, Achebe lets it speak for itself, offering no explanation, commentary, or judgment.

At the end of Part I, Okonkwo accidentally kills a member of the village when his gun misfires, forcing him to take his family and move to the village of his mother’s family, Mbanta, where they live in exile for seven years. While in exile, Obierika, Okonkwo’s best friend, brings him news that white men have come to the villages and that one village, Abame, has been annihilated (by the white men).

At the beginning of Part III, Okonkwo returns to Umuofia after his seven years in exile, but he returns to a village that has allowed a white, Anglican missionary, Mr. Brown, to infiltrate its land and begin a parish. Each day, it seems, Mr. Brown attracts more and more converts to Christianity, one of whom is Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son. Over time, the growing parish becomes a parish and a government, and the caring, tolerant Mr. Brown is replaced by the orthodox, unyielding Mr. Smith. Through a series of unfortunate events, the masked spirits of Umuofia burn down Mr. Smith’s church, resulting in the imprisonment of Okonkwo and many men of the nine villages of Umuofia.

After the British officials release Okonkwo and the others, Umuofia calls a general meeting to decide whether or not to go to war with the white men, but a British official shows up, demanding the meeting disband. Okonkwo decapitates the messenger with two blows of his machete, and when the village responds with panic instead of unified action, he hangs himself from a tree.

II. Response

This was my third time reading Things Fall Apart. I read and reread it for a class entitled “Writing and Ideology” in the English literature department at the University of Glasgow, and then I read as a student. This time I read as a teacher – or tried to – but informed by the scholarship I practiced at Glasgow.

Even upon my third reading, I found myself looking for some sort of judgment, some explicit bias on Achebe’s part. What I found, yet again, was the reality that Achebe does not present the British arrival in Umuofia as the sole catalyst for Okonkwo’s death and Umuofia’s implied downfall. With each reading I am struck by the speech Uchendu, Okonkwo’s uncle, makes during the feast Okonkwo throws in his last days in Mbanta, in which he says outright, “’I fear for you young people because you do not understand the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice” (167). Throughout the entire story, Okonkwo and others make reference to the lethargy of the younger generations, who ultimately prove themselves unable to maintain the stability of Umuofia’s culture within the increasingly tumultuous “widening gyre” that is their world-view.

This was the first book I studied that demonstrated to be the power of presenting events as they are, and letting the reader pass judgment on them. There is no description for the grotesqueness of the District Commissioner’s final lines, the title of his book, “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger,” but the effect is achieved by the realities Achebe presents in the book, not by some external, irrational appeal to the reader’s emotion. Even that final move is Achebe’s way of balancing the scales. He would be historically inaccurate to present a Nigerian victory over the English, but the title of the commissioner’s book, word for word, forces the reader to reflect on “the tribes of the lower Niger”: Were they primitive? Were they pacified? Things Fall Apart insists on reflection, on looking backward while being inescapably pulled toward the historical conclusion of the story.

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Things Fall Apart is steeped in a great deal of historical controversy that in inextricably linked to the narrative itself. I would be unable to differentiate between formalist close reading and New Historicist cultural criticism when studying TFA on any sort of large scale, like the scale on which it would likely be taught at the high school level, rather generally. The fact that Achebe wrote in English places the book in a precarious place in the context of post-colonial literature and criticism. Does Achebe’s writing in English undermine the anti-imperialist sentiment which is attributed to the story? And one cannot ignore TFA’s historical connection to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Achebe himself says that his novel is a direct response to Conrad’s novel, his way of giving a voice to the savages that are silent at the end of Conrad’s story. But Achebe’s work could hardly be classified as reactionary, and he cannot escape his upbringing, his education in a British school system, and his consequent capability to read and understand Heart of Darkness. Disputes over Achebe’s work walk the line between complicity and rebellion.

Of course, imperialism in British literature does not begin with Africa or India. Centuries before Achebe wrote, Sir Walter Scott wrote Waverley, a novel about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, which in vastly overgeneralized terms was a Scottish uprising against the British. Waverley, and much of Scott’s writing, despite its reverence for tradition, ultimately accepts the reality of change, and, one could argue, supports modernization. Achebe, in the most subtle of ways, is thought to break that model, but that would be a good discussion for students to have.

IV. Teaching and Learning

In Critical Encounters in High School English, Deborah Appleman says, “To broaden their sphere of understanding in addressing social issues, [students need] to think of themselves as public individuals as well [as unique individuals]” (91). Scaffolding that connection to students will be difficult on multiple levels, but I believe that is the fundamental challenge that faces teachers of postcolonial literature, a challenge that is especially difficult in teaching Things Fall Apart in an American classroom because there are no Americans in Achebe’s novel. Step one of teaching TFA would be to include historical and literary scaffolds for communicating why Things Fall Apart is relevant in an American classroom and not a just a British classroom. Poems, for example, that tell of the American imperial experience would be useful. White, upper-middle class students, especially boys and young men, need to see themselves in Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith and the District Commissioner, and they can only see that if they can extrapolate themselves to a collective. The ridiculousness of white guilt is that most of us are not personally responsible for the slavery and oppression that ravages the history of the west. But individual students must recognize that they are part of a culture that has been and still is oppressive of other cultures because knowledge of their complicity alone will help them see beyond that culture.

The complexity that I am struggling with trying to hypothesize how I might teach TFA and the postcolonial lens is one that I think my students would struggle with: the struggle to see themselves and others as cultural groups and to do so by recognizing the dignity and humanity of other cultures, which can only be done through profoundly individual narratives. Things Fall Apart is about Nigeria and the British Empire, but the story comes down to Okonkwo: “This man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself, and how he will be buried like a dog…” (208).

To begin teaching TFA, I would start with a modified transactional reader response, and I would ask students to focus on their expectations of the book and the many different ways the experiences within the book will be different from their own. Then students would identify the textual elements of the book, and I will be very curious to see what they identify, especially on the levels of language and writing. When I first read TFA, I did not pick up on the awkwardness of the language to my American ear. Only upon studying the text and rereading it did I realize the unique rhythms of a writer whose first language was Igbo, not English. After having students think about the context in which they were reading the story, I would turn their attention to the final step, the meaning statement. Rather, I would set up the assignment, graphic organizer, or other vehicle in such a way that students expected to write a meaning statement. But as they went to move on, I would interrupt them: “Woah! Hold up! Why are you writing meaning statements? What makes you think you have the right to write a meaning statement for this story?” Writing a meaning statement would be delayed until the book is finished and would somehow become incorporated into their final project. However, by this point, the focus of students learning would not be on the meaning statement itself, but on why they are allowed and should and need to write one. That will be their justification and their transfer.  

The Qur'an - Post III

Name: Jonathan Tomick

Lesson #, Title: #1, Peace is Possible

Date: Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Grade level and Class title: 11th grade, English III

Period: Any

Epigraph: “In matters of faith, there are no arguments.” – Anonymous

Background and Rationale:

In the United States, less than a month after the school year begins, we reflect on the anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 are a recent and local example of how religious beliefs can be a source of conflict and argument. Belief systems – religious or not – are often a source of conflict in canonical literature. In order to engage with these texts on a deep level via a mature, scholarly conversation, we need to establish a classroom community in which students and teacher feel safe discussing their beliefs and characters’ beliefs without instigating an argument.  Learning to identify beliefs and analyze them to determine common ground between differences is essential to creating this safe classroom community.

Faith serves a specific function in our lives, and religion is one manifestation of faith in our culture, one that has affected almost every author that students will discuss in their language arts and literature classes. The passage we will read from the Qur’an honors the fundamental beliefs of Christianity and Judaism, as well as Islam. Few citizens - of adolescents or adults - realize that all three religions share such commonality: our original motivations for belief are the same. The character Abraham's words articulate the need for reliability in belief. In other words, we believe in what we do because it can never fail us. Even "belief" in something like a football team is predicated by this idea. The Tennessee Titans might not win the Super Bowl, but they will be there to nurture our love of the sport. By coming to this realization about faith and belief through the Qur'an, we as a class confront and overcome one of the most prevalent prejudices in contemporary America, and prepare the classroom community for similar, necesary discussions of how religious beliefs operate in historical texts and contemporary texts addressing our increasingly globalized world.

Textual Support: from Teaching Literature:

"An important basis for creating understanding of a text involves a link to personal beliefs. Of necessity, interpretations must be rooted in a larger understanding of the world and its possibilities. One way to prepare students to interpret texts, then, is to ask them to identify their beliefs about the world in which they live" (121).

Instructional Context:

            “Peace is Possible” is the introductory lesson in a short series of lessons in which students will learn a framework for identifying beliefs of characters and persons, as well as learn how to discuss the sensitive issue of personal, religious, political, and other beliefs without offending their fellow classmates or the teacher. This lesson would be taught around September 11th, after some time has been spent building an emotionally and physically safe classroom, and would serve as preparation for discussing the complex characters found in the canon.

            The course of questioning students will learn in this lesson will be applied to multiple works of literature later in the year. The graphic organizer students will receive with this lesson will serve as a template for later, text-specific graphic organizers. Also, if any issues or difficulties arise during discussions of texts or current issues, this lesson will serve as a model for how students should act when dealing with sensitive topics.

Standards:

3003.8.15 – Analyze texts to identify the author’s attitudes, viewpoints, and beliefs and to critique how these relate to the larger historical, social, and cultural context of the text.

3003.8.13 – Identify, analyze, and explain the multiple levels of theme(s) within a complex literary text and of similar or contrasting themes across two or more texts.

3003.7.2 – Examine the agreements and conflicts between the visual (e.g. media image, painting, film, graphic arts) and the verbal.

Learning Objectives:

Students reflect on their own beliefs and create a physical representation of one belief.

Students collaborate with peers to construct a visual representation of their group’s belief.

Students analyze texts to identify a character’s belief and the motivation for that character’s belief.

Students learn to make inferences about characters’ beliefs and their own based on concrete observations and events.

Students distinguish between the academic terms “discussion” and “argument.”

Students articulate their own beliefs and a character’s belief within a cultural context.

Academic Language:

Discussion/Discuss

Argument/Argue

Belief

Analysis/Analyze

the Qur’an

Islam

Christianity

Judaism

9/11 (as terrifying a thought as it that in a few years we’re going to have to explain this)

Formative Assessment:

- Completion of an analytical graphic organizer comparing and contrasting students' personal beliefs with those of Helena and Abraham.

- One student-composed paragraph (7-10 sentences) in which students articulate one personal belief in relation to their culture - current events, everyday activities, or previous experience. The belief discussed does not have to be religious.

Summative Assessment:

- Completed "Combining Voices" activity.

- One student-composed paragraph (7-10 sentences) in which students articulate one personal belief in relation to their culture - current events, everyday activities, or previous experience. The belief discussed does not have to be religious.

Learning Activities:

1. Combining voices (2+5+5 = 12 min.)

2. "This I Believe: Peace is Possible" (2 min.)

3. "Peace is Possible" think-aloud with graphic organizer (5 min.)

4. Discussion of lesson epigraph, "In matters of faith, there are no arguments." - Anonymous

How does this quote apply to Helena's essay? Based on Helena's words, what do you think the difference is between an argument and a discussion? How does this apply to the "Combining Voices activity? (5 min.)

5. Reading and individual analysis of Qur'an with graphic organizer (6 min.)

We will finish this in class tomorrow

Total time: 30 min.

6. Homework assignment: Take the image you drew for the first part of combining voices, and, based on what you drew, fill in the column of the graphic organizer labeled "What I Believe." Tomorrow, along with finishing our discussion of the Qur'an, we will finish the graphic organizer by looking at our group drawings.

Student Supports:

            Belief is an abstract concept. The purpose of using a graphic organizer is for students to see how concrete images and events - things that can be written about and observed - articulate and influence beliefs. When listening to “Peace is Possible,” I will provide students with a hard-copy of the text so that they might physically identify specific words, phrases, and sentences that stand out to them. I will ask them to identify items that they think are related to Helena’s belief while we listen, and then construct her belief from the bottom, up. The alternative would be to tell students what Helena believes, and then have them identify what items in the passage prove that, which would put extra pressure on students to identify the “correct” answer.

            Students might be uncomfortable sharing their beliefs or engaging with the idea on a deep and serious level. If a student is uncomfortable sharing their belief, they won’t have to , but they will need to draw it as part of Combining Voices so that they can make their thinking visible and tangible. My ultimate goal is to get students to engage collaboratively with each other, but that starts with the individual. I have no qualms with a student opting out of the collaboration for now, as long as he or she completes the individual work. With high school students, I may have to provide a more concrete definition of belief, or otherwise have students spend more time defining belief. If I felt it was necessary, I would have students do a brainstorming session on their definition of belief, or their thoughts and feelings on belief, perhaps doing a Taba lesson on categorizing different kinds and facets of belief.

            Combining Voices allows students to be as expressive as they can be or choose to be, theoretically making it accessible to all students. Including the work of special needs students would only contribute to the goal of creating a collaborative classroom environment. Individuals of unfamiliar or stigmatized religious, political, or sexual affiliation may need to be directly addressed. If I had such students, I would discuss this lesson with them ahead of time in order to determine what they are and are not comfortable discussing in class. Depending on the individual students, it might be beneficial to have them help me teach the lesson.

Materials:

Handouts of Qur’an reading (x20)

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/88540/

Handouts of This I Believe excerpt (x20)

Computer connected to speakers and projector

Standard printer/copier paper (x20)

Markers (x20)

Big paper (x5)

Graphic organizer (x20)

Digital copy of graphic organizer (for projection)

Student writing utensils, notebook, and other regular class materials

Timer

Detailed Learning Plan:

1. Intro/Combining Voices, pt. I - Throughout the year we are going to be reading and discussing many texts, and in that process we will encounter characters that hold many different beliefs. When you think of beliefs, what do you think of? Religious beliefs? Personal beliefs? Belief in an idea? These are all different types of beliefs. But before we go any further, we need to find out what you believe! Take a piece of blank paper and a marker from the center of your table, and draw something you believe. No words please, just images. Your drawing can be a static image, or a depiction of an event. Don’t think too hard, we’re only going to take a few minutes for this part. Start drawing the first thing that comes to mind.

2.  Combining Voices, pt. II - Now, while you were drawing, I handed each of your tables a sheet of big paper/Pick one person from your table to come up and get a sheet of big paper. Now, each table, each group, is going to take all the individual images you drew, and combine them into one image somehow. Pick one artists for your table, but work together to figure out how to combine all of your images into one, group belief. Again, artistic ability is not so important. Work quickly! Spend one minute per group unpacking each group’s image.

3. “This I Believe: Peace is Possible” - Great! Let’s hang those up on the wall. We’ll come back to them later, I promise. Take out your graphic organizer, this sheet of paper that looks like a grid of sorts, and the handout with the longer text on it. This one. We’re going to listen to an excerpt from an NPR program called “This I Believe.” This particular essay is one woman’s reflection on a vigil held for the victims of September 11th. She is a Bahai woman. Do we have any Bahai in here? We can talk about Bahai itself in more detail later. Right now, that’s not our biggest concern. When we listen and follow along with Helena’s essay, think about what she believes. Underline words, phrases, or sentences that you think are relevant to Helena’s belief. Listen and underline first, then we’ll fill out the graphic organizer later. Play 1.31 minute clip of Helena’s essay.

4. Peace is Possible think-aloud with graphic organizer. Now, let’s turn to our graphic organizer. You have the text in front of you for reference. We have our character, Helena. What are some of the images she shows us? Smoke. World Trade Center towers. Unity. Mosque. Great! What are the events she describes in this passage? The attacks. Praying together. The woman shouting “We have a Bahai here, too!” Good eyes and good thinking! Now, someone give me one sentence - either from the text or in your own words - of what Helena believes. “Peace is possible.” “It is up to the individual to start striving for a better world.” People of all different religious can pray together. These are all valid answers. Look at the last column of your graphic organizer, “Relation to Images and Events.” Ask yourself, “How did these images and events lead to Helena’s belief that she shows us here in her essay? How do they provide a backdrop? How does she make sense of those images based on her belief?” Just write one or two sentences. Pause for writing. Would anyone like to share what they wrote?

5. Lesson epigraph. We’ve done a lot of great thinking. Now let’s have a brief discussion. We have this quote on the board, “In matters of faith there are no arguments” by Anonymous. How might this quote apply to Helena’s essay? Field answers. How does this apply to our combining voices activity? Field answers. How could this apply to our classroom community? Field answers.

6. Reading and individual analysis of Qur’an excerpt. Let’s look back at our graphic organizers . You should have another sheet of paper with a shorter excerpt from the Qur’an. As many of you know, the Qur’an is the holy book of Islam, but this passage speaks of Abraham, a man whom Christians, Muslims, and Jews see as an important figure of their faith. This passage is a little more tricky than Helena’s essay, but we’re going to apply the same kind of questioning. Individually, read silently over the passage, and fill out the row on your graphic organizer entitled “Abraham.”

What are you wondering about this section of the assignment, or about what we’ve done in class so far?

7. Homework: If you haven’t finished analyzing the Qur’an passage, we will take a few more minutes to finish tomorrow in class. Your homework assignment is to take your individual drawing, the first one you did today, and use it to fill in the graphic organizer row label “You.” Fill in your name, look at your image, and follow the same line of questioning that we did in class, from left to right, working toward the final questions, “What does this image say about what I believe? Why do I believe in what this image represents?” Tomorrow, in class, we will complete the graphic organizer by looking at your group’s drawing, and then we’ll move on to some composing!

What are you wondering about your homework assignment?

Reflection:

            The class seemed to take readily to drawing. What I could have been more explicit and transparent about was the move to combining images into one group image. Artistically, students got it, which is all they need to do - produce the image for us to talk about later in the class. But I wonder how I could guide their combining, structure it more, to make it more purposeful from the beginning. I don’t have an answer to this question now, but I know I could do some sharpening there, giving students more purpose early on in the lesson.

            I did nothing to draw out quiet students, and while I might be able to rationalize that fact by saying I was already treading on eggshells of belief, I won’t. I did not engage Yumeng at all during the lesson. In fact, I even saw in the video (and cringed as I saw it coming) that I ended an activity saying “It looks like everyone is just about done” when Yumeng was clearly still writing. I don’t know if Yumeng and others’ reticence was based on communication skill of on differences in belief, but as far as I’m concerned, if I don’t do even more careful planning on how to bring those voices into the lesson, than I am a failure. I thought that by carefully constructing classroom activities I could scaffold into such openness. I need to do more of what I discuss in my lesson analysis, and that is engage students more directly when unpacking Combining Voices and thinking aloud with “Peace is Possible.” I could do more direct instructing to draw students voices into the air.

Texts:

“This I Believe: Peace is Possible” (excerpt) - Helena Marie Carnes-Jeffries

"On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I turned on the television to check the weather. I had just woken up. On every station I saw smoke billowing up from the World Trade Center towers. I reached for the phone to call my mother but could not get through. So I sat and watched the horror unfold on my TV screen, like something out of a freakish nightmare.

A few days later, my brother invited me to a small peace vigil at a mosque on the northwest side of Chicago. Muslims were suffering a great deal of backlash after 9/11. There we were, standing outside the mosque, praying together. I whipped out my Bahai prayer book and was about to say a prayer for unity when the main speaker announced, “Here with us today we have Christians, Jews and Muslims.”

A Muslim woman standing next to me noticed the Bahai Greatest Name on my prayer book and called out, “She’s a Bahai! We have a Bahai here, too!” And so there we stood in unity, people from different major religions praying together.

I believe that peace is possible – between individuals as well as nations. Although the world seems like it’s falling apart around us, my faith tells me that this is just the beginning, that the human race is in its adolescence and coming of age. It is up to the individual to start striving for a better world today."

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/88540/

Excerpt from the Qur’an:

“When the night grew dark over [Abraham] he saw a star and said, ‘This is my Lord,’ but when it set, he said ‘I do not like things that set.’ And when he saw the moon rising he said, ‘This  is my Lord,’ but when it too set, he said, ‘If my Lord does not guide me, I shall be one of those who go astray.’ Then he saw the sun rising and cried, ‘This is my Lord! This is greater.’ But when the sun set, he said, ‘My people, I disown all that you worship beside God. I have turned my face as a true believer toward Him who created the heavens and the earth’” (Haleem, p. 85).

The Qur'an - Post II

A. Jonathan to Nate:

Good afternoon Nate,

I am doing an independent study with Melanie this semester to fill a content gap in world literature. In order to make this study more applicable, I am planning on doing my mini-lesson on religious belief - why we believe in what we do, how do those beliefs conflict, where is the common ground, etc. My texts would be the Book of Genesis, the Qur'an, The Odyssey, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. 

I will have a more concrete plan hammered out by the end of the weekend. 

Thank you!

A2. Nate to Jonathan:

Thanks for getting with me, Jonathan. A few initial thoughts: remember that this lesson is 30 minutes long. That's not a lot of time, and you've got an ambitious lineup of texts. Also, consider your audience for the lesson. Is the kind of lesson you could/would want to teach at a public high school or middle school? Could you teach it in one of your placements? What kinds of things would you need to consider in teaching this kind of lesson in an English class in public schools? All of this is not to say that you can't do or shouldn't do it, but you've got to think practically about the standards and objectives for the course you're teaching (and these standards also need to link up to state and national standards). Maybe the thing to do would be to narrow your focus. You could move away from whole belief systems and discuss, instead, language in these texts.

Get back with me when you've worked on it some and let me know where your lesson is heading. The main thing for you to do is be cautious about the amount of time you have and to think seriously about the goal of the lesson within the context of larger curricular goals.

B. Jonathan to Nate:

Hey Nate,

Russel and I are actually meeting as we speak. I've pasted at the bottom of this email a rough outline of what I have of my lesson thus far. Russel has given me some great suggestions about how to make more explicit to my students the purpose of establishing classroom beliefs and the specific community I am trying to create. 

My primary text is the Qur'an. I am currently trying to find a second text to incorporate, and I haven't decided which one or how. I think I am going to have to give up having students start their compositions in class in exchange for engaging with a second text. I could use another passage from GIlgamesh, or Genesis, but Russel mentioned the "This I Believe" series on npr, and I may use a segment from there, or I may find a song to use. 

Thank you in advance for your consulting!

B2. Nate back to Jonathan:

Jonathan, Thanks for getting back to me. Sounds like your collaboration with Russell has been productive. "This I Believe" as a second text is a great idea--it would require students to listen,  and there are so many to choose from.

It's good to be thinking about what you have to give up in order to include elements of the lesson that are required. I know that's uncomfortable, but in lesson planning generally, you will often have to cut things because of time or content constraints that are not of your making.

I think you're moving in a good direction with this. Below are a few thoughts:

1) Think carefully about the word "belief." It looks to me like you're hoping that students will come at "belief" as something deep and identifying for them--such as religious belief. I could see many students, depending on age and maturity, going for something much more shallow or even silly: e.g., "I believe in the Tennessee Vols football team" or "I believe I will rule the world some day." Perhaps you're OK with this element existing as part of the lesson but you should be really careful about designing the lesson in such a way that it elicits the kinds of student thinking that you're hoping for.

2) I'm still concerned about your focus on religious belief systems. This is not to say that I don't think it's worthwhile for students to be open and think seriously about their belief systems, but it's such a personal topic. I could see your principal getting multiple calls if you taught only the Qur'an in a lesson. I believe it is a defensible move on your part, but you have to be able to make the defense and stand up for the curricular connections and the textual choices.

3) Think about our class discussion last week about handling sensitive topics and protecting students in your classroom. What sensitivities do you need to have based on your class? How do you handle introducing the lesson, reading the text, and having discussion? What are you willing to allow in terms of discussion and what are you not willing to allow? How would this lesson work with a class of all suburban, white Christian students? How would it work with a majority of Muslim students? How would it work with one Muslim student? What if you knew that student was Muslim but no one else did? What if everyone knew that a particular student was Muslim?

That's what comes to mind at the moment. Let me know what other questions you have (if any) as you're finishing this for Thursday.

Jonathan (now)

Nate was invaluable in helping me to see some of the problems with incorporating The Qur'an into the classroom. He pushed me to consider all the angles, and I got to receive some peer feedback from my classmates. I would love to talk about this more, but right now it's too much to distill into this blog. If you would like to talk through this experience more, I would be happy to do so in person. 

Lesson plan coming in Part III. 

The Qur'an - Post I

Reflections on The Qur’an

First, let me preface by saying that I have not read the entirety of The Qur’an. When I proposed to study The Qur’an as part of this course, I was unsure of how long and dense the text would be. I read about the first hundred pages of the text, after which I decided that I needed to prioritize moving onto other texts above finishing this one task. Additionally, the first hundred or so pages mark the largest single sections of The Qur’an. After “The Heights,” the final section I read, the sections become shorter and shorter, first decreasing to less than ten pages, and then eventually five or fewer pages. The second three-quarters of the text is comprised of these very short passages that address very specific topics. Consequently, I believe that in reading the first seven sections, I have learned enough for the purpose of this survey-type study about the nature of The Qur’an and the context from which it comes.

I. Summary

Providing a summary of The Qur’an as a whole (or a large sub-section of the whole) is difficult because it is not a narrative text, but rather, didactic and informative. The first seven sections are as follows: 1) The Opening, 2) The Cow, 3) The Family of ‘Imran, 4) Women, 5) The Feast, 6) Livestock, 7) The Heights. The translation of the text that I have is an Oxford’s World Classics edition, translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. Haleem provides brief, topical overviews at the beginning of each section that are quite clear and succinct. The following summary will draw from his own introductions, as well as my own highlights from the sections.

“The Opening” consists of a single prayer that is less than a paragraph long, but this prayer has become an obligatory part of daily prayer in Islam. The first lines invoke and praise God with various titles, and one notices that “mercy” is mentioned four times in the first two lines. Throughout the book, I would wager the most common title for God is some variation on “the Lord of Mercy” or “the Giver of Mercy” (3) The second part of the opening is a request for guidance, a plea for guidance to “the straight path” (3). The prayer sets up the text that follows as the instructions, the guidelines of that “straight path.”

“The Cow” is the longest sura, or section, of The Qur’an. Haleem describes the opening of this sura as a direct response to the plea from “The Opening,” and indeed the first half of this sura is devoted to confirming the place of The Qur’an and the believers (Muslims) in the holy tradition established by God that began with Abraham and has succeeded through Israel and Jesus. By acknowledging that tradition, The Qur’an also distinguishes between the People of the Book, or Jews, and Christians. This differentiation serves as a transition into some specific guidelines for believers, such as fasting and praying by facing toward Mecca, “the Sacred Mosque” (21).

The title of the next sura, “The Family of ‘Imran,” is actually a reference to Mary’s father. One topic addressed in this sura is Jesus’ role in Islam. It’s also in this sura that we first see the word “islam” (35), which translates to “devotion to Him alone” (35). The fourth sura, “Women,” is a lengthy articulation of how various property disputes and situations should be handled according to God’s decree, and often deals explicitly with how to treat women and orphans. This will come back in the response section.

“The Feast” begins with a short articulation of various laws regarding food – what believers are and not allowed to eat – and quickly moves into Muslims’ relationship to Jews and Christians. This sura explicitly discusses Jesus and the fact that he is not divine, but merely imbued with God’s holy spirit (but not the Holy Spirit of Christianity). “Livestock” directly addresses early Muslim concerns regarding polytheism. It repeatedly emphasizes through various declarations and allusions the all-powerful nature of God as the Creator of everything in the heavens and on Earth. “The Heights” reiterates the urgency disbelievers should feel to repent and believe, and at the end, the precedent of study, memorization, and recitation of The Qur’an is established as the way of communicating God’s word to the disbelievers.

And so much more, but I was doing my best to be as concise as possible.

II. Response

I mentioned above that The Qur’an is didactic, which contrasts with the other deliberately religious text I have read as part of this study, Genesis. The entirety of the text is direct address, from the angel Gabriel through the Prophet, Muhammad.

Much of the language of the text struck me as combative. The following passage issues a direct challenge to the listener:

If you have doubts about the revelation We have sent down to Our servant, then produce a single sura like it-enlist whatever supporters you have other than God – if you truly [think you can]. If you cannot do this – and you never will – then beware of the Fire prepared for the disbelievers, whose fuel is men and stones. (6).

On one hand, the direct address is almost intimate, an attempt to affect the listener. And in the case of Islam, the listener is not only Muhammad, nor just ancient Muslims who first read his transcription, but all contemporary followers of Islam because the message is directly from God. The stories of the Bible do not work in the same way. Though many of the narratives of the Bible contain didactic messages, they are stories, and stories are less presumptuous. I am not trying to say the messages of the Bible are told better, but they are told differently, and in some ways in a more removed fashion. We say the books of the Bible, especially the Gospels, were inspired by God, and authored by God, but of human translation. The Qur’an is believed to be word-for-word as Gabriel spoke, a direct messenger of God.

One fascinating difficulty in reading The Qur’an as well as Genesis is discovering how texts that are meant to lay out some sort of moral code deal with the ambiguities of human existence. Here is another passage dealing with the cohabitation of men and their wives (notice the possessor and the actor): “Live with [your wives] in accordance with what is fair and kind: if you dislike them, it may well be that you dislike something in which God has put much good” (52). In this passage, The Qur’an acknowledges that what may be uncomfortable or disagreeable to someone may in fact be God’s good will at work. Overall, however, The Qur’an’s treatment of women is difficult to stomach, but with this text, there is always the difficulty of translation. Not only is the language itself a translation, but my reading is also a cultural translation. As I read, I am trying to make sense of the text with cultural biases that an Iranian reader does not have. I would be fascinated to discuss the language of The Qur’an with a Muslim, someone more cultural connected to the nuances inherent in the text.

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

I have discussed some of these questions in the above passage, as part of my response to the text, and for brevity’s sake, I will keep this section short. The Qur’an acknowledges the presence and blessedness of the Jewish Torah and the Christian Gospels, but it explicitly accuses the Jewish people of straying from the covenant of the Torah and denies the idea that Jesus is the son of God. The way the text treats controversy among the different beliefs present in the area makes me realize how culturally and chronologically responsive The Qur’an is. In other words, many of its teachings – like the letters of Paul and others in the New Testament – are reactionary to different practices and beliefs of the particular time and place in which Muhammad lived. I think some research into the relationships between Christians, Jews, and the early Muslims in 6^th and 7^th century Saudi Arabia and the Middle East would reveal some interesting correlation with various teaching found in The Qur’an.

Study of The Qur’an and Islam would undoubtedly be necessary for any classroom reading of contemporary work by Muslim artists dealing with culture in the Middle East. Two books that come to mind as a teacher would be Persepolis and The Kite Runner, maybe A Thousand Splendid Suns. I have not read either of the latter two works, but the environment of contemporary America and the stigma against Islam and The Qur’an needs to be addressed head on in order for students to be truly aware of these works’ place in American literature.

IV. Teaching and Learning

For this section, rather than hypothesizing, I offer the correspondence between Nate (Phillips) and me regarding a lesson I wrote and taught for his class in which I used The Qur’an as a primary text. I will also attach the lesson itself. The process of planning, justifying, teaching, and reflecting on this lesson gave me practical and critical experience with incorporating The Qur’an and presumably other controversial texts in an American classroom.

Because this post and all the posts in this blog are too long, I have decided to include Nate' and my correspondence in a second post, and my lesson plan in a third. There will then be three posts on my dealings with The Qur'an. 

Coming soon:

The Qur'an and Things Fall Apart

Genesis

I. Summary

The Book of Genesis begins with the creation of “the heavens and the earth” (p. 8) and eventually man and woman. Adam and Eve are then cast out of the garden of Eden because they both eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. They give birth to two children, Cain and Abel. Cain murders his brother out of jealously, and God curses Cain and all of his descendants. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve have another child, Seth. Genesis then traces Seth’s genealogy down to Noah, at which point we receive the familiar story of Noah and the great Flood. After surviving the Flood, Noah’s genealogy is traced through his son Shem all the way to Abraham. Before this, in two small paragraphs, the story of the Tower of Babel is relayed, and men and women are scattered to all ends of the earth, speaking in languages unintelligible to each other.

God promises to Abraham that his descendants will be as countless as the stars. Abraham’s wife Sarah (Sarai) gives him a concubine, Hagar, by which to have a child. Thus Ishmael is born. Shortly after Ishmael’s birth, God blesses Sarah to conceive, though she has been barren, and she births their son Isaac, whose line the Covenant of Abraham will follow. Between the birth of Abraham’s sons, God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah because their citizens have been having homosexual “intimacies” (p. 23).

Isaac marries Rebekah, and they have two sons, twins, Esau and Jacob. While Jacob is younger, with the help of his mother he deceives Isaac, and the patriarchy extends through his line, not Esau’s. Jacob marries Leah and Rachel, daughters of Laban, Abraham’s brother’s (Nahor’s) grandson. By Leah, Rachel, and their respective concubines, Jacob has 12 sons and a daughter. The second youngest son, Joseph, is despised by his brothers, and he is sold into slavery in Egypt.

There, in Egypt, Joseph interprets the dream of the pharaoh, predicting seven years of abundance and seven years of famine, at which point the pharaoh makes Joseph the equivalent of second-in-command. When the famine strikes, Jacob, now Israel, sends his sons to Egypt to collect grain for food. Joseph recognizes his family, and eventually reveals himself to them. The family brings Israel and the rest of his family to live in Egypt, where Israel and eventually Joseph die by the end of the book. The book ends with the 11 sons and their families living abundantly in Egypt.

II. Response

Reading Genesis in this context was difficult for me. I tried to read always one step back, and think about the narrative and the devices at work. Still, I could not help but be impressed on a spiritual level. I think the bridge between the two – objectivity and spirituality – is crossed most easily during Abraham’s story. Because even for a non-Hebrew, non-Christian, or non-Muslim, the faith Abraham demonstrates is extraordinary. Now, anyone who claims Abraham as a religious ancestor has millions or billions of others who believe the same as they do. Abraham didn’t. He was truly the first. Though he was a descendent of Noah, someone who was loved by God, after Babel there seems to have been a long-tern rift between God and all people. Abraham is the first of the “chosen people.” His own brother had separate gods. And yet, there seems to be no conflict because of Abraham’s faith. I wonder if there were so many different beliefs back then that Abraham did not stand out for faith in his particular God. But over time and over terrain, others acknowledge the power of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. However, that power is not presented as superior to any other gods, as there are no others in questions. It must not be until Moses and Aaron lead the Hebrews out of Egypt that we see God triumph over the gods of the Egyptians. Moses then receives the Ten Commandments, the first of which is “I am the Lord your God, you shall not have any other gods besides me.”

I was surprised by how much sex is in Genesis. I was even more surprised by how much sex takes place between unmarried men and women, either as concubines or “temple prostitutes.” Women are not given much agency, nor are they shown much respect throughout Genesis. Rebekah helps Jacob to receive his brother’s blessing, but if that is the best moment for women in the book, then the worst must be when Joseph is deceived by his master’s wife in Egypt. The wife of Joseph’s master attempts to seduce him, giving the impression that this woman must have nothing else to do other than offer herself sexually to Joseph. When she doesn’t get her way, she gets him thrown in jail. Men are not the only ones called to faith, and though I understand Genesis is not the only book for Jews and Christians to turn to for an understanding of their faith, it is the first, and there are no empowering female role models. There wouldn’t be, because that wasn’t the culture when the stories were collected (“redacted”), but what would I do if I were a young Christian or Jewish woman?  What more would I get from Genesis other than bear as many children as possible for my husband?

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences.

Compared to The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, the biggest noticeable difference is the scope of time Genesis covers. If read literally, Genesis covers well over 2000 years, if not 3000. Even if the events from the Creation to the Flood are read as mythology, the latter two-thirds of Genesis closely follow four entire generations from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. I suspect the reason for this difference is a difference of intent.

All three books deal with their respective deities and those deities interactions with men and women. But Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and their fellow players simply show how the gods work with and through men. In this respect Genesis sets up a new kind of God, one with an ultimate purpose. While we see through each character – at least through each patriarch – how God’s will is to be fulfilled on earth, we see through the generations – from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph – how a grander “design” is being fulfilled. The life of one man, no matter how long he lives, proves significant only insofar as his life has served to further God’s purpose through his people. However the lives of Odysseus and Telemachus, or Gilgamesh and Enkidu, however didactic or demonstrative they are supposed to be, are limited by their humanity. One might even say in these older “mythologies,” the gods are limited by man. Any greater purpose they might have, either in their construction or in their action, is obscured and lost by a human perspective. In this way, I am beginning to see why the Torah and the Bible, by their narrative construction, may have outlasted the others. Although, by making such a statement I recognize my own potential biases and the line between my new knowledge and remaining ignorance of these texts and their enormous impact.

IV. Teaching and Learning

The Book of Genesis is the first book in this world literature independent study that retains its religious relevance, and concurrently, its potential for controversy. On one hand, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all agree that Genesis is a holy text, and those are the three main belief systems we encounter in the contemporary American classroom – though there are others. However, even though all three religions acknowledge the book, they each have unique, subsequent interpretations. Opening any sacred text to discussion in the classroom is risky business on multiple levels, and I will discuss this more in my reflections on The Qur’an.  First of all, students need proper coaching about being respectful of each other’s viewpoints, and secondly, parents (and consequently, administration) need a rock solid rationale for opening up their families’ sacred text for criticism.

I realize that in a public school setting – even in a private or parochial school setting – I would probably never teach the entire Book of Genesis in a literature class. However, in many cases, even students who seem to be devout practitioners of their faiths remain ignorant of their scriptural history, or of the actual stories that comprise their scripture. For this reason, I am glad I read Genesis as a part of this independent study, as it gives me a background knowledge that I could utilize if a religious controversy arose while studying another text, or if a conflict arose out of some external situation that penetrated the school. Knowledge of this cornerstone text may give my students common ground to discuss differences in interpretations of the text by acknowledging its existence as a text, as a compilation of words that are open to interpretation.

If I were in a school system, even a public school system, in which religion, especially Christianity, played a fundamental role in daily life, there are various excerpts that I could pull from different sections of the book that could serve as good windows into unit themes. For example, if I were doing a theme on “cruelty and injustice,” or some variation (for example, many of my classmates are dealing with the Holocaust in their placements), I might intro with Abraham’s plea to God regarding the destruction of Sodom:

While the two men walked on farther toward Sodom, the Lord remained standing before Abraham. Then Abraham drew nearer to him and said: “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within in? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty, so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike. (New American 23)

Questions of innocence and guilt, and the treatment of both, are moral dilemmas that appear in the other literature students will be reading. As mentioned before, this could introduce a lesson on the Holocaust (The Diary of Anne Frank or Anne Frank the play). This passage could also relate to any text on racism and other prejudices, as well as dystopian works. I could see this applying to Things Fall Apart as well, in which there is a constant tension between who is guilty of different crimes and the appropriate way to punish those crimes. 

That Really Long Journey

I. Summary

The Odyssey is an extensive work, an epic poem that I wonder if high school students, especially freshmen and sophomores, have the patience to navigate. Fortunately (and I won’t be telling my students this), Odysseus provides a succinct summary of his adventures in the 23^rd book.

Upon returning from Troy, Odysseus sacked the city of Ismarus, home of the Cicons (Why you ask? Me too…), but after initial success, his foolish men loitered in the city and the Cicons returned with reinforcements. This is the first time Odysseus loses a significant number of his men. After Ismarus, Odysseus lands among the Lotus-eaters, whose delicious lotus made many men forget their desire to return to Ithaca, but Odysseus bound them to his ship and carried them away when he realized what mischief was afoot. Next comes the famous encounter with the Cyclops, who first knows Odysseus as “Noman (No man).” After the Cyclops eats six of Odysseus’s men, Odysseus rams a large wooden spear (battering ram) into the Cyclop’s eye to blind him. Shortly after, he and his remaining men escape upon the bellies of sheep and a ram, but not before finding out that Odysseus has angered Poseidon by blinding his son the Cyclops. This is the real impetus of Odysseus’s future misfortune. After an insignificant couple of stops in Aeolus, Odysseus’s misfortune carries him to Telepylos, where all of his men and their ships are destroyed excepting his own crew and ship. From here the last remaining crew sails to Circe’s island, where Odysseus rescues all of his men from being turned into swine. Circe then sends Odysseus to the house of Hades to receive a prophecy from Theban. After receiving his prophecy, he passes the Sirens, Charybdis and Scylla, the island of Hyperion (Helios), and is eventually stranded alone with Calypso.

All of this actually happens before The Odyssey begins.

When the story opens, the setting is back in Ithaca, in Odysseus’s house, where Telemachus and Penelope, son and wife to Odysseus, endure the insolence of over a hundred suitors trying to buy the hand of Penelope, and in the process reducing Odysseus’s estate to nothing. Athena comes to Telemachus and sends him to Pylos and eventually to Lacedaemon to inquire of Nestor and Menelaus whether or not they know if his father is still alive.

Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice…

Calypso releases Odysseus by Zeus’s bidding (via Hermes via Athena), Poseidon wrecks Odysseus’s ship (canoe), and he shores up in the land of the Phaeacians, who then guide him home to Ithaca.

Once in Ithaca, he and Telemachus, with the help of Athena and Zeus, slaughter – literally – each and every one of the suitors and maidservants who had offended his land and property.

II. Response

Odysseus is not the perfect hero I expected him to be, and I suspect part of the reason for that is my anachronistic reading. By anachronistic I mean culturally. The treatment of women and the liberties women could take were clearly much different, as evidenced by Penelope being a pushover. The bond of father and son too is much different, much closer, in The Odyssey than we see in contemporary stories. Though Odysseus is absent for all of Telemachus’s memorable life, Telemachus cannot authentically achieve manhood until his father returns. I felt this was a much more subtle and powerful way of conveying the importance of lineage to the Greeks than the numerous spoken family trees.

But I had also forgotten that in Greek mythology the gods are much more human, and the humans are much more stubborn. Taken as a paradigm of the epic hero, Odysseus is a fated man, and yet that does not seem to diminish, or in any way particularly affect, his strength, cunning, and decisions. Much of the book is spent discussing Odysseus’s misfortune, and yet he was clearly blessed from birth.

The most difficult aspect of the poem for me was the long, intricate deceptions. Many times when Odysseus comes upon a new land, especially toward the end when he is back in Ithaca, he must deceive those around him. But it is not enough to simply say where he is from and how he got to where he is. Instead, he is compelled to create an entire history, which we must wade through, although we the readers/listeners already know the truth. While reading, I became more and more annoyed with this, and consequently I began to ponder in earnest the meaning of these digressions. Then, I realized that I received some amusement in reading through the deceptions and picking out the kernels of truth littered within them. Like so many other elements of the book, these digressions must have been a requirement of popular story weaving in Homer’s time.

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Like The Epic of Gilgamesh, there is a significant amount of repetition in The Odyssey, which is probably due to its development in an oral/musical tradition.

As contemporary readers, we tend to read works like The Odyssey and The Epic as fantasy, but when we remember that the ancient Greeks believed in the gods – Zeus, Athena, and Apollo – in the same way that we believe in God/Yahweh/Allah (and their respective interpretations), the story is much more profound and has more gravity. Through such a lens, one can imagine The Odyssey being one of the books in an ancient Greek equivalent of the Old Testament, as a story of how their gods work through men and women and how humans should interact with their gods and fellow men and women.

Unlike the tragic heroes that would come centuries later, the Shakespearean heroes, Odysseus is never harmed by his own decisions. Though praised for his strength and his counsel, the poem moves by the actions of either the gods or other humans, i.e. the Phaeacians. The line between a great man and a favored man, though discussed a great deal, is taken for granted, and never actually drawn.

There is a great amount of wine and passing around of bread, and there were many times when, due to the translation I read, I questioned the extent to which the seemingly Christian elements throughout the story were from the original or the result of a translator who was the product of a predominantly Christian culture.

As the second extant work of western literature, there are many themes throughout The Odyssey  that will be developed more throughout later western authorship: transitioning from boyhood to manhood, propriety with the gods, propriety with men/women, love and courtship, the power and interference of the gods/God, revenging/avenging, justice, honor, ancestry. Western culture continues to struggle with these concepts. Perspective changes with impetus, or vice versa. Do gods determine our fate, or do our choices? But if our choices determine our fate, where are the gods/God? Odysseus and his fellow players do not ask these questions, but he is the reason authors will ask them later.

IV. Teaching and Learning

After coming so far, I must return to my original question: How do I teach this long, tedious text to a classroom of impatient high school students?

One way to scaffold the text would be with a contemporary young adult (or even adult) hero/adventure novel. The first unit my cooperating teacher at Brentwood Middle School does with her eighth graders is archetypes and the monomyth cycle in hero/adventure novels. She allows each of her students to pick a different hero/adventure story (Harry Potter, The Hobbit, etc.), and then teaches generally about archetypes and the monomyth cycle, enabling students individually to apply that knowledge to their own novels. I could do a similar unit as a precursor to The Odyssey, THE hero/adventure story of all time. By scaffolding this way, students would be familiar with the narrative structure of The Odyssey, which may help them break the large story into smaller morsels. If they get confused as to what is happening structurally, students could go back and ask themselves, “The last section I identified was ‘Crossing the threshold into the unknown.’ Has a helper or mentor come into the story yet? Have there been any challenges yet?” In fact, the students would need prior experience with archetypes and the monomyth cycle because even though Odysseus is revered as the quintessential epic hero, Homer’s narrative timeline manipulates and distorts the cycle quite a bit, to the point that students may need guidance discerning what is happening when, narratively and chronologically.

I mentioned in my earlier response that the most frustrating parts of The Odyssey for me were the disguises and long deceptions that Odysseus weaves along his journey back home. I suspect these moments may also be boring and frustrating to my students as well. One piece of informal teaching advice that I have taken to heart over the years is that if there are sections of a story that you think are going to be especially boring or difficult for students, rather than cut them out, focus on them. I see Odysseus’s tall tales as perfect opportunities to capitalize on the oral/aural nature of The Odyssey. I could plan out students’ reading so that they won’t read those sections for homework, but instead they could take turns – perhaps in pairs – presenting those stories to the class. They could explore the different ways speaking and listening to a story changes the reading experience. And, because there are nuggets of truth in each of Odysseus’s stories, listening to them aloud would help students sharpen their aural attention if I ask them to write down the truths they hear in each different story. This would, in turn, lead to practice with analytic thinking, as students would then explain how Odysseus has disguised the truth, comparing his deception with the events of the story.