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.