Prof. Guarino,

           

            Sorry I got carried away with length and content. It’s a little longer than the 600-800 words required. Also, I meant to shake your hand last class and thank you for a great semester, so I’d now like to take this opportunity to do that. Thank you! It’s been a pleasure, it’s been enjoyable, and I’ve learned a lot. Have a splendid summer ma’am. See ya around.

            Sincerely,

                        James Mormile

When referring to certain genres of writing, namely fiction and creative writing, its intents and purposes of have always been pretty universal: its been a gesture that’s aesthetic in nature, serving to connect human beings to one another and helping to bring meaning and understanding to our lives. Essentially, writing chronicles ‘what it means to be human.’ Writing can be therapeutic for those who need it to be therapeutic; conversely, it can be equally remedial to readers and/or an audience seeking meaning and understanding in their own lives. The Bible, the Koran, and other timeless religious texts have served as a profound means of comfort for people worldwide, and a way to bring meaning and understanding in world that can be ruthless, cold, and chaotic. Another example is classic literature, regarded as timeless, capturing universal themes and truths that are fundamentally human, traits that are common and disregard the trivial and superfluous and superficial: skin color, ethnicity, sex, or preference. Women’s literature is simply a subcategory of literature that addresses and captures relevant issues to pertaining to the fairer sex. It captures what it is to be a woman living in the world, as we know it, and how different women have been personally affected by human experience.

The books studied in ENG 217 have been of a diverse variety, but all share very common characteristics and fundamentals that allow us to place them into the category known as Women’s literature. These books both celebrate and empower the female sex. Eve Ensler’s “I am an Emotional Creature” precisely displays this attitude in “Refuser.”

“Our mothers are the Pink Suri Gang.”

“We are the Liberian women.”

“We are Cindy Sheehan showing up in Crawford without a plan.”

“Don’t deny us, criticize us, or infantilize us.”

Ensler says LOOK! We are not a weaker sex or inferior to men. Hear me roar! Her “Monologues” and “Creature” empowered women by celebrating the female body and giving them a voice and renewed beauty that they can be proud of and rally behind. The benefits are unquestionable and to put it quite simply: these books did a lot of good to and for a lot of people. What more can you ask from pieces of literature?

Three books stuck out as being among my favorites, and I allow for further classification into a smaller sub-category of Women’s literature: “In the Time of Butterflies,” “The Shawl,” and “When the Emperor was Divine.” Each unique ‘voice’ told by the characters of each book had fatefully become caught up in the unfolding of factually horrific events with tremendous degrees and amounts of human injustice and war and oppression. Each book/story had elements of major historical events, making their particular stories even more significant in my own eyes. Alvarez’s “Butterflies” captures a tragic but ultimately uplifting and empowering story of revolution in the Dominican Republic. The heroics of the Mirabel sisters represent a human characteristic so admirable that it’s the very reason many of us even read narrative. Much like the bravery and ferocity, glory and greatness of Achilles in battle; even the allure of Harry Potter heroically defeating the dreadful Voldemort, as good overcomes evil, quite literally. The book’s story celebrates the contribution of the Mirabel sisters to the noble cause of freedom in the poor, corrupt, and impoverished country of the Dominican Republic. Their bravery and sacrifice and humility and selflessness serves as inspiration to women worldwide (to all people in general). At the same time, history reveals, exposes, and unravels itself in its compelling narrative. The surviving sister continues to live with both the good and bad memories, and through her roots she is forever bound to the past.

“When the Emperor was Divine” and “The Shawl” both worked differently and sought to achieve different goals; they were written for different reasons. Otsuka sought to expose and maybe find culpability and acknowledgement from the United States, in shining some light on the way Japanese American citizens were treated during WWII. Her mother and grandmother being sent to a camp at one point, and a desire to tap a writing source that was untapped, led her to put her readers in a first-person narrative that exposes inhumanities suffered by an uprooted a Japanese American family. Most significant were the long-term effects of such injustices, this also being the same case in “The Shawl.” In this most unusual and interesting narrative, Ozick details the horrors and after affects of the Holocaust. The protagonist is haunted by her past, unable to resume her life. Ozick introduces a sane and optimistic counterpart and rational perspective in Persky, who maintains, “I work from a different theory. For everything there’s a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.” Sound advice to adopt; almost necessary to make it in a world such as ours. The authors seek to find solace through their stories. In turn, they share and offer each to the world, hoping for others to find equal meaning in it. The universality of it exposes itself.

Other books in this curriculum share, in a general sense, themes of the same intents and purposes. Just like Ozick writes of a family who was uprooted from everything they knew (among many other horrible things), Nye’s “Gazelle” largely addresses issues and themes revolving around the severed roots from her own native Middle Eastern country. She says: “Love means you breathe in two countries.” Through her poetry, she describes the void from the disconnectedness she feels as a result of leaving the Middle East. It’s through poetry she is able to find a way to fill this particular void.

Danticat also attempts to preserve a Haitian identity. In her “Night Women,” she details the life of a prostitute, and the harsh reality of the Haitian struggle as the ‘night woman’ tries to earn a living in effort to give her young son a better life. In a lawless land where so many lives were lost and so many inhumanities were suffered, also a place that almost certainly makes citizens of the United States take an honest look at our own freedoms that may be taken for granted, Danticat makes an attempt to preserve the memory of some of her ancestors so they may not have died in vain:

“…and since you had written them down and memorized them, the names would come rolling off your tongue. And this was your testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again.”

This preservation of heritage, culture, and identity is something that we are all familiar with, the United States being a home for refugees for the past hundreds of years. We all seek to understand ourselves through our roots. In all the ugliness and horror often associated with places like Haiti and the Middle East, forgotten are the large amounts of innocent people who have suffered tremendously at the hands of despotism.

          If I could sum up the purpose of the books in this course, along with the importance of Women’s literature and what it tries to accomplish, I am hard-pressed for a simple explanation. The absolute common denominator is that all books define and detail human experience. Most often, these experiences are profound struggles and the facing of great adversity. Although each book focuses on the perspective of women, the strength that can be found in each piece is fundamentally human. Each piece can be said to ‘reach out to others,’ a desire to not leave anyone behind in a fundamental human struggle which human beings endure a seemingly perpetual and endless pursuit for self-identity. Through words in literature and poetry, a fundamental human connectedness can be found, serving as solace for those in need. Fitzgerald finished “Gatsby” by saying “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The trick is to embrace the past and use it to serve you in trying to live a better future.

“I can tell you anything. All you have to believe is the truth.” Allison’s final sentence was quite a way to end the novel. At first, I was a little weary about the book and its stories and themes because like Allison brashly admitted to the reader: “I’m a storyteller. I’ll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage.” That wasn’t really what I wanted to hear. As a reader, I want truth; I don’t want to be manipulated and have my sincere and honest emotions played upon and messed with by the book’s author. Ultimately, I actually ended up finding plenty of truth in Allison’s book and her life lessons both served and satisfied me well. Very often, throughout the course of my life, there have been hundreds, thousands even (we’ll say countless), of things that I thought I knew for certain, of which, of course, I turned out to be completely wrong about; it is inescapable, part of growing up and growing old, hopefully bringing with it clarity.

                       

One thing Allison knew for sure was “that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.” This is difficult realization for Allison due to her upbringing. She was brought up in an environment in which men totally and selfishly managed to eradicate/shatter any inkling of self-confidence and self-appreciation that women had. Her sister “fell in love with a boy who got a bunch of his friends to swear that the baby she was carrying could just as easily have been theirs as his…By eighteen she was no long beautiful, she was ashamed: staying up nights with her bastard son.” Something is seriously f***ed up in your neck of the woods when a typical statement from boy to girl (age 12-60+) is “You think you pretty, girl? Ha! You an’t nothing but another piece of dirt masquerading as better.” Allison became a victim of both equally as awful abuse and abuse ten times worse; she was supposed to simply “have shrunk down and died….deeply broken.” In order for Allison to discover the life lesson “if we are not beautiful….know beauty in any form” she obviously needed to learn it elsewhere.

Karate helped foster this concept. “If there was love in the world, I thought, then there was no reason I should not have it in my life.” Here she was finally able to learn how to run without fear pushing her; finally began to appreciate her body and realize her abilities and potential to do anything in life as long as she worked at it. In a lot of ways, this was a turning point that opened doors that previously had been locked shut.

This is the story of Dorothy Allison. She possesses a very strong ambivalence toward her roots and origins. Their family has been plagued with poverty and misfortune, and it got gradually worse and more inbred from generation to generation, leaving Dorothy with her predicament. Growing up in its most stagnant and wretched lull, where “everything was rotten,” Allison dreams of better things for herself. “I did not want to grow up to be them. I made myself proud of their pride, their determination, their stubbornness, but every night I prayed a man’s prayer: Lord, save me from them. Do not let me become them.” Coming from an almost inescapable poverty, the family was isolated and had a great disconnectedness to the world: “…thumbing through magazines full of women so different from us they could have been another species.” They were left behind to devolve; especially the women.

As she tries to run from her past, throughout the course of her life, she finds that she is forever bound to it, as it reveals precious facts and details that are the only remaining clues that may help to define her. After all, she is who she is mainly because of how she was raised, and who raised her. She was able to use what she had learned to aid her escape and helped her stay gone: the ‘determination’ and that stubbornness; that “Nothing-gonna-stop-you look” about her.” And she was able to get away. But it would be only a matter of time before her past returns and entices her back and she seeks out answers. “No one told me that you take your world with you, that running becomes a habit, that the secret to running is to know why you run and where you are going – and to leave behind the reason you run.” She discovers that it cannot be left behind, or ran from, and that it follows you. This is why one of things she knows for sure is – “if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seed in a wind.” A plant severed from its root will cease to exist; it becomes deprived of something that is vital to its existence.

In my two posts regarding ‘The Shawl,’ I have picked much of this story apart from beginning to end, made some inferences, and drawn some conclusions, now I’d like to see what others have to say and respond. I’d like to take a look at some of the stuff ‘Runesmith,’ whose blog ‘Give me your skin…” I tend to read and follow; I am rather a fan of it, not to mention based on the style and tone I can easily pin-point precisely whom it is written by. I have worked with this individual in our in-class group activities and I enjoy what he/she has to say.

“The Shawl is less a story and more an indictment.” Indictment! Runesmith begins. What a perfect term. This book has indictment written all over it; and it should, as it goes to show that there were those directly affected who suffered death immediately or shortly thereafter at the hands of the Nazis, and then there were those who supposedly ‘survived’ but may never escape its haunting memories because of a lingering and consuming ripple effect; possibly stemming to a wide array of people (friends, family, descendants, ancestors etc.). The magnitude of the terror spread by the Nazis is actually much worse than imagined; in addition to the death toll, we must add people like Rosa and Stella, who also lost their lives, but in different ways. So take how bad we deem it was and add an exponent of two. As part of this indictment, Runesmith includes the quote:

“To never forget to remember "my Warsaw is not your Warsaw." It's an indictment against Europeans…”

I have to disagree with the purpose of this statement. I don’t think Rosa is accusingly pointing the finger at everyone who fled before the terror and roundup, indicting Europeans for fleeing instead of fighting; even though that’s precisely what many did, this statement is important in other ways. Instead, here she ruminates and wallows in her loss, reminiscing of a time and place where life was perfect; where her family was cultured, bookshelves laden with thousands of books (“Polish, German, French her father’s Latin books; the shelf of shy literary periodicals her mother’s poetry…”) and lived in a refined, educated, and cultivated aristocratic lifestyle.

“The Warsaw of her childhood: a great light: she switched it on, she wanted to live inside her eyes….Cultivation, old civilization, beauty, history!” She glorifies Warsaw to a great extent, “Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw…Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great light of Warsaw.” Her Warsaw is blissful and the pure and unadulterated utopia of her childhood, before it was ruined and ‘stolen by thieves,’ getting back to the indictment. She was the perfect embodiment (a future Marie Curie even!) of holy Warsaw and “Americans couldn’t tell her apart from this fellow (Persky) with his false teeth and his dewlaps and his rakehell reddish toupee bought God knows when or where…” Preposterous! Ignorant Americans! (However ignorant, my history tells me that we saved the day). They may know “good material,” “she saw them walking with Tolstoy under their arms, with Dostoyevsky,” but it’s all phony, fraudulent; she was the real deal.

“The Shawl isn't so much a shawl as it is a symbol. To Ozick, the inactive Germans might as well have been Nazis themselves.” This idea is very insightful and Runesmith does an excellent job in elaborating on the indictment and implications of any and all Europeans who remained inactive while an entire race of people were persecuted. Just like Rosa’s Warsaw and the profound loss it represents for her, I believe the shawl is also important for other reasons. I think back to the “shawl” chapter, about the delirium and hysteria that dictated their thoughts, actions, and feelings, and I think I can come to the conclusion that the two most powerful and intense things they are suffering from are hunger and cold.  What I believe the shawl does, and why I believe Rosa sees it as being ‘magic,’ is that it brings warmth and comfort, a feeling they no longer know. This minuscule amount of warmth and comfort from a simple shawl or blanket is magnified to great levels having been non-existent for so long, then mixed with the hysteria and madness that has swept them up it is probably easy for Rosa to really believe its magic power has kept Magda alive. This is why Stella steals it: “I was cold.”

On a side note: I am unable to include this in my post, but I have seen that no one is spared from Rosa’s contempt, even her own people. It’s odd because she carries a strange contempt for Jews. That they are….“her father, like her, mocked at Yiddish; there was not a particle of ghetto left in him, not a grain of rot.” She appears to possess a hatred for Jews even, and a feeling that they are dirty, unclean, impure, subhuman. This is rather peculiar. I will think more into it...