Monthly Archives: March 2015

A book that retrieves ‘hushed’ voices !

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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is absolutely fascinating. It literally helps its readers going through the same complex waters of how racism is lived, seen and felt by black Americans. Reading her, one comes out with a sense of knowing what it means to fill these shoes, this hoodie, this body. Rankine wants us to understand how one can become “invisible and hypervisible” in language and life — as she has.

Line by line we are invited to share her her race’s very deepest and most personal feelings and thoughts. Her line in which she says: “I feel most colored when I’m thrown against white background”(53) drives me to think about my own self driven to live a life with people to whom I don’t belong, and with whom I tend to be driven to feel less, belittled, and down-looked  at. How “Colored” people are “colored” and the realization of being “colored” gratifies whenever a “colored” person is thrown in the middest of white people.

This piece of art with all its language, pictures, paintings, and piercings adequately serves as a vehicle that convey’s black citizens experience. “For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person,” Rankine says. “Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and as insane as it is, saying please.”(49) Rankine, who recognized the quiet violence makes this struggle visible throughout the book.

On Galatea

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This week’s assigned reading somehow startled me. At first I did not know how to approach it. I kept trying really hard to decode the way; using which the text would open up itself for me to read. I had a great difficulty and was on the verge of giving up and quitting. Now that I somehow know how it works, I feel that I was working it too hard, Maybe! It is a game that has voice, mood, feelings, and above all a clear stance ! It is astonishing how she conveys her feelings. At times she is mad and cynical that I can almost feel how she is mocking me, or belittling my question. At other times, I sensed a sadness underlying her tone, as if she has went through a bad experience or something. I felt the need to communicate more, but as a real introvert, she drove me to feel that I am intervening into a space I’m not supposed to surpass. It is as if she is not giving me a room or an approval for asking. Just like Ziyad I felt I was a co-author. I felt that I had a great impact on how the conversation is to go. All in all, Though I had a great difficulty at first, yet the experience itself is so uniquely enjoyable !

Close Reading of Rachel Zolf’s “the lone soldier”

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The lone soldier is a very expressive poem. Regardless of its precise condensed nature, it opens up the door wide for different readings. Personally speaking, the lone soldier is a poem that passes to its readers a soldier’s feeling of sadness. The word “ALONE” sums it all up. It mirrors vividly how he is thrust to live in the frontier all alone. “Lone soldiers don’t get visits from mom and dad_,” this phrase alone conveys a soldier’s  feeling of being not only misplaced but also forgotten.

“Alone Don’t have a brother to our coping”, Those soldiers are driven by outer forces to cope, yet ‘no assistance is offered’. And even if they wanted to escape, again there is nobody there to help them. It feels like as if they were born to suffer, created to go through all this misery ALONE.

Their situation is way much harsher than anyone can imagine. They just can’t flee it all and head back to that peaceful place from where they came in the first place. Ironically, they are “Supposed to get wings and fly off on their own,” yet how can they do that while their feet is glued to the frontier.

Those people are not in any way able to enjoy life’s simplest and most mundane affairs. Being a soldier “means Mom can’t bake a cake for their buddies.” Being a soldier “means coming home before Shabbat and doing laundry.” The unjustness of being a soldier doesn’t stop at the level of not only denied life’s simplest practices, but also robbed the right to rest even when the whole world around them is resting.

Indeed, they are ” A book with no cover,” easily torn into pieces. Those people are vulnerable, lacking the crust and shell that keeps them safe. They “pray” to “receive” mercy, they “can’t even express” that “being alone soldier means being alone”

A response to Philip’s creativity

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I

                                      fee

                            L

          U

In answer to this following excerpt:

w      wa                                            wa                                        t
er                                           wa                                        te
r                                                                       wat
er                                                                  wa   ter
of                                      w
ant

Brathwaite’s: When our speaking voice tells who we are !

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Having read Brathwaites’ Middle Passages with a keen eye that tries to grasp a firm hold of what he was trying to communicate, I have missed a lot. It was only when I relaxed and read it in its own context that I, somehow and to a certain extent, understood it. (if at all) The identity, whether personal or collective, is so crucial in this week’s reading. Knowing more about the people, their identity, their history, the discrimination and prejudices they were forced to go through, and above all their invented language is the key to that of understanding the text.

We all can speak of our own sufferings. We all have certain linguistic codes which can only be decoded by those to whom we belong and with whom we share commonalities. So What distinguishes Brathwaite’s writings from the almost unreadable, undecidable notes we write to our closest friends, for instance? Is it the form that is so special ? or the content ? or the way both collaborate to create a certain effect !

Much the same way the beauty of the Caribbean’s landscape is brought into ruins by the cruel colonization, Brathwaite blends together the beauty and musicality of poetry in talking about seriously brutal and critical topics. Leaving aside the form and content a bit, the speaking voice Brathwaite employs is astonishingly revealing. Those people, the poems are talking about, are the slaves, the waged workers, the sort of people who gets the least amount of education, if any. Bearing this idea in mind, Brathwaite have made a legitimately good call by employing the speaking voice as a means of getting this sect’s identity, voices and demands heard !