I imagine all writing dealing with social change are personal (manifestos have to have a reason for being written, for example) but the usage of the word “I” adds a sense of urgency to the piece in recognizing how your own experience is a critical piece of a larger problem, and forcing others to see individual experiences versus an abstract movement might make calling for social change more effective. Something that I’ve noticed from my own project is how personal my pieces had become; the reason that I feel so strongly about what I am writing about is because I have a stake in it. Reading Boyer’s The Undying and Baldwin’s letter to his nephew really resonated with me, because both of these authors were writing about something that their own experiences had validated. There were also poems in Long Soldier’s Whereas (such as the poem regarding her father apologizing) where that usage also popped up. I think something apparent in all the pieces we read in class, not just those above, was the need to give a voice to someone who didn’t have that before, and to make sure you aren’t taking away their agency when doing so. When that voice is your own, that becomes much easier than when you undertake the same job for someone else.   

Question: Where do you draw the line between saying something you think is honest but might come out as overstating to someone else? There were quite a few times where I found myself asking if invoking a concept/person was too much and if I had a right to do so, but my decision came down to validating my own experiences, and I was wondering if toning down language for people to stop and listen to you makes it less impactful. 

One thing I took away from both the Brecht and the Schumann reading was the importance of staying objective in performances in order to provoke audiences to have a critical reaction to the work demonstrated. The alienation effect, by refusing to let audience members sympathize with the characters on stage, forces those members to grapple with whether or not the action or not exists as is in the real world, and if they are okay with that. In the same vein, puppetry is extremely alien from audience members, and is already seen as distant from other forms of theater, so it should use that advantage to attack issues in the New World Order. “Objectivity” can be dangerous however, and I think being able to incorporate the experiences of people actually affected should be considered just as important. I feel as if there are significant groups of people who are not aware of how their privilege allows them to avoid thinking about these problems in the first place, and this lack of awareness could lead them to believe that depictions are not as important as the actors would like them to believe, which prevents meaningful discourse and change from occurring. When I was watching the Bread and Puppet Theater, I also had doubts that this would be able to reach out to people who already had right wing views. I feel like a call for empathy might be a more effective way to reach out to enact change, but I am not completely sure if that is due to my western bias.

Monologue/ Spoken Poem:

I tell my friends that my essays have gotten better because I’m a math major.

I think about my arguments in the same way I think about a proof

You realize that there are things you can’t take for granted

You have to prove everything. 

Except math doesn’t work like that. There are axioms you do have to assume, like the axiom of choice, or the parallel postulate, or the native postulate.

Wait. I forget this one isn’t as well known as the others.

There’s a nice story behind this one. It starts in an email chain, after a draft on some very elementary, super easy, memorable years after writing it, number theoretical concepts was submitted to a supervisor: 

“Nice solid write up.   I’ll be curious to see how it compares with others (several on the same topic).”

“A little more care of English is needed.” 

“(which I assume is not your native language)”

Which I assume is not your native language.

Which I assume, is not your native language.

Which, pronoun, as in this idea I see no problems with saying

I, subject, as in someone whose Google search image results gives a picture of someone who has no idea what their privilege is

Assume, verb, as in to know with certainty

Is, verb, as in to be without doubt

Not, adverb, as in unlike me

Your, adjective, as in not mine

Native, adjective, as in not mine

Language, noun, as in English, not math.

Granted, the fact that I had to look up which part of speech the word “which” is confirms his truth.

My professors had concocted a conspiracy where, yes, I had good ideas. Yes, I was smart. But no one could tell me my English was so bad, so imperfect, so disgustingly written that it must be because I don’t know the language. 

All the other papers I had frantically submitted 2 minutes before the deadline, from an 8-page paper about 3 short minutes in Pacific Rim (yes, the giant robot movie) to an analysis of some of Arendt’s arguments in Eichmann in Jerusalem (god, she’s so dense)

They were all terrible.

Well, fuck. How the hell did I get here? I can’t construct a sentence for the love of myself.

Maybe it was my speech impediment how I didn’t start talking until I was 4 and if I wrote a paper like how I talked it was wrong because I never developed those language development skills.

Maybe it was my parents, who left everything behind 30 years ago in a land still reeling from the effects of British colonialism and who never could pass down good grammatical skills.

Maybe I was wrong. Because now my English wasn’t good it had left me and the only thing on my mind was how much I wanted to shrink, into a ball, so small that no one would hear me speak.

“I do believe your comment about my native language was inappropriate and unnecessary”

Were words I never could speak but somehow could type. 

And all these feelings go away, when he says, quote, “Sorry.” with a justification of his words.

I tell my friends that my essays have gotten better because I’m a math major.

Process Notes:

I found myself fine tuning the use of my voice for this piece. It was liberating to be able to express parts of the piece with inflection and not having to write everything down, at the cost of having to make sure it is read the same way every time I went through it. I tried to make it sarcastic and a bit humorous so it would be more palatable, and I’d like to know what people think about that (along with breaking the fourth wall). We’ll see how it goes tomorrow!

In the last chapter of The Sickbed, Boyer quotes Bertolt Brecht, who states “the truth… must be written for someone, someone who can do something with it,”(133-4) To me, this encapsulates Boyer’s purpose in writing her memoir. This is the reason she tells not only her story but the story of objectification in the cancer industry, how breast cancer is gendered (accompanied with phrases such as “Attitude is Everything for Breast Cancer Survivor”(165), and the immoral practices of doctors and our healthcare system profiting off of disease. One thing that I noticed was the reiterated idea that we refuse to accept that our world is the reason that these diseases have expressed themselves in the way and prevalence that they have. Statements like half of people will get cancer is less outrageous if we believe it all comes from ourselves and do not think about the effects our environment have on our body. Boyer’s conversation to her daughter broke me a little, when she tries to reassure her daughter that she has a lower chance of breast cancer because she does not have the hereditary BRCA gene, but her daughter comments that instead of being genetically cursed, she is cursed “of living in the world that made you sick,”(131) Something that we have been trained to think is out of our control is not. I am reminded of the idea that a patient displaying “any potential for agency” is to “cease compliance” (65), where questioning the way that things have operated, even when there is no real way to know if treatments will work with certainty. Agency is framed as this horrible thing that will shorten your lifetime if wielded, but we should know that this is not the case.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how disturbing is that memory?

Seven.

And on a scale from 1 to 7, how much do you believe that there’s something wrong with you?

Five.

The point of EMDR is to close your eyes and see where your thoughts carry you, where one picture in your mind means a million different things and a million different pathways to doors you forgot you had left behind and suddenly they are all blown open with the wind generated by let’s see what you notice from there where you feel your heartbeat in your right ankle and the blood rushing in your left arm and somehow the words keep coming and coming and  

But like, hear me out: could all of my memories be like twos? Or threes? Is that a good baseline?

How do you quantify that? It wasn’t like I hadn’t dealt with trauma– fuck, the last two times I was here I had no idea just how much I had repressed that shit– but it also wasn’t like my life was perfect otherwise. 

When I was walking home at 2 am in the quad I suddenly thought that everything could end if the wrong person saw a strange brown man holding something other than gummy worms in his pocket. 

That didn’t traumatize me. 

No single thing had shocked me into that basic fact. It was just a fact that I had come to realize. 

I don’t do well with others and I know that’s my anxiety talking but I never did understand why I felt weird bringing people back home. I’m sure Mom would gladly set out food for any one of my friends who I wanted to hang out with. They didn’t know my friends existed; they were just names that I would come up with at the top of my head if they pressed.

Why did I always go to their apartments?

I’ve always been afraid of asking for my own space because I felt bad when I considered telling people I didn’t fall into the boxes that they had cut out for me. If the only thing that mattered was how people saw me, why did my perception and theirs fail to align? 

I can only control myself to change.

It felt like I’d never get here. The whole point of everything I did was to get here. And it would have been by my hand.

Or by his. I wasn’t okay with that loss of control, but I knew what it felt like. And by definition, I couldn’t do anything about it. 

The beads that dug into my right palm twirled, stretched, tangled, looped, untangled, and twisted in my grasp. It was better than my fingernails biting into my own skin. 

On a scale from 1 to 10, how disturbing is that memory now?

Eight. 

Process Notes:

This was a particularly hard writing assignment to do, because I wasn’t sure what I could connect my topic to that had a STEM focus; I ended up choosing my therapy session, which I saw Sofia also did. I like what I did with incorporating things said in session next to what hasn’t been said (which is a weird concept to begin with, because the idea of therapy is that there shouldn’t be a lot unsaid), but I don’t know if I connect the thoughts together well enough. I’m also on the fence about if I should have tried to take a more objective line of speaking; I like how it sounds though. It sounds like me. 

One thing I noticed in Baldwin’s letter to his nephew is that it strikes a desperate tone: there is nothing else to do except to hold on to their own perception of reality. The burden of proof is not on validating the Negro experience in America; Baldwin and his nephew already know that these feelings are valid. Rather, it is on those who are unaware of those conditions. “They are, in effect, still trapped in a history they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it,” This allows Baldwin to emphasize further how much things need to change, and that it cannot be done just from his work. It is also important to realize that Baldwin is speaking to all African Americans in this letter, which then justifies the tone he takes, as well as giving a peek to others what the experience is truly like. This same sentiment is shown in his Talk to Teachers, except now Baldwin is attempting to do the work that he said needed to be done for society: he is trying to educate them. It is not an explicitly desperate tone but rather a call to action. He is trying to teach teachers the truth about their society so that they could spread that knowledge to all children. The importance of education is emphasized, as teachers have to perpetrate the “aims of society”. He even gives an immediate example of what can happen if you don’t teach with the intention of questioning the society you live in: you can reach a situation akin to Nazi Germany. Baldwin highlights the fact that to address a different audience, the rhetorical tools that are effective look very different, even with the same topic in mind (even if it is a big one): how to improve society for African Americans.

Letter:

To Theo,

I’ve always had trouble answering the “diversity question” on each of my college applications. I know that college is still a while off for you and you probably haven’t started thinking about high school yet, yet alone that. But I wanted to help you figure out the strange emotions that may come up when you have to answer it for yourself. 

Mom always told me to check the “American Indian or Alaskan Native” box and I have; it’s not like I’m lying, because she is Arawak. (You know, like the natives that Christopher Columbus first, uh, encountered?) It doesn’t feel as if we are though, and when you have our last name? Sheesh. People would not shut up about how I gamed the system. Dad told me how it was a good sign that one of the colleges I had applied to reached back to me wanting to know more about my “Native American/Native Hawaiian/Alaskan Native background”, and it felt… weird. Weird because this was something that was true on only this electronic application and nowhere else. No one saw me and thought: “Yeah, he’s Native American.” I know I didn’t think that way about myself. I wasn’t sure what to think, so I always let other people think for me.   

And Dad? I couldn’t tell you the whole story of how we arrived from India because it happened a century ago, and I’m not sure if any of us know the story. Sometimes it feels like that page in the history book has been torn out. But we did end up in the Carribean somehow, and God I felt weird checking off African American even though Caribbean kind of implies “black”, but it felt like I was claiming to be part of an experience I had no right to claim. So I didn’t. If you feel comfortable making that choice when you are older, I understand. Truth be told I’m not comfortable with the choice I made, because I was forced to make it. Leaving that question blank seemed worse both for my college acceptance chances and letting others make their choice on what my identity was. 

And I always felt out of place because everyone who saw me as different saw me in the same way that most people did, and I was afraid that the people who saw me as the same would realize that I wasn’t. I saw myself as different; they gave me a reason to feel different, through their questions about my name and where I was really from and how I couldn’t eat beef, no wait pork, right? I hope you don’t have to deal with more than that, because I know it can get much worse than that. But I also couldn’t relate to the stories of life back home, because I was so far removed from that space. So we are part of no group but yet all of them.

People will think whatever they want to think about us. Trust me, I know. I really hope that I can help because I’ve been through it without the words of a sibling guiding me.

I still have applications to work on, and I will still have to deal with this question in the future. I hope that my time pining over this seemingly small question will help you. It is a question that has not escaped me, and one I think will hang over me for a long time.    

Shamaul

Lecture:

Islamophobia is a misleading term. It does not capture the entire picture, as the implication is that it is connected to the aforementioned religion. But many people have conflated the religion with the skin color. Anything that seems religious that a brown person is wearing is seen as Islamic. Any foreign food, any difficult name, any belief that we keep with us is seen as an attempt to undermine American democracy. You may think I am being extreme, but perhaps you don’t remember the birther controversy, or the travel ban that President Trump enacted just 3 years ago.

It has, at the very least, stayed alive through the current administration, through tweets that claims Muslim communities cheered the downing of the Twin Towers, and that representatives who wear Muslim headdress are a danger to America. This divisive rhetoric alienates people who have done nothing wrong, because they are seen the same as enemies of the U.S government, protectors of freedom, democracy, and everything right with the world.

This idea of feeling otherized isn’t specific to brown-presenting people, but we have dealt with many antagonistic feelings due to the events of the last twenty years, including but not limited to terrorism attacks, American intervention in the Middle East, and anti-immigration sentiment. Note that I say presenting: Many times these choices aren’t made by the people around them. It matters less about what you think about yourself and more about what people think about you, and people like me can only do so much to change the minds of others. 

To prove my point further, even I do not feel as if I should belong to this group I associate with. I come from a small Caribbean nation called Guyana, which brought indentured servants from India under British colonialism over a hundred years ago. My disconnect with what many people consider my history is a century wide, and yet it does not matter. I must be Islamic.  

We have always been considered outsiders in a country that is meant to be built from people all over the world. An outside should not exist, because otherwise we become a country that is not welcome to everyone who wants to be a part of it. We must do better. Otherwise we cannot claim to stand for those ideals we are so proud to call our own.   

Process Notes:

Something that I noticed immediately when constructing these two pieces was how different my audience was and how I needed to use the right language when addressing them. In my lecture, it felt as if I had to explain the problem to someone else, whereas my letter had the premise that this was a problem that I have encountered that will continue in the future. That simple premise was the difference between being vulnerable and trying to convince others about the severity of the problem. The difference between the two uses of the word “we” is striking to me. I found myself toning down a lot of my expressions in the lecture, as if I had to justify everything I said, and not take it for granted. 

I feel as if Long Soldier stresses in the importance of spoken word throughout the entire book; one poem that I was stuck on for a while was Vaporative, where in one of the sections she states that writing was only important to the author’s memory, and not to anyone else. This is followed by a definition of the word opaque just from how it sounds. The idea that words precede speaking and that hierarchy feels like it is being attacked constantly. Long Soldier even mentions in the Introduction of the Whereas section that “President Obama never read the Apology aloud, publically” which leads me to believe that one particular source of tension was this importance of the written word, which then only makes the various edits like the use of strikethrough even more powerful. In addition, on page 92 she states that there is no word for apologize, but there are actions, which the resolution doesn’t have a clear counterpart. For me, reading 38 was jarring both because of its straight-forwardness in telling the reader exactly what was being done with stylistic choices but also because it felt like every poem preceding had a place in setting it up. Lines like “everything is in the language we use”, “there’s irony in their poem”, and “‘real’ poems do not ‘really’ require words” just makes this particular poem feel like one giant condemnation of the use of written language, which maybe was the point.

I also used different editing styles in my piece, and the blog didn’t appreciate my use of white text, so I have the pdf of the assignment, with process notes, attached below:

patriot act

To Be in a Time of Grief

To stand, to walk, to smile. To smile at how simple the world can be and yet how beautiful, to close your eyes and breathe in, then out. To feel like everything is okay. Not to realize it isn’t.

To read. To stare at the words in front of you, your eyebrow furrowed when time stops, because these words don’t make sense. To fail to have the words leave your throat. To have all of them leave at the same time. To remember that this is who you are now, no, this is who you’ve always been. To say that it isn’t fair, and you know it isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel wronged from it. To force yourself to smile. To say that it isn’t okay, but these are the rules that we have to play by. 

To hold in a scream. To process. To let out a controlled statement, to only a select few.

To not want to be in your own bed. To feel as if you are in a dream, that it isn’t real yet, that it can’t be real. To not want to sleep, because what has happened will have always happened today until you wake the next day, where it will have happened yesterday. To feel your heartbeat racing, your fists clench and unclench, your fingernails cutting into your own skin, your breathing quicken, your mind suddenly flooded with thoughts that someone forgot to filter for you. 

To be slapped in your face violently, with the thought that you did not know what you once had. To be lost in thought. To feel the silence around you. To hear the words that people have said behind a screen. To hear the words they never said staring at you. To prove them wrong. To prove something only you have to prove. To feel the questions breathing down your neck, the questions you hear so often you start to ask yourself them when no one is around.

What have you lost? What were you given? What was stolen from you?

To finally shower, to feel the water beating down on you, to feel your hands running through your hair, scents of green apple grasping at every handful. To forget. To forget your shampoo in the shower, only to have someone throw it away.

To let your thoughts out in one long stream of consciousness, because you need to somehow let the world know that yes, this is real and no you aren’t making this up and throwing away the thoughts that whoever you beg to listen can relate even if you know damn well they don’t and stopping and thinking that somehow they might, even if it isn’t the same. To know you aren’t alone. To realize you were never alone.  

To breathe. To laugh. Not to forget. To smile.

To continue. To continue. To continue. To continue. To cont–

Process Notes

I tried to merge a few different experiences of having to deal with grief, one of which having to deal with feeling discriminated against. I don’t know if that makes the poem more powerful or more overstated, but I actually really like how it all blended together. This also made the poem really hard to write. I feel like this is something that can take additions fairly easily, and that the more details the stronger it becomes. I decided pretty early on on the ending (as usual) and I like the open ended way it ends, because I don’t think any of the experiences I reference are ever completely shut.