Final Blog Post : The Last Analysis

    Understanding women's literature is a lot like understanding the woman, herself. As we were shown in various texts we've read throughout the course, especially illustrated in works such as The Vagina Monologues, The Shawl, and Krik? Krak!, women fit no specific stereotype placed upon them. They are wild; they are tame, they are emotional; they are stoic, they are simple; they are mysteriously complex. I've drawn on my experiences growing up to a single mother and being raised in her hair salon to help me connect to each text; each different aspect embodied in femininity.  In some cases, the material was easily understood. The trials of women displayed in Ensler's "What I want my Words to do to You" and The Vagina Monologues, and in other cases, I couldn't have had a harder time connecting. The alienation and self-depersonalization in Push and Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. Here and now, at the end of the course, I find myself more enlightened, empathatic to, and sensitive towards femininity and womanhood, but really the same "boat" as before: "Woman" is just too general of a label to slap on any person of the gender. Under that title, they are fighters, mothers, lovers, lonely, bored, starving, outspoken, silenced, healing, broken, content, pissed off, sophisticated, raunchy, and everything in between. No two women, through life or our novels have proved to be the same.

    My favorite novel(s) were a tie between The Vagina Monologues and Krik? Krak! Eve Ensler quickly became a favorite author of mine, due to her raw,  "no-holds-barred" styling. She wound up and punched the reader in the face with everything she had to celebrate women with. This novel made me uncomfortable, sad, guilty, turned on, interested, repulsed, and other feelings I thought a book had no power in coercing me to feel. I learned the most through Ensler, as she exposed me to the mind of a lesbian's vagina, an "old" vagina, and a brand new vagina. All in all, she had me thinking as close as I ever could like a girl. Being a bit of a close-minded reader, dabbling only in old works written by dead men, this was a new alien territory that I actually found myself to like.

     Krik? Krak! was one of the standout novels that I thoroughly enjoyed for reasons I've yet to figure out.  I enjoyed the little, novella like stories that all seemed to tie together, yet contradict themselves at the same time, as that seemed to be foreshadowing or even allegorical of the course as a whole.

   The course seemed best wrapped up by our final piece analyzed, the documentary-esque film, "What I Want my Words To Do To You." As I wrote in our final in class assignment, the film takes women of different backgrounds with different stories, that can all stand alone as piece of educating material on feminism, and juxtaposes each together to present a bigger, picture of feminism : a plethora of cultures, ideologies, pasts, futures, and stories that all come together in a celebratory jubilation that even Ms. Ensler herself couldn't express in words.

Two or Three Things That Healed for Sure

Dorothy Allison writes the novel "Two or Three Things I Know For Sure" from an autobiographical standpoint, letting the readers into very intimate, personal hardships of her life. One of the last "two or three things" that Allison admits she knows, is she wrote the brutally honest truths out of love, but leaves a bit of ambiguity in the sense that she doesn't tell us who the love is directed at. 

I, personally, interpreted the love she speaks of, as love towards herself and especially to her family. The anecdotes are not only her stories, but are the stories of her family and Allison very bluntly airs out the family's dirty laundry. I think she ends with the loving "two or three thing" because she wants to reach out to the family she "put on the spot." Writing, to many people, is a therapeutic way to heal one's self and reach out and heal relationships with people. Allison has given we, the readers, the privilege of letting us in to her own personal life and the reconciliation she makes with herself and hopefully the family from her past, and gives us a great read and a great contribution to the feminist movement.

Two or Three Things I Know For Sure uses pictures, captions, and text just like Fun Home to portray the story of the author, Dorothy Allison's childhood and upbringing. Not unlike Fun Home, Two or Three Things ... is autobiographical, which made me want to explore the idea of why authors feel they want to include visual aspects in retelling the story of their lives, even if slightly fictionalized for entertainment value.

In class, my group was assigned the task to analyze a photo of and the story surrounding it of Allison as a child. It was humorous to read her own thoughts on her image as a child and helped build the story around it she was trying to portray. Around 1995, the earliest publication year of this novel, while entering the era of the computer, I believe Allison, just like Bechdel, took advantage of modern multimedia to help the reader grab a sense of "connectivity" to the author's story.

So, I decided to join in the fun. Above is a picture of me, that I love to make fun of, during freshman year of high school. And yes, that is all really my hair. Whether it be my patented feauxhawk or the "jewfro" I was sporting above, I've always been big into hair (no pun intended considering the jewfro). This was taken outside my best friends home just after our buddies and I had one of our "band practices" which consisted of a quarter of music and 3/4 of taking pictures of ourselves "playing" music.  We certainly fell victim to the glamour of the "high school kids in a band" myspace era and would do whatever it took to stop being the quiet nerdy kids in school and meet a girl or two. The jewfro didn't help this cause much.

"Are you listening, Magda?"

   In the second story portion of The Shawl, Rosa, we learn of Rosa's life after her survival of the horrors of the Holocaust. Besides her animalistic conditions of living, Rosa shows her trauma most notably through the letters she writes to her dead daughter, Magda, who was killed in the camps. Because of the letters, the disturbing question arises of if Rosa actually believes Magda could be alive, or understands her letters as a coping method. The follow issue inspired me to write a small, poetic-like piece regarding my belief on the question.

"Are You Listening, Magda?"

Are you listening Magda?
Can you hear me screaming out for you?
When they took you from me,
and you went shock bodied stiff,
I dare not say a word.
But I call for you now Magda,
each day and every night
in the dark corner of this room,
through scribbles and scratches.
The blonde of your curls is the brightest color I remember
when this Florida sky is so black,
So I'm calling for you Magda,
Can you hear me Magda,
Won't you call back?

Did they lose their divinity?

In the novel, "When The Emperor was Divine," there is little reference to the relevance of the title. As discussed in class and from prior knowledge of Japanese culture, the Japanese believe their Emperor's or leader's to actually be divine deities, in a metaphoric manner. I believe Otsuka uses the title to make reference to a period before the novel takes place, a time in which the Japanese people in America were still proud of their heritage. The boy has an episode in a California street where he claims to be a "chink" rather than a "jap" to avoid being mistreated due to his ethnicity. I believe this is one of Otsuka's references to a time before when the Japanese people (characterized by aforementioned Emperor) were "divine" or at least not considered lesser class citizens on their way to detainment camps. The loss of  "divinity" is personified by the father and especially his questionable confession at the end of the novel where he admits the wrongdoings he did because was indeed, Japanese.

The question soon arises of did the Japanese really lose their pride and can another group of people take someone's pride? Otsuka ends the novel in an ambiguous tone, perhaps leaving us to think about the answer. More than 50 years later, the Japanese have restored status and the detainment camps are (unfortunately) rarely mentioned, as if they were never thought less of. The roller-coaster like ride the Japanese took with their status has certainly strengthened as a people and should not be forgotten. I believe Otsuka wishes to tackle that issue with her novel and especially resonates in her title personifying the Japanese as a whole.

Cultural Tradition vs. Assimilation

In Otsuku's novel, "When The Emperor was Divine," there is an evident struggle of identity for the young boy character. Like his ancestors, he wishes to remain small framed so that he may jockey a horse someday. His peers advise him to "become a big American" however, because that would lead to "success." The boy from here on internalizes the issue of conflict between the cultures of his Japanese heritage and his new home.

 Otsuku helps to illuminate this as the boy dreams in the stable and dreams of riding a white horse. The color of the horse is especially significant, as one would unfortunately think of the white male as the typical and average American. The boy has mixed symbols of both worlds in his dream, further uncovering the extent to how indecisive the boy is.

Assimilation has been a hardship that has always walked hand-in-hand with immigration. I recall my great-grandfather, Damiano Anthony Fabrizi telling me of his travel to Ellis Island and the "new" name he was given when his ship landed, Anthony Damiano Fabrizi, because it was more American. Unlike the boy, my great grandfather had no struggle and accepted his new future, much as the peers of the boy do. For the boy however, he has the depth to put more thought into the battle and hopes for an outcome he can comfortably live with.

When The Emperor Was Divine

During the early 1940s, history's most gruesome acts against humanity were committed during the Holocaust as the Nazi's occupied western Europe. But right here in America, as we were fighting for the rights of humanity, we were condemning our own Japanese-American citizens.

Julie Otsuka's novel When The Emperor was Divine describes the journey one Japanese family undergoes as this very event occurs in Berkeley, California. Otsuka uses one of my favorite literary devices, borrowed from Existentialism, a stoic form of writing devoid of much emotion. This subtle tool is so essential to the core theme of the novel. As the Japanese were being dehumanized and their human rights and emotions were being stripped and ignored, Otsuka uses the stoic styling of writing to illuminate this thought. The same idea is employed in the nameless nature of the characters. Each member of the family is addressed by their role in the family : the boy, the girl, the father, etc.

As historical fiction does, Otsuka is creating her own scenario in an event that actually happened to enlighten readers more thoroughly of a crime against humanity that occurred and went mostly unnoticed.