Breath, Eyes, Memory

This novel is set in the always turbulent country of Haiti located in the Carribean. This country is one of the poorest in the world and always seems to be involved in some kind of violent discourse.

The country is so poor that the natives make due with what they have. Sophies aunt explains to her that they are lucky to live in as big of a house as they do. The house is certainly not the model of luxury and they have to share a crowded yard with all of their neighbors and they cook outside over open fires. The inhabitants of the village work for terrible pay performing manual labor jobs for long hours wearing out their bodies.

The government that was in place was all powerful and could execute people without the right to a trial. The government had a secret police force known as the Macoutes. In the book they are described as being non-human, they are referred to as mythical monsters that were born neither of God nor the Devil. They were unpaid volunteers that used fear, intimidation, and terror to subdue the people that they were supposed to be serving. Any kind of rebellion against these government officials was put down swiftly. When Sophie’s aunt is accompying her to the airport there is a car on fire and young Haitins attempting to battle the military figures. “They (the Haitians) scurried to avoid the tear gas and the round of bullets that the soldiers shot back at them.” (BEM, Danticat, 34)

Another issue witht he population is the total lack of education. Less than ten percent of the population could read, most of this miniscule percentage were made up of the young girls and boys that were just getting the benifit of little schooling. When sophie is buying lottery tickets with her aunt she asks “Would it not be wonderful to read,” Tantie Atie replies, “I tell you my time is passed. School is not for people my age.”(BEM, Danticat, 6) The older generation of Haitians have never been exposed to any kind of education and they seem to not even believe that they could even learn if they wanted to.

The most prevelant problem in the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory is the sexual violence that is often carried out against young women. The main character Sophie is a product of this sexual violence as she was conceived from a brutal rape that occured in the sugar cane fields. “A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body. I was still a young girl then, just barely older than you”, (BEM, Danticat, pg.61). This terrifying experience haunts Sophie’s mother for the rest of her life. She has terrible nightmares of the rape that make her cry out horribly in her sleep.

The lighter skinned individual has more power in Haiti therefore many of the natives wish to be lighter skinned. Sophies mother goes as far as to physically alter the color of her skin by bleaching it to appear more like a light skinned black. She tries in vain to make herself appear white to cover up years of abuse for simply being a native Haitian.

 

Breath, Eyes, Memory. Edwidge Danticat

The Poisonwood Bible

It is no secret that the people of Africa have long been taken advantage of and treated inhumanely. It is a terrible battle between good and evil that still wages today. Many countries have come into Africa with promises of modern goodies and religion for everyone but in the end it always ends up with the imposters taking more than what they deserve and giving little in return.

The first man to enter the turbulent Congo and set up a soveirgn nation was King Leopold of Belgium. His government did not give their blessing to him to enter the congo and start a colony. However he ignored their concerns and decided to do it as a private citizen. He hired on his own men and created The International African Society that was cleverly disguised as a scientific and philanthropic association. Really it was nothing more than a private army out to take what they pleased no matter what that meant for the unsuspecting natives of the Congo. With their guise in place it was easy for the king to move in and gain the trust of the natives. He claimed a piece of land that was seventy six times the size of his native Belgium and enslaved the people.

The first of many natural resources to be exploited by a foreign group of people in the Congo was the rubber industry. The Congo has an abundant supply of rubber trees that up until this point had never been comercially harvested. King Leopold was using the natives to harvest the rubber and killing or disfiguring any of the natives that did not comply. Estimates for the number of natives killed under King Leopold are in the millions to tens of millions. He would work the congonese literally to their death and then replace them with another one of their kinfolk.

The King would seperate young children from their families and take the ones that were old enough and put them to work harvesting the rubber while the younger ones went into childrens colonies where they were forced to convert to Christianity. If anyone, be they men, women or children did not comply with the rules of the king he was have their hands severed as a sign of their mistakes.

In the twentieth century the focus turned to what lies beneath the African soil. The Congo has been referred to as “The richest patch of earth on the plane”. Now this certainly does not mean that the people themselves are rich, this statement refers to the mineral wealth that the land posseses. The congo is on of the biggest suppliers of diamonds, copper, zinc, cobalt, manganese, uranium, niobium, and the newest and possibly the most intriguing to foreign markets coltan. Coltan is used is several things, among these are fiber optics, cell phones, computers, military grade night vision goggles, and even in the Sony Playstation. All of these minerals make a profit of one hundred and fifty seven billion dollars per year. Now hardly any of this profit sees its way back into the Congo’s infrastructure. Nearly all of the money is made by foreign companies from Europe, Asia, and even the United States.

There are still terrible dictators running business the same way king leopold did in the early nineteenth century with little or no concern for the well being of the Congonese people.

 

“Leopold II”. Encyclopedia Britannica.2009. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 2009

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Adam Hochschild. Mariner Books. October 1999

Precursors to the Hippies

After World War II America became terrified with the pervading communist threat and turned to a life of consumerism. Automobiles were everywhere, highways were constructed and there was a television in almost every house telling you what you should buy. The fifties constructed extremely rigid gender roles that were highlighted by girls playing with barbies and young boys dressing up like the cowboys they saw in the movies and running around popping off cap guns. It was a clean-cut pro-religion society in which “…under God” was added to the pledge of allegience because religion was considered anti-communist.

During all of this prosperity and bubble gum way of life there was one group who dared to question the institutions that ran this country. This group what known as the beat generation. It was composed of young writers, artists, and thinkers that were searching for answers in a chaotic post-war America. The individuals were dubbed beatniks and at the beginning of the movement they were almost always white males. The man who introduced this idea of the Beat Generation was a poet named Jack Kerouac. In an interview with a New York Times reporter he utter the words that would define a generation. A few years later, in 1952, John C. Holmes published his article in the New York Times that he called “This is the Beat Generation”. Kerouac went on to give his own official definition for the movement as “Members of the generation that came after World War II, who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the cold war, espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions.”

Most of the original members of this beatnik movement were from the north eastern United States, more specifically uptown Manhattan. You had Jack Kerouac, the man who gave the movement a name, Alen Ginsberg, arguably the most famous poet of the movement, Neal Cassidy, and William Burroughs. All of these men lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the prestigious Columbia University making their home a great place for eager young minds. The men later moved to the even more intellectual and diverse city of San Francisco California where they were really appreciated and were able to spread their message.

As poets they were greatly influenced by Walt Whitman, especially his book of poetry entitled “Leaves of Grass”. They fed off of Whitman’s non-traditional verse patterns that seemed more natural and his emphasis on individual spirituality. This spirituality later lead to several of the movements leaders to begin studying the religion of zen Buddhism that later translates into their stories and poems.

Not only did they like the unorthodox methods that Whitman used they also became deeply influenced by Jazz music that was beginning to sweep the underground of the nation. Jazz was music without rules that allowed the musicians to tell a story and inspired the writers to explore new mediums. One of the major problems that the Beat Generation would face was drug and alcohol abuse that actually killed several of their members well before their time.

Several members of the movement were open homosexuals at a time that no one would ever admit to homosexual tendencies. The idea that everything goes was a big part of the Beat Generation. No one was judged for their shortcomings and there was no mistakes in art. The Beatniks questioned not only the classical structure of art, literature, and music but questioned the post-war American society that did not want to hear them.

“The Only ones for me are the mad ones…mad to life, mad to talk” Jack Kerouac

Tender Buttons; Cubism in Writing

Gertrude Stein was a well known poet as well as a huge proponent of art. Her and her husband spent much of their life collecting and debating art. They accrued a respectable collection of very famous works and opened their home to guests, both invited and un-invited on saturday nights. Stein fell in love with the cubism that was sweeping across the art world about the time that she was writing Tender Buttons. She became infactuated with the work of one artist inparticular, Pablo Picasso. He was known for his fragmented art and wild cubic style that allowed the viewer to interprit his work however they saw fit. Stein seems to draw on this particular style of art and translates it perfectly into her writing style.

Stein takes various objects that seem rather unimportant and give them new life through a confusing jumble of nouns and adjectives. She talks about “A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.  All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling.  The difference is spreading. ”(Stein) At first glance these lines are confusing and seem to have no real meaning. Once the reader delves deeper into the meaning the lines can literally be translated into meaning just about whatever the reader feels. The single hurt color could be red, the color of blood or passion. The glass could be filled with red wine and the cousin could be referring to other kinds of glasses or containers.

Even the title Tender Buttons is a source of debate. Some seem to think that the phrase refers to a womans nipples while other believe that she borrowed the title from a French phrase Tendres Boutons which refers to the budding of plants. Many agree that the latter is the more likely of the sources. Just as a new bud from a plant transforms so do Stein’s words and the meaning behind them. Reading one of Stein’s poems is very similar to viewing one of Picasso’s paintings. In various forms of abstraction the poem or painting can have limitless meanings for the viewer. The work literally goes through a metamorphosis that appears differently to different people.

Neither Picasso nor Stein thought of their work as abstract they simply saw a new avenue to get their point across and used it to their advantage. Their goal is to not just paint a pretty picture with their words or paint brush but to create a sensation that the viewer can interprit and react to.

Stein’s work brings together many small and seemingly unimportant pieces that form a larger whole very similar to cubism. Picasso painted many of his cubic works showcasing movements by isolating different parts of the piece just like Stein isolates her words through the use of impropper grammar and punctuation. Both Stein and Picasso question how things around them were conceptualized by everyday people and challenged the ideas by flipping the script and allowing the viewer to put together all the pieces. They both focused on how things were perceived by strangers and those that new the object or subject intimately.

Hawthorne and the Making of the Middle Class, Michael T. Gilmore

In the book The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne never refers to a specific class system and certainly does not mention the middle class. He simply uses words like rich and poor. Although he leads the reader to believe that there is this two class system with no grey area in the middle he does alot to create a middle common class in the story.  “…the period when Hawthorne was writing saw the appearence of the middle class in its recognizably modern form.” (Gilmore 598) It is suggested that this middle class was formed when there was a seperation between public and private spheres, gender arrangements, and the change from naturalism to historical contingency. There was now an inversion of gender roles according to Gilmore that lead to the ultimate forming of the powerful modern middle class.  “The middle class mother assumes a relation to the social like that of a free market individualist, while the middle class father embraces feminized sentiment” (Gilmore599)

Hawthorne is considered one of the great writers of the nineteenth century that played a large role in the creation of the modern middle class. Gilmore believes that the reason he was so unclear about the class structure in his writing was because of his own struggle to fit into the class structure. Hawthorne was a very talented man who struggled to earn a living through literature leaving him somewhere in the middle of the rich and the poor. It is said that this group of people (the middle class) do not want to be categorized and in The Scarlett Letter they are given a vague name “The People”. Hawthorne also describes the class system of the Puritan times as feudal. He writes that the Puritans replaced the “System of ancient prejudice” that are associated with “nobles and kings”. That is the way the classes were viewed during the Puritan times, there was the rich and then everyone else was lumped into the poor category. “It is a community of rulers and the ruled,” (Gilmore 601).

Hester’s refusal to step forward in the marketplace and identify her lover shows the seperation of the public and private spheres and puts hester at the fore front of the movement for post-Puritan life.  Hester assumes the role of the nineteenth century middle-class mother and takes on duties that are considered admirable such as volunteering as a nurse. Gilmore describes the new middle class womans role as a “…self sacrificing dispenser of nurturance.” (602)

Just as Hester is described as this post-puritan new middle class woman her male counterpart is formed through Dimmesdale. He is the new middle-class father. He admires Hesters refusal to speak out in public and he himself supports the idea of the seperation of the public and private spheres. He struggles as a minister to put on a faccade and speak to his parish while his private self is much different that what his public sees.

Hawthorne paints a picture of the forming of the modern middle class through courageous characters that are trying to break free from the grip of strict Puritan life. The middle class is not ever mentioned but through careful reading one can find references to this new class system all thoughout the story.

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