What it means to love

I was very much in shock after reading about Sethe's past. The little hints and glimmers scattered throughout the book made it easy to see that yes, the baby was probably killed by Sethe herself, but the circumstances and motivations remained unclear. Before I actually got to the retelling of the events, I could, in no way, justify Sethe's actions. Isn't killing your child the absolute worst thing you could do? Hasn't it been ingrained in our minds by every medium of society that murder is just about the worst crime? You probably could argue yes, but in the context of this specific situation, Sethe wasn't killing, she was, as she said in her own words, just sending her baby away to a safer place. To finally taste freedom, to finally realize just how oppressed, how enslaved, and how restricted a life she lived in Sweet Home added a whole new layer of resentment to Sethe's dilemma. Sweet Home was intolerable, she knew she had to get away, if not for herself, then for her children. She took comfort in the fact that she sent away her children alone and vulnerable in the arms of strangers, because that, to her, was a fate more favorable than a lifetime of slavery. With no previous warning, no other means of escape, Sethe had to choose the eternal escape, the only place that her children could be guaranteed safety and protection. In her scrambled state of mind, only one thought ran through her head, and that was keeping her children away from the life that she had endured. If death was the only viable way to save her children, then well Sethe sure took it. Death was the ultimate gesture of her love, honestly the biggest sacrifice any parent could ever be forced to make. She took the cliche of loving someone enough to let them go to a whole new level, and at the end of the day, it worked.

The child that is Denver

So I haven't started my weekend reading, but from what I have read so far, if things weren't laid out in such an explicit chronological order, I honestly would have thought that Denver was a small(ish?) child. Isolated and friendless, Denver is not socialized, she is stubborn, and childlike in her ways. Reading the first few chapters (and even the first few pages) left me very confused. She was mad at Baby Suggs, her grandmother, for dying (dying?!?), overtly rude to Paul D within their first encounter, and much like a small child, she didn't want to share her mother. We are also told that she is basically 18. Still, even in the beginning, I found her character extremely sympathetic. She has essentially been deprived of everything we like to associate with childhood, and really only is hungry for love, attention, and friendship. In the early stages of the book, Denver really reminded me a lot of Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God, because both characters were enamored with the idea of love (though different kinds), had grown up under the care of women who had lived through the realities of slavery, and had also grown up away and separated from children their own age. In a lot of ways, she also parallels the ghost of the dead baby. The spirit that haunts 124 is prone to tantrums and innocent mischief, and when Beloved actually enters the story, we see that she is a beautiful, young woman, trapped in a state of infancy. Denver too, just like Beloved, is a fully grown woman, that acts like a child. However this slowly changes along with Beloved's intrusion into the story, and we already begin to see changes within Denver as she adopts the role of an older sibling and caregiver instead of the childlike role she played before. I wonder how she'll continue to evolve.

Is public property more valuable than private property?

This week, mostly when we had our discussion right after finishing Style Wars, one of the biggest arguments that we had, I think, was about whether or not private property was more valuable than public property. I think the general consensus in the room was that the graffiti on the outside of the subway trains were beautiful, artistic, and inspiring, but the main difference in opinion existed about whether or not we cared about the legalities of it. Maybe we all do little things that 'break the law' (I'm sure at least that we all jay-walk), but we all also understand the fine line between actual criminal activity and harmless habits. People who were for self expression through graffiti claimed that since it was public property, it didn't belong to one single owner, and that the artists had as much right to paint on it as others had to ride on it. Conversely, people against graffiti on the trains used the argument that defacing private property (like someone's house) would be disrespectful, and would cause justifiable anger. Is defacing public property less 'bad' than defacing private property? Its hard to say, public property is something that all of us pay for, including those who don't like graffiti. We all pay for the right to have access to efficient, public transportation, but do we all also pay for the right to have clean, efficient, transportation? Graffiti is meant to speak to other writers, but when this exclusive group of writers compose an incredibly small minority of the people who pay for trains, is it fair to impose their art on the majority that either don't care or don't want graffiti? Likewise you could argue that graffiti is a form of self-expression, and it was probably one of the only artistic outlets that early writers had available to them. It's easy to form strong opinions on this topic, but there are always two sides to a story. Its sort of like Nanny and Janie, I'm not really sure who or what I sympathize with.

Yoshiko--The Mail Order Bride

I know it's a little late to be talking about White Boy Shuffle, but it just dawned on me how crazy Yoshiko's role in the book actually was. We all knew that Psycho Loco said he was going to get Gunnar married by the time he turned 18, but I didn't actually take that seriously at all. I skimmed over that little promise, convinced myself that he was joking, and completely forgot about it until Yoshiko was actually a physical presence in the book. The craziest thing was not that Psycho Loco got a mail order bride from who-knows-where out of who-knows-what circumstances for 18 year old Gunnar, but more that later in the novel it turns out that Yoshiko is the perfect girl for Gunnar, and eventually the love of his life. There was definitely a tone of surrealism throughout the whole story, but it struck me especially with Yoshiko and Gunnar's marriage. I mean how many guys have never ever been with a girl in their life, get set up with their wife from a mail order service at 18, and then realize that their new wife is actually their soul mate? For a long time I couldn't believe that Yoshiko was even there in the first place, and secondly that she and Gunnar were really and truly in love. The most puzzling part is that, as we get acclimated to Yoshiko and her character in the novel, the more it feels like she was always there. She fits right into the story, develops into the perfect girl for Gunnar, and even gets pregnant with his child. We have to constantly remind ourselves that her character doesn't even appear until the last quarter of the book, despite the huge impact and influence she has over Gunnar's adult life. The most curious part to me is that regardless of the little time she is given to be a part of the story, Yoshiko blossoms as a character without having any real introduction. We never find out about her past, what drove her to become a mail order bride, how she picked up English so well, and whether or not she even had/has a family. From an outsider point of view she seems like a sorely undeveloped character, but in context, in the actual text of the novel, she is a pivotal piece in Gunnar's narrative. Maybe I should get a mail order husband.

The Multicultural Education Ideaology

Okay, so this title is a little confusing, but for some reason I kept seeing parallels between Gunnar's previous school in Santa Monica with the Brotherhood from Invisible Man. In class during discussions, most of my classmates seemed to be against the 'multicultural' education that Gunnar underwent during his years in Santa Monica. Despite all of its good intentions, the whole schooling system was flawed, it pushed its students to fit into a mainstream mold that was mostly representative of 'white culture'. Likewise, it was almost patronizing in the way that it claimed all students were human, as if some students were privileged to be treated humanly, and as if by acknowledging their human-ness (for lack of a better word), the school was doing something great. After attending this kind of school for such a long time, it was almost next to impossible for Gunnar to fit into the totally different culture he encountered in Hillside.

The ghetto culture in Hillside was as big of a shock to Gunnar as the zootsuiters were to the Narrator. Both of these groups fell outside of the range that the Brotherhood and Santa Monica school catered to, they fell outside of the mainstream, and in the eyes of both institutions, they were nonexistent and not worth caring about. As the Narrator became more involved with the Brotherhood he realized that the Brothers did not care about his individuality but that they only saw him as a useful tool to meet their needs. He was the skilled, black, public speaker, much like Gunnar was the funny, cool, black guy. In order to be successful, both the Narrator and Gunnar had to conform to the societal values that were forced on them.

Janie Without the Beauty?

Along the same lines as one of my earlier posts, I'm going back to the point about the importance of appearances in our society. As I was reading Their Eyes Were Watching God I was always visualizing Janie in my head because the vivid descriptions of her, starting even from the very beginning, really struck me. I made a note of it and realized that Janie's physical appearance is almost sort of crucial to the heart of her story. From the very beginning of chapter one we get a very clear description of her, one that tells of an unconventional beauty, almost intimidating in its magnitude. Most significant is her hair, a symbol for her sensuality and deeply feminine nature. When we are first introduced to Janie we see her in tattered overalls, yet her beauty is still obvious enough to spark jealousy among the other women. Much like lighter skin (which Janie also has because of her mixed ancestry), straighter, finer hair was preferred to kinkier, coarser hair because of its similarity to Caucasian hair. Janie's hair is described to be long, straight, and thick. It was something she took pride in, and something that attracted others to her. It was so coveted, that Jody, during their marriage, had even required Janie to always keep her hair hidden away from the eyes of other men, mostly in an attempt to control her. Janie's beauty proves to be both a boon and a burden to her thoroughout the story. Her kind of pretty makes it so that she gets chances in life that other women may not have, after all, how many 40 something women can find true love from attractive men in their twenties *after* two failed marriages? While Janie draws a lot of her personality from her physical self, because she is so aware of her beauty, she also has a huge drive for independence. As she learns to wield the gift of beauty, Janie discovers that, at times, being beautiful is a huge obstacle. She is spoiled or assumed to be spoiled, stemming from an early age because of how she is treated by white people (who tended to favor 'whiter' looking blacks), she is assumed to have an air of superiority (as seen by the villagers who assume that she is haughty because of her looks), and often times friendless because she left other women feeling insecure. Janie learns that by looking a certain way, she will always be labeled and placed into categories that aren't representative of her. As I read more of the story, I realize that one of Janie's major struggles is coming to terms with her outward appearance and learning to use it in a way so that her actual self can shine through. With that thought, I imagined how completely different this story would've been if Janie had been plain looking. Would there be a Jody to rescue her from Logan, or rather, would there even be a Logan at all?

Sympathy for the Hopeless Romantic

Though long overdue, I wanted to comment on the dynamic of Nanny and Janie on the matter of marriage. Janie, being 17 when she is first married, is in a kind of situation that I could obviously never relate to, but can have some serious sympathy for. Janie is in many ways a hopeless romantic. She wants love, the kind that blossoms under pear trees, in a world where sometimes love has no practical place. I think, if I were an older reader, coming in with a much more cynical perspective on life I'd have a harder time sympathizing with Janie, but right now, I find her all too relatable. I think idealized expectations of love are kind of a rite of passage for teenage girls, whether we admit to it or not. Janie is impulsive, aware of her sexuality, and deeply connected with her emotions. Because her emotions are such direct influences on her, she can't stay still in a position where she isn't satisfied, physically or emotionally. On the other hand, Nanny, too,  is well justified in her opposition. Born and raised a slave, with her only daughter being the product of a painful rape, love is trivial, and basically inconsequential. In Nanny's perspective Logan Killicks represents an ideal, something that she could have only dreamt of when she was Janie's age. To have the opportunity, as a woman, to be able to marry into such financial stability was something as valuable to Nanny as love must have seemed to Janie.

This situation is deeply affected by the generational gap between the two characters that prevent them from understanding the others' point of view. In a lot of ways I see parallels of this situation between myself, my cousins and my own grandmother. I won't go into details, but my grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage at the age of 14, and like Nanny, love was never a reality for her. She had children because society expected her to, and struggled to raise her children single-handedly after her husband's sudden, and premature death. Though I respect her in a lot of ways, I also see that her mentality is skewed and stuck in an earlier time. This became especially evident to me when I saw her try to end the engagement between my cousin and her long time boyfriend only because of the interracial nature of their relationship. Different people will always have different priorities in life, but I realize now, that given context, most people are justified in their beliefs.