P2 Really rough practice in 30 minutes

12. Explain, with reference to works you have studied, why writers are frequently drawn to tell stories about characters who are rebellious towards or in some way alienated from society.

[REALLY ROUGH THESIS STATEMENT + Outline]

In TFA and TATD, Mahfouz and Achebe choose to portray their main characters as characters that do not entirely conform to the society that they are in. Despite this, the protagonists are both very attached to their respective societies, and could even represent an ideal person of that society. However, their relatable characteristics and tragic ends provide commentary on the ideals of their societies, our own perceptions of ideals, and the dangers of rejecting our societies' opinions.

TS1

Okonkwo and Said represent their societies ideals, but challenge them, thus revealing various aspects of their own societies in a genuine and realistic way.

TS2

The fact that the protagonists represent the ideal of the societies, but still reject it and get rejected themselves teaches us that sometimes what we believe to be correct may not be.

TS3

They show us how society can be extremely harsh and unforgiving, and that rejecting it in favor of a fanatist ideology, even if it is supporting that society's ideology, may not be the right thing to do.

That one piece of cryptic otherworldly thing that is practically meant to not be understood...

It would seem that all of the parts where Said goes to see the Sheikh there is this certain aura of peace and tranquility. I mean “The old room had hardly changed. [...] the Sheikh’s sleeping mattress still lay close to the western wall, pierced by a window through which the rays of the declining Sun were pouring down at Said’s feet.” I mean, it sounds like a moment out of those old anime that were so calm and detached that you felt kinda high by the end. There is no other place in the story that is so calm… almost heavenly…

The Sheikh is somehow a being that seems to know it all. When Said first arrives at his house in Chapter 2 and says that he seeks his guidance the Sheikh responds “You seek the walls, not the heart.” He also always speaks in a metaphoric language that is rather off compared to the rest of the dialogues in the book. It’s almost as if the Sheikh was not human. As if he was something else. Like a perfectly wise being. A being that resides in heaven only to carry out His word.

You know, there is an interesting point made in The Matrix trilogy by the architect, the creator of the Matrix. He says that the reason that the first Matrix did not succeed was because it was created as a utopia. There was no pain or suffering, only happiness… but the humans could not live that way, and so they revolted to bring it down. It would almost seem as if this idea is repeated here. Said is talking to a man that resides in a perfect, warm and welcoming place. But Said is too human to simply stay there and devote himself to Islam. He needs that rush in life, which he will most certainly lose if he stays in that house. In a sense, it would seem that the Sheikh and his house represent a lost past to Said. A past of peace and happiness that led to a promising future, were it not for his father’s unfortunate death early on that was probably the event that kicked off the little rock that would continue to roll down the mountain until becoming a huge snowball that, literally, kills Said at the end.

However, it would almost seem like Said belongs in that house. The house is the first place that comes to Said’s mind when he gets out of prison to go to for shelter. He even says it himself: “this house is my real home as it always was home for my father and for every supplicant.” Despite this, it seems that Said cut off his ties with this world a long time ago. The Sheikh almost seems angry as he constantly repeats “Wash and read” while Said is telling him the story of his most recent tragedy, and that’s despite the fact that the book says “replied the Sheikh gently.” It would seem that Said has had the opportunity to repent for all his stealing and bad deeds many times before, but has always shunned them away. Said has already set himself on a path of destruction by the time that he comes back to the Sheikh’s house. He is too detached to understand the cryptic words of wisdom the Sheikh is trying to give to him. As Said himself puts it, the Sheikh’s “words [...] cannot be understood by someone approaching hell.” Said is beyond the point of salvation…

I’ll be honest and say that I really am clueless as to what the Sheikh symbolizes. I’ve tried to bring in as many facts as I could to look into them, but the epiphany has not hit me yet. If I had to take a guess, I would say the Sheikh is a representation of a calm, peaceful, and pure world that is beyond the reach of our unfortunate protagonist... Maybe I too am too close to hell to understand... Maybe we all are, because Mahfouz seems to be portraying the guy as way too mean and cryptic for pretty much anyone to understand.

The not so pleasant journey into the mind of the character

When one starts reading Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs the weird use of italics in the middle of the text come across as one of the most intriguing parts. In these words, the narration suddenly shifts into a First Person narration that is practically being delivered as a monologue by Said towards some characters that are completely unknown to the reader. And yet, despite this unconventional break in the narration structure of the  novel, Mahfouz manages to convey his story in an extremely effective way that remains intuitive right off the first paragraph that does this, when the only context that is given is that he just came out of prison and that the weather's hot.

The stream of consciousness in Mahfouz's novel is perhaps the most natural and fluid progression ever. The author jumps around from one point in time to another inside the stream but it still seems perfectly natural. In a sense, the flow of Said's thoughts in The Thief and the Dogs is modeled after the way the human mind records and remembers events. We do not remember things in a linear progression, but rather we tend to recall things at different times in different order, the memories are all cut up, split up and distorted and this shows through in Said's stream of consciousness. He rarely recalls a memory on a specific person fully from the start. It is not until episode ten that we hear the story of how he fell in love with Nabawiyya and it's in episode ten that we learn of how his father died; both of these memories are revealed much after Said makes a first mention of them during the first and second episode respectively. Said recalling his memories in a scattered and discontinuous manner does not throw off the reader because it is natural for us to do that kind of remembering. Replaying a scene from our past in our heads comes natural, and Mahfouz uses this to his advantage to capture the reader and make his novel interesting.

One of the most interesting aspects of the stream of consciousness however, has to do with how the discontinuity and brokenness of his thoughts as well as the progression of the wrath he feels evolves throughout the story. Throughout the first chapters his thoughts are usually coherent and don't vary from one topic to another too suddenly.

Translations... Traducciones... Traductions...

There's a certain charm in the foreign, something that we never voluntarily seek to fully comprehend, but whenever it lands in our lives we can't help but be fascinated. We find it extremely intriguing that foreign human beings - who are always portrayed as an oversimplified out-group in our own media, in our own languages - could have such a striking resemblance to us in the aspects we least expect. Their core human aspects, the ones that we inherently know form a part of our daily lives, but are buried under the layer of politeness that culture spreads upon our lives. 

Texts in another language are the most genuine representation of a person's personal world. The language itself contains an entirely different culture, in their feel and their ideas and expressions. But unfortunately, language is a frontier that is not so easily crossed. Crossing it requires time and understanding, learning a new language to the point where one can connect with it and understand the culture that is engrained within the particular text. However, there is a short-cut to this understanding, albeit a perilous one where a lot must be sacrificed in order to cross over. That is the route of translation.

A work in translation will NEVER feel like the original. Try to translate any poem into any language and you will notice that it doesn't feel like the original. The concepts and ideas transmitted in the translation will lack the essence of the language. Translating from spanish to english causes the roughness and simplicity of the Spanish language to disappear, while going the other way around makes the English language's elegance and sophistication vanish. This type of sacrifice that has to be made in order to trespass the cultural frontiers in texts and gain basic understanding of the ideas. But in a constantly globalizing world where cultures become more and more easily connected with each passing year, learning a new language and experiencing other cultures first hand is easier than ever. So the question has to be asked, is the sacrifice truly worth it? Wouldn't it be better to simply learn the new language and experience the culture first hand? 

Personally, I'd say yes and yes. It would be better, but the sacrifice allows for a connection that would otherwise be hard to create.

Is deception just as bad as telling an outright lie?

Deception according to Google: A thing that deceives; the act of deceiving someone

…

Deceive according to Google: Deliberately cause someone to believe that something is not true, especially for personal gain

Lying is an intrinsic part of us human beings. It’s quite sad to say that absolutely no human being has never told a lie in their life. But that’s the truth. Lying is an essential part of our lives and it will probably always be. But when does lying become a problem?

In my opinion, it is always a problem. A society where nobody needs to tell a lie would be a nearly perfect society. A society where everyone would have to live up to the truth and deal with it. A society where everyone can trust everyone and cooperation is actually possible. But this is not the case, we are living in a lying world. However, the thing that makes this lying world so bad is not really the fact that we’re telling lies. It is the fact that over time people have learned how to lie properly in order to get the masses to believe them.

Outright lies are easy to catch out. An educated audience will always be able to catch one of these. The thing that can often make them effective is when the truth about something is not actually known by the population. But eventually the truth always comes out, and outright lies will eventually be righted. In fact, I believe that the thing that really keeps them from dominating is the fact that it’s possible to provide counter-evidence. If the people can be shown the truth, then a lie will lose credibility.

Deception however, is a different story. Deception is sneaky. When done right, there’s no way to perceive it. Deception is much more carefully orchestrated so that it isn’t caught out. Facts can be true, but the message that will be given may not be a truthful one. It is the fact that deception is so powerful that makes it much worse than just telling outright lies. Deceiving someone is much more likely to succeed because the facts are so well manipulated to be credible. But the undeniable fact is that it is still lying. And because of that, we cannot have a society where trust is consistent. Use of deception is something that has been deeply ingrained into our culture, and it will be difficult to get rid of it, given that it can be so effective to further personal agendas.

Because of all this, I’m going to side up with the other corner in the classroom. I strongly disagree, not because deception is better than lying, but because it is much worse.

Learning how to be Biased: writing a biased article

The following is an attempt at rewriting this article: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/09/tripped-refugee-heading-spain-football-academy-150916142230899.html by portraying an ideology different than the one portrayed in it.

Syrian Refugee Crisis a Hoax?

Recently Osama Abdul Mohsem, the refugee who was tripped by the Hungarian camerawoman Petra Laszlo was discovered to be a football coach back in Syria and was taken in by a football academy in Spain to come and work as a coach. This wonderful humanitarian act would not have been possible without the media's constant repeated reporting of the seemingly awful story of the Hungarian camerawoman's actions. However, how many people have stopped to think about why the camerawoman tripped the man in the first place?

The Syrian refugee crisis is perhaps the most reported and continued news story that we've had in a while. But is the way that the media portrays the crisis actually truthful? Is the tale of the “Syrian refugees” truly as sad as we have been demonstrated it is? Part of it is. It is undeniable that Syria is right now going through a time of crisis and that the conflict has caused large displacements of the population both within the country and outside of it. But is the flood of refugees in Europe we've been hearing so much of actually made up of fleeing families?

It turns out that the media has been skewing our perception of the refugee crisis in Europe. While it is true that tragic stories like that of Osama Abdul Mohsem are a reality, the media focuses far too much attention on stories like this.

Out of all the “Syrian” refugees arriving at Europe, it is quite often that as many as 90% of the refugees claiming to be Syrian do not actually have the documents to prove it. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of Syrian refugees that are interviewed by the media state that the thing that they want the most is to return to Syria, so that their lives can go back to normal. If that is the case, then why are there so many refugees making the perilous journey all the way to Germany, when the UN's convention relating to the Status of Refugees states that countries are obligated to grant asylum to anybody who declares a refugee status in the first country that they report in? Clearly Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt are already over-saturated, with refugees, so then considering that the Arab Gulf states don't want to offer any help to their Muslim brothers, the next option in line is Europe. But why go all the way to Germany when all the other countries are capable of providing asylum? Eastern Europe may not be economically developed enough to provide optimal conditions for refugees, but neither are Lebanon and Egypt, at least in comparison to the likes of Germany. It is obvious that these “refugees” are looking for more than just a place to stay in until the conflict subsides. They are looking for a country where they will be showered with money.

Despite this, countries like Hungary have received a tremendous backlash in the media for not accepting refugees. But with a real calamity waiting behind the floodgates, one can truly understand the reasoning behind Hungary's decision. The culture that all these refugees carry with them is completely opposing to the standards of European culture. It would be extremely difficult for any country to not be gravely affected by the sudden massive influx of refugees. There have even been reports of a school in Germany close to a refugee camp having to ban miniskirts for the fear of possible rape by refugees. And this is in fact not as far fetched of a statement, considering that there have already been rapes of women and children within a refugee camp in Europe.

The massive, rapid influx of refugees means that the refugees are not having to adapt to Europe; Europe is having to adapt to the refugees. These refugees, who could easily be Pakistanis or Jordanians who threw their passports to the sea and then claimed to be Syrian upon arrival, are bringing in a massive and abrupt change to the European way of life. Perhaps it is about time for the media to begin to understand that Syria is not the only country with problems. As the saying goes: “You can't take care of others if you can't take care of yourself.” Perhaps it is time that the NATO affiliated countries stopped complaining about Russia and Bashar Al Asad, and found a way to stop the violence once and for all so that the senseless mass migration can stop and Syrians can go back to where they truly want to be: “Home.”





Rationale:

The article was meant to go against the ideology of Al Jazeera regarding the Syrian refugee crisis about how the refugees are victims and anybody who doesn't want to offer them help is the enemy. The article is a continuation to all the series of news stories regarding the reporter that tripped the refugee, so it is following the ideology of the refugees being victims and the non-conforming Europeans being the aggressors.

The main idea of my article is to shift that focus and, while still keeping the idea that refugees are victims, show that the European states have a point when they say they don't want to accept refugees. The ideology in my article does not go against the Syrian refugees, but rather it goes against Western media in general, by claiming that their focus on the problem is not only ignoring the negative aspects of that the refugees are bringing to Europe; but also portraying their focus in the media as "wrong" and not focused on where the real issue lies: in the governments' incapacity to cooperate together.

This is English

Here I sit, intrigued at the fact that I will actually post this before sundown and pondering why on Earth did our teacher ask us to a simple literary analysis of such a... speech... that only goes to how does this guy develop his thesis and how does that thesis relate to the question “How can literature develop empathy and emotional intelligence?” Although personally to me it seems that the speech is so good and blunt that there isn't really a need to explain the concept(s) exposed. So on with the typical English stuff:

https://vimeo.com/68855377

He starts off his speech with a humorous and rather unlikely metaphor that really captures the audiences attention. He then explains what the metaphor means and then goes on to explain what it really means. He talks about the whole routine. About how people just get up, go to their difficult jobs. Work. Get stressed. Work. Get back home. “Unwind.” Then go sleep to do it all over again. Then he goes into what happens when you run out of food. And well, “you have to drive to the supermarket.” And then suffer like I think pretty much everyone does while trying to get all you need and then pay (the queues..!). And etc etc. So in this first part he goes on using a simple description of this deadly routine and uses a simple form of it, so that everyone can relate. He goes on it in a very sulky and depressing tone so that people really get the idea that the routine is depressing and annoying.

Then he takes a tone shift as soon as he says “But that is not the point.” He goes on to explain how it's all about choice. Making emphasis on the whole “choice” part. He talks about how it's our default setting to think that everything revolves around us and uses the example that maybe everyone else around us that is stressing us out is just as equally stressed. Basically saying in a very long way that life isn't as depressing as we see it all the time in our default setting, but that it's up to us to make it seem depressing.

He finally wraps it up by saying that even though the speech isn't inspiring like homecoming speeches tend to be, it is a lesson to be assimilated by anyone. The end, pretty much... Shout outs to the people that made the video above for recognizing these three sections of the speech.

Now then, how does this relate to the inquiry question? Well simple. When we read we get to consider perspectives of people different to us. We get to consciously go through the thought process of other people. Do that in real life and well, you've made the conscious choice to not perceive life as the monotonous depressing routine it might be. In other words, literature consists of doing precisely what this guy says it's good to do in his speech. Isn't that nice?

On a side note, I'll just leave one of the things I've learned from a friend. A thing that in my opinion counters the whole depressing atmosphere of the video.

Keep things interesting.

Practice IOC: Boys and Girls by Alice Munro

Don't judge too harshly...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6ZfRT_ZZ7MbeGlKd01mUDdoc0k

Alice Munro: Capturing the subconscious struggle (of women?)

For a slow reader like me, trying to read through half a story of description only to get another 20 extra pages of actually interesting things, well... puts me to sleep most of the time frankly. But that usually happens to me with all books unless something interesting's happening. But when I really get into it it's very... interesting. It reminds me of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Something that probably has to do with the fact that they both choose rural settings (at least in the Márquez stories I've read). But something about their writing styles just feels very different... Maybe it's because Márquez is in Spanish and Munro in English, but Márquez is kind of like in sepia, while Munro is in a combination of dim and melancholic colors... still similar though, wouldn't you say? It probably has something to do with me perceiving the Canadian countryside to be much more lush, foresty green than the Latin American one, but well who knows. Point is I only just recently realized that and I found it interesting. Interesting that halfway through the Alice Munro stories that I've read I am subconsciously captured by the action of the story and the sleepiness no longer creeps in...

So how does that work? Well, my thought is that Munro (and I won't talk about Márquez anymore, because I haven't really read much of him anyway, much less analyzed his work) writes about the human subconscious. But she doesn't do so in a direct way. Instead she explores the human subconscious and perhaps more specifically, the female subconscious through her short stories of melancholic stories and seemingly uninteresting first halves that are spent mostly on descriptions and on some past event (jks, she gets creative with these descriptions and keeps it interesting. No way she would've gotten a Nobel prize with lousy half-half short stories). So back to the point I wanted to actually talk about in this paragraph: it would seem that (for me) halfway through the story some subconscious happening takes place within the universe of Munro's story that secretly captures me and makes me want to find out more. The passionate and often irrational decisions that the characters take without knowing why. The apparent suffering of not understanding why everyone behaves the way they do. I find it quite interesting, even if it's subconscious, to try to understand what on Earth is happening inside the heads of these characters Munro has created. Now that is real life complexity captured in a few thousand words. I take away any bad comment I might've said about Munro before this. 

Now then, since obviously this blogpost can't be all my personal experience and I have to eventually relate this back to the title and the foreshadowing of the theme of feminism I attempted to do on the last paragraph. Truth is, for some reason it seems that either men haven't realized that they are powerless before a woman or women haven't realized just how much power they actually have in their hands (sorry, I know , because it seems that when we talk about "Women's Literature" minds tend to be filled with the idea of the oppression of women by the more dominant male a-bit-less-than-half section of the population and the heroic story of Feminism and how it has helped women claim the position they deserve. But the thing is, all of this social oppression on women is something that has been recognized far and wide, and I mean, I never saw a single person in Venezuela tell a girl or woman to go to the kitchen or whatever if it wasn't to crack a joke and have a good time. Western society has caught on to the whole unfairness of the issue, and slowly but surely the entire world is making progress toward that so cherished social equality. But Munro shows us a different aspect of the picture. 

Alice Munro doesn't really write about Feminism, and if my memory is wirkin beter tahn my typing skills at this hour in the morning, she doesn't identify herself as a Feminist writer either. Alice Munro writes about humanity, about issues that we can all identify with. But her being a woman who grew up in the 20th century, she has a lot of views on the world that have been shaped by her experiences as a child. The expectations that people had of her and all other women. The inevitable ignorance of countryside folk. And as any good artist should do, she writes from her heart about the things that have happened in her own life. The things she knows the true emotions of and thus is able to so skillfully portray them. And included among all this is the subconscious struggle of women in society. And even though this struggle comes as a repercussion of the way women have been treated by society, these struggles stretch far deeper than simply trying to achieve equality in society. Alice Munro writes about those mental struggles. She writes about the incomprehensible, those impulses of the heart that we can't put into words but that she can put into stories. Short stories. The deep and complex realism of her stories is simply the perfect tool to convey the mental struggles that women go in their lives. Whether they are related to Feminism or not is, I believe, up to personal opinion. Then again, an author can easily convey meanings that weren't intended. After all as videogames (the type of "book" that I grew up with (some videogames have good stories, trust me (don't judge))) have taught me, you can never fully understand another human being. So in that sense it is impossible for us to ever fully grasp the full length meaning of Munro's stories with our souls. But there are things we can learn. About struggles. And even Feminism. Maybe. Maybe I should just generalize it and throw everything into that box popularly labeled "life." Because maybe, women's struggles are more related to life than female oppression... which is then again a part of life anyway... ok I'll just stop there. 

The Power of Stories

During my stay at the Art Monastery, there was a person who brought to my mind a certain idea that I had thought of before but never in so much detail as he showed me. This idea was how powerful stories can be. He showed us how some of the best filmmakers create storyboards so detailed that the producers and editors could not mess around with their ideas too much. In other words, the story was so well set that they could not change it, and so the original story came out fully. He showed us how he had implemented this concept into a financing app he was creating; I didn't fully understand it, but it has to do with laying out the company's “story” into the app to ensure that things would go as planned. A bit more complicated than that obviously.

This being an English blog though, I thought it'd be a little out of place to talk about how good storytelling can be used to ensure something is carried out in a certain way. I thought it would be more interesting to talk in this case about how stories connect to language and cultures. About how stories are able to evoke emotions and teach lessons in a very effective ways. There's a reason why all of the abstract art (especially in areas like writing, theater and music) is not the “mainstream.” And that's because people will always find the relateable format of a story much easier to deal with than the tough-to-grasp, more abstract forms of art.

The reasons why stories are so powerful have to do with imagination and empathy, both innate human characteristics. Through imagination, we are able to suspend our disbelief of something and, to some extent, make ourselves believe that the stories that we are being told are real. And that's precisely what allows empathy to kick in and make us feel for the characters in the stories. In psychology there is a theory of something called a “Flashbulb Memory” and it is the idea that when an event is accompanied by a strong emotional reaction it is much more likely to be “burnt” into our memory. This is what happens with stories. If instead of listening to a boring lecture about moral behavior, you read/hear/watch a story that teaches about those moral behaviors, you would be much more likely to remember them and apply them, especially if the story involves you emotionally. Even more if you are able to identify with the characters in the story, which is the main reason why stories remain more popular than abstract art. It leaves less to speculation and thus makes the characters and the plot more relateable to the audience.

Despite that, stories are not the perfect medium for communicating ideas. Despite not being an abstract art itself, when attempting to teach a lesson through a story, as many cultures have and still do, the story becomes a sort of abstraction of the lesson. One must be told what the lesson underlying in the story is, or otherwise that will be left to speculation, just as if it were an abstract piece. That's precisely where the fun part starts though. Stories can be more than just a fun read or something to relate with; they can be a completely unpredictable thing. With every person's individual interpretation of the events that take place, misunderstandings included, a completely new intention or purpose can surge out of the story.

And by intention I don't mean the author's intention; rather, I am referring to the intention of the story itself. The one that varies between readers. The one that makes a single story fan out into so many different faces. Stories are a powerful and unpredictable thing. Almost behaving like a living being. Changing its intentions and stuff... Funny, it sounds similar to how we described language at the beginning of the course. And with good reason I suppose. After all, stories and language are quite strongly intertwined. They compliment each other, granting each other powers they would not have otherwise.

Humans and their imagination...

Exploring the universe one story at a time...

Writing from the Heart

So, uh… how do I start this… Maybe I should start by analyzing how that list sentence should’ve been a question but wasn’t? Well I guess this awkward thing I’m writing right now is probably stupid enough. I think I’ve broken the ice enough, probably should get to what I wanted to get to now. Question is, whether to do it artistically or just be straightforward about this “general musing…” Nah, that’s a pretty stupid question to ask actually. It’ll just be what it’ll be. Well, here it goes. Just gonna let it flow now.

Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to use language without any involvement from the brain? Well ok, obvious logical answer is no. But have you ever thought about what it means to write “from the heart?” Trying to figure out what that meant was extremely difficult. Maybe I should start with the whole story though, some context never hurt any story.

So, I spent the entire first week of April in a small medieval mountain town in Italy called Caramanico as part of a summer program organized by something called the Art Monastery project. Sounds kinda cool, doesn’t it?? The program was essentially a combination between relaxation, contemplation, exploration and creation (by creation I mean art). Among the many activities that we did, there was one creative writing workshop that we did. First one I’d ever done actually (that involved some actual writing). I have absolutely no memory of what she called the thing we were doing, but essentially it was writing from the heart. We read this (translated) poem from the Persian poet Rumi and she told us to pick a word/phrase/verse/section/whatever we wanted from the poem that caught our attention and just write stuff using that as an inspiration. But the most important thing was that we had to write “from the heart.”

And that simple command got me absolutely baffled!

In fact, I don’t even remember what part of that poem I had chosen or anything, because when I got to writing what I did was basically discuss with myself in three different languages how on earth to start writing something that came from “the heart.” However, that was under stress conditions, so I never really thought about what I was doing… I just kept on discussing, thinking that analyzing a poem was definitely something that came from the mind and not the heart and therefore was not something I could start the piece with. But now that I have time I really wanted to ask myself: what does it mean to write with the heart? Is there a way to use language in an entirely intuitive way that does not involve the use of the mind?

Well as I said before, there most likely isn’t. I mean, language is a thought process, right? In that sense, there’s no way to use language without thinking about it. I mean, language is used to convey ideas and those come from the mind. The conscious, “civilized” mind, that is. But what about the other part of the mind? The impulsive one responsible for emotions and things like that? Is it possible to use language using ONLY that part of the brain..? Well, if it’s not impossible I guess it must be extremely difficult for me at the very least, considering how much I overthink stuff. I mean, certainly letting emotions run completely free on a blog meant to be read by my entire class is pretty dangerous… But what would have been the problem with unleashing those emotions onto the sheet of paper back at the monastery? Something just didn’t feel right back then. Like everything I tried to come up with didn’t seem to come from the heart.

It’s a funny thing actually. It makes me question to what extent can language actually convey emotion. Sure, language can create scenarios that one can imagine and then we can immerse ourselves into whatever emotion that scenario produces within us, but that’s not really the language conveying emotion. It’s an idea with the power to produce emotions in others. And of those I’m very sure that there are many. What IS it then, to write from the heart??? Does that actually even exist?

I remember hearing in theater that some theater forms like Absurdist Theater and Theater of Cruelty often worked on the basis that language was a failure as a means for communication. Especially the latter one, which essentially believed that true emotion could only be experienced when one detached from all social stimuli. Language probably being one of them. Language can clearly communicate ideas, but when it comes to conveying emotions it is absolutely useless. Emotions are just such a personal experience. And everyone perceives them in such different ways. The same event can cause completely different reactions on two different people depending on their own memories and personality. And then they might try to communicate the emotion to the other person, but will they ever truly, fully understand what the other person was feeling only through language? Even though they both know all the details from the event firsthand? Language may be a very powerful tool, but when it comes to conveying emotion it certainly falls short…

However, and here’s where it gets interesting, in spoken language it might, just might, be a different story. Especially in personal interactions with other people. At one point in my trip, the person who was my travel companion, a friend from Resuscitation Theater here in Abu Dhabi, said that Spanish and Italians are very passionate people. When we spoke some more about it he mentioned that these languages usually involve much more breath and the sounds tend to come from more within the body than a language like in English. Like saying that when one is a native speaker of these languages there is a lot more from the person’s body that is involved in the communication. Almost like it’s coming straight from the heart..!

And call me crazy for talking Physics in an English blog, but there’s actually still a lot that we possibly don’t know about the things we can’t see. It might be possible that when we speak there is more than just air vibrations that travel the air… There’s something I was read: “Any sound can shake the air. A voice can shake the soul.” Maybe when we speak there’s more than just those vibrations going across… And maybe it’s language that allows us to encode that “something else.” But well, it’s not like I know anything about that stuff. It’s fun to imagine it might be true though 

How to write about Venezuela

For starters, there is no such thing as a Venezuelan. In Latin America everyone is Mexican. If not, then you speak Portuguese. And before you get the idea, allow me to tell you that it is pointless to try and explain to your readers what the difference is. About 60% of them don’t really care about your country, so just go straight to the point. However, if you do want people to realize that it’s Venezuela you’re talking about, then here are a few things that will make everyone understand more easily.

Firstly do not, EVER, speak badly of the government. Chávez was a great hero and everyone loved him. Thanks to him the country is in a “decent state.” It’s important to mention what a kind and gentle soul he was. And never say anything about giving away practically free petroleum to other countries. All the money the government makes goes toward helping the poor people inside the country and toward giving power to the people. His successor, Maduro, is of course a wonderful man too. Talk as nicely as you can of these great men and your readers will love your work.

Always remember that all of the women in Venezuela are what defines beauty. The women are the only good thing that comes out of the country. Don’t mention Gustavo Dudamel or Maikel Melamed, because you will lose your audience. Always make sure that you include a lot of women in your story, because that’s the only thing people know about and will be able to identify with. And don’t try to make your women smart, because you’ll confuse your audience.

If you want to include a guy in your story then you have two options: either he’s a fat guy that drinks beer all day and deals drugs, or he’s a skinny guy that robs places and deals drugs. And of course, never try to bring up those malandros that work for the government on the streets killing people. Remember that anyone who’s come out of the Chávez regime is like a sacred figure. These men do not exist, and any good men can’t be round characters. And every now and then make sure your male drug dealer fails horribly, like crashing a plane with his cargo of cocaine on the mountains. And always remember that everyone is poor and living on a shanty house. Yeah, this doesn’t contradict the fact that the government still helps the poor people more than anyone. Deal with it.

When it comes to music it is important that you note that the only thing people can dance is Salsa. And you pronounce that with a swallowed L. You can also mention Reggaeton and how popular it is. People love that kind of crappy rap. Don’t worry, nobody will understand all the swear words, so you won’t go get criticized for putting Reggaeton lyrics in your writing.

One of Venezuela’s most interesting points is its wide diversity in landscapes, which includes plains, beaches, islands, many green mountains, a desert, a snowy mountain, nice cities with lots of trees around and the ever amazing Amazonian Rainforest with its Angel Falls. When it comes to writing though, using all of these will be at your disadvantage, because people will not understand where the action’s taking place. Always set your story either in the gray downtown area of a violent city or in a messy jungle where the only inhabitants are antisocial natives. Sometimes you can let the natives have a magical shaman among them, but you should avoid such clichés and leave them to the Africans. And remember the jungle can’t be the Amazonian rainforest because that is only in Brazil and Guyana. Oh, and don’t mention the Angel Falls, unless you want people to think of the Disney movie UP which copied the waterfall. 

Paper 2 practice: Myths and Legends in Things Fall Apart

Show how and to what effect Achebe makes use of myth, legend of other stories and tales.

Stories often form an important part of the culture of a people. It is through stories that ideas, moral beliefs and everyday life can be preserved most easily. In a culture with no form of written language, such as Achebe’s Igbo culture, story-telling becomes the most practical way to convey knowledge to the younger generations. In his novel Things Fall Apart, Achebe makes good use of various stories and myths of the Igbo culture to create a genuine depiction of his own culture, which in turn allows his readers to not only better understand the Igbo culture, but to entirely immerse oneself into Achebe’s fictional village of Umuofia.

Achebe shows us just how important stories are in Igbo culture by showing us a story made up by Ekwefi, who is telling it to Ezinma. Ekwefi’s story carries a moral that she intends to teach to her daughter. She uses the story as a method of education. Ekwefi then asks Ezinma to create her own story, a task which she finds to be harder than what her mother made it look like. The use of stories as a form of education and the encouragement for young members of the population to be trained in the art of making stories from a young age shows us that in Igbo culture stories are the main way of transmitting knowledge and of educating the population. Achebe also shows us that this transmission of knowledge was something more than just a mere moral lesson. It was also used to shape the Igbo society itself. This can be seen when we see that Okonkwo’s male sons are told stories by him while his daughters are only told stories by their mothers. This shows that stories were used to determine the gender roles within the Igbo society, since there would be a separation as to what stories the boys would hear and what stories the girls would hear. And as remarked by Achebe through Nwoye’s opinions of the difference between Okonkwo’s and his mother’s stories, these stories would differ in content, the male ones usually being more violent than those told by the mothers.

Another example of an Igbo legend used by Achebe, and in this case one that has a visible effect within the culture is the legend of the Ogbanje. The Ogbanje is a demon child that keeps dying young and being reborn into the womb of the same mother. In Things Fall Apart, Ezinma is considered to be an Ogbanje, since Ekwefi has had many children before her, but they have all died young, thus she was thought to be plagued by an Ogbanje for a long time. At one point in the novel, the members of the village even harass Ezinma so that she gives off the location of the small pebble that is supposed to be the link between the Ogbanje and the physical world, in order to make sure that Ekwefi would not be tortured anymore. Achebe, writing for a contemporary audience, would have known that there is a scientific explanation for this phenomenon which the Igbo mythology attributed to supernatural forces, and that his audience would have known this as well. The fact that the reader knows that this is indeed nothing more than a legend may cause some confusion or misjudgment of the Igbo culture, but Achebe tries to stay as true to the culture as possible and show his readers exactly what the culture was like. And to this end, he shows us the extreme extent that these legends would impact the behavior of the Igbo people.

Another example of a myth that would directly impact the lifestyle of the Igbo people was their belief of having a very strong connection to Ani, the earth goddess in Igbo religion. Throughout Things Fall Apart Ani is the most mentioned deity, since many of the actions taken by the people in the village have consequences that are directly related to her. An example of this can be seen when Okonkwo accidentally kills Ogbuefi Ezeudo’s son with his faulty gun. Killing a fellow clansman is considered to be an offense to Ani, and thus Okonkwo is forced into exile in order to prevent the earth goddess from doing anything too rash. Okonkwo’s house, all of his crops and his animals are also destroyed in order to please the earth goddess. This shows that the Igbo people had a very deep belief in their religion and that it heavily affected the way they lived. Achebe might have intended to make special emphasis on this aspect of the Igbo culture in order to make an indirect comparison with the Christian church, where a lot of people do not take religion as much into account during all of their lives, and thus portray the Igbo people as a culture that may be more religious than the colonizers themselves. This would have caused the western readers of the time of the novels release to question the religious aspects of their own lives.

These are just a few of the instances in which Achebe uses Igbo legends and myths in order to create a genuine portrait of the Igbo culture.

Obierika's Memoir

In the end, I suppose it was inevitable. Umuofia had for long had cracks in its system, incomprehensible actions that not only I, but others as well did not really understand. Why were twins not allowed to live among us? Why were some men not given the same respect during their burial even though they were born equal? Why should a man pay dearly for a crime he never intended to commit? All of these questions have been for long swirling in the minds of our people, but never were they truly answered until the white men came to our land.

When they came at first nobody truly took them seriously. The only ones who found refuge in the white man’s religion were the osu, those who we had rejected. But eventually everyone began to see the superior power the white men had. They wooed our people with their medicine, with their education system. But what caused our people to lose faith on Umuofia’s traditions was that the white man could do many things we believed would bring him certain death. He built his settlement in the evil forest and survived without any problems. He removed the Chukwu’s mask and was not met with any punishment. They accepted twins, who then grew up to be perfectly normal people. The actions of the white men confirmed the horrible doubts that had already been stirring within our people for a long time; our beliefs and our religion were indeed flawed from the very beginning.

Paper 2 Practice #1: Social status in Things Fall Apart

Discuss the significance of social status in Things Fall Apart, and comment on its contribution to characterization.

Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, takes place in a fictional group of Igbo tribes known as Umuofia. Despite being a creation of Achebe, Umuofia’s society stays true to the vast majority of the Igbo social and cultural elements. Among these is the great importance of social status within the Igbo society. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe uses the element of social status in Igbo culture to enrich his characters and place them into the context he is writing them into. Three clear examples in which Achebe does this in his novel are when he uses a low social status to give a negative view of a character, when he uses high social status to create a positive view of a character, and when he represents the constant struggle to achieve high a social status in Okonkwo, the main character of the novel.

In the first chapters of the novel, Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo’s father, who was a man of low social status that spent his days being lazy and worried more about his music rather than gaining wealth and climbing the social ladder. It is important to remark that in Igbo society the achievement of a high social status through hard work was what most men would dedicate their lives to, and men who did poorly in this aspect were often looked down upon and thought of as weak and feminine. By giving Okonkwo’s father an extremely low social status and complimenting that with the description of him as a lazy person, Achebe effectively creates a negative image of this character in the reader’s mind. This in turn allows the reader to sympathize more with Okonkwo, who deeply resents his father’s paradigm, which in turn allows the audience to emotionally engage with the novel more easily since they will now be able to feel sorry for Okonkwo’s tragic occurrences. This is shows how Achebe can use a low social standing to create a negative image of a character.

Achebe, however, also uses high social statuses to create positive perspectives of characters, as is the case with Ogbuefi Ezeudo, one of the leaders of the tribe. Ezeudo is one of the most revered men in all of Umuofia and he is also meant to be a very wise character who always speaks the truth. It is for this reason that Achebe gave this man a very high position in the social ladder, with three of the four great titles that a man could have in Umuofia. Ezeudo’s high social standing immediately creates an image that portrays him as a man of honor, as a hard-working man who is worth looking up to. Even though Ogbuefi Ezeudo is a rather flat character, his high social standing allows the reader to quickly understand how important he is in his community, apart from creating such a positive image of him.

The entire hegemony of the Igbo society is portrayed clearly through Okonkwo. Similarly to Ogbuefi Ezeudo, Achebe grants Okonkwo a relatively high social standing and describes how he has got there through hard work, which creates a positive image of him for the reader. However, the fact that Okonkwo is still trying hard to climb up the social ladder gives him a drive to carry out most of his actions. At the end of Things Fall Apart Okonkwo is forced to take his own life due to the circumstances he was in, however most of the actions that led him there were typically related to climbing the social ladder. Throughout the novel, it is seen how Okonkwo works hard to attain wealth in order to obtain titles, which in Igbo culture can only be obtained when a man has enough wealth to pay for the initiation rites. We also see how Okonkwo strives to behave as manly as possible in order to be perceived positively by the community of Umuofia. Okonkwo’s constant attempt at looking manly is what often leads to many of his wrongful decisions, such as participating in Ikemefuna’s sacrifice. Okonkwo’s constant attempt to look manly has also had an influence in the way that he expresses his emotions, and he thus becomes less comprehensive and more violent, since imposing authority through violence is a trait that is considered to be manly in Igbo culture. This is what leads to Okonkwo breaking the week of peace by beating his wife and to him beheading the missionary at the end, which was the final mistake that led to his demise. This shows how Achebe not only uses social status to express specific traits, but also how he uses the hegemony in the Igbo culture to drive his characters, especially Okonkwo, in a specific direction. In Okonkwo’s case, his tragic end might suggest that Achebe wanted to show how detrimental the social hegemony was for the Igbo people, since the search for this eventually lead to Okonkwo’s demise.

In conclusion, Chinua Achebe is able to use a social structure, very resembling of that of the real Igbo tribes, to quickly convey traits of a character due to the clear views of social positions in Igbo culture. Achebe also uses the search for social status to drive his characters, most specifically Okonkwo, whose demise is eventually caused by this constant strife to be perceived positively in his society.

Catching the audience: Paper 1-style speech analysis

Link to speech: http://www.nationalcenter.org/AnthonySuffrage.html

In the year 1873, Susan B. Anthony was unjustly arrested and fined for voting in the presidential elections of the previous year in the US. In order to express her feelings of anger and convey her ideals of gender equality to the rest of the population she wrote a speech. Through her speech, she manages to convey the message that women should also be allowed to vote in an effective manner that reaches her intended branch of the population. She accomplishes her goal by using a complex diction, which not only allows her to reach out to the more educated section of the population but also makes her speech more effective by making her look more educated, which gives her ethos. Overall, Anthony manages to create a tone and mood that is extremely serious and credible, which ultimately makes her speech extremely effective.

It is most likely that Anthony’s intended audience when giving out this speech was an adult population of a higher education section while also targeting specifically men. This can be seen primarily in her choice of sophisticated terms which are defined by using uncommon words, such as “ex post facto law,” “disfranchisement” and “odious aristocracy.” Evidence for her targeting of higher education brackets of the population can also be seen in the fact that she references things such as the Federal Constitution and scholars such as Webster, Worcester and Bouvier. The fact that her speech is mostly focused on using logos as a method to appeal to the audience rather than pathos is evidence that her target audience would have most likely been men, since an appeal to emotion would have been more effective for women and men normally tend to find highly logical and direct messages more convincing.

It is possible to see from Anthony’s target audience choice that the purpose of her speech was not to encourage more women to join the gender equality movement; rather her intention was more directed towards the idea of providing a strong argument for the gender equality movement that would resonate in the male population as well. To this intent she uses direct citations from the Federal Constitution and gives a detailed explanation of her argument, which means that she is using very strong logos to persuade her audience. However, her choice of sophisticated words and proof of her knowledge of scholarly figures would also make the audience perceive her as a highly educated member of the population, which gives her a strong ethos through the speech itself.

Despite having a lot of factual based arguments in her speech, Anthony still manages to a tone of ire and sorrow that delivers her message in a passionate way that can resonate with the masses. She does this by using certain rhetorical devices which allow her to emphasize on specific aspects of her argument. For example, when she uses the diacope in “It was we, the people; not we the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union” she stresses on the fact that it was not only men who established the country and that women also played a large role in that, thus showing that they should be more equal. At the same time, by using the personal pronoun “we” Anthony makes the audience put themselves in the situation and think of themselves as the ones who are rejecting; which in this case are the ones who are put in the wrong throughout the speech. This would make the audience feel bad about themselves, which creates a tone of sorrow throughout the text, especially due to the early positioning of this statement in the speech.

Anthony also portrays some anger through her speech which also leads to it being more powerful. When she says “it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty” she creates a juxtaposition of the “blessings of liberty” and not just a mockery, but a “downright mockery.” By juxtaposing these two ideas, she creates a stark contrast between them, which allows people to more clearly comprehend her point; that women are not entirely free unless they can vote. The use of the word “downright” right before “mockery” also gives a strong emphasis to this negative word. The fact that these words are also placed towards the beginning of the sentence set a tone of ire for the rest of the sentence, which allows this important part of the speech, which contains an allusion to the right to vote at the end when she refers to “the ballot” (which is also further emphasized by a pause), to come across effectively and get her point across.

She also further creates a tone of ire with a deliberate accusation towards the higher class population of that time, which were likely to be part of the target audience as well, since these people would tend to have higher levels of education. Towards the end of her fourth paragraph, Anthony says:

an oligarchy of wealth, where the right govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules over the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes fathers, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household—which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

In this part of her speech, Anthony uses an anaphora by repeating the word “oligarchy” and changing the word after it; however, this is also combined with a climax (as in this context the “oligarchy of sex” would sound as more important than the rest, since it is the main topic of the speech, and thus the oligarchies are stated in an order that rises in importance) and a parallelism (due to the similar grammatical structure used immediately after each oligarchy) in order to strongly emphasize the idea that a sexual dictatorship is one of the worst things that can exist. By adding the conjunction “but” right before the “oligarchy of sex,” Anthony not only indicates that this case is different to the rest, but also produces a short pause that would give emphasis to what she says next. She then further emphasizes her point of the oligarchy of sex by using a metanoia and re-explaining her already-longer-than-the-rest explanation of the “oligarchy of sex.” Lastly she uses a list of three with three negative attributes that the “oligarchy of sex” brings forward at the very end when she says “carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation” in order to further emphasize her point. By using the anaphora combined with the climax, Anthony creates a mood of ire by rising the relevance of the subject each time, thus starting from the audiences possibly uninterested starting mood and bringing them up with her speech. These other rhetorical devices used right after take advantage of this tone of ire that has been created and manage to transmit the message in a more effective way, thus getting it across much more effectively.

It is also important to note that the structure of Anthony’s speech makes the speech less ambiguous and allows her message to come across with clarity to the largest amount of people possible. Her introduction at the beginning sets the context of her speech and she then proceeds to present her main point of evidence for her argument, which is the citation from the Constitution. She then proceeds to develop her ideas in an effective way and closes with the rhetorical question which she says is “the only question left to be settled now [is]: Are women persons?” which she then proceeds to implicitly respond to, thus closing her speech by giving the impression that there is nothing else to cover and that she has therefore covered all of her points. This structure makes her speech extremely effective, since it allows people to follow a natural flow and thus not get lost in her thoughts. The conclusion is also extremely effective for the reasons previously stated. The speech is also rather short, which ensures that people will be able to keep their attention focused.

This speech is perhaps one of the best masterpieces ever written in the English language. The masterful use of rhetorical devices and an organized structure to convey her message in an effective way make the speech extremely powerful. The fact that Anthony was also able to target members of the male part of the population also makes this speech through her use of heavy logos also makes this speech even more effective. It is truly a wonder.

Practice IOC - The Tempest

Practice IOC on Soundcloud

The Tempest Act 4 Scene 1 - Lines 200 to 254

Guiding questions:

 -How does the passage contribute to the comic relief of the play?

 -What do Trinculo and Stephano's actions show about their characters?

Written Task 2 Thesis Statements - The Tempest

Reader, culture and context

How could the text be read and interpreted differently by two different readers?

            The Tempest takes place in an isolated island, in which Prospero is perceived as the ruler. However, from Caliban’s dialogues we learn that he was the one who was originally entitled to be the ruler of the island, but Prospero took the right away from him by taking Sycorax’s powers. For this reason, Prospero could be viewed as the “colonizer” of the island. Because of the way Caliban is represented as a creature that is lower in status than a human, one may infer that Shakespeare intended to make a positive criticism in the colonizing agenda of the European nations of that time, when England was starting to make colonies in the New World. Despite this, a few lines spoken by Gonzalo, who is perceived as a righteous character, while describing the island in Act 2 Scene 1 may lead to believe that Shakespeare may have actually been trying to criticize the colonies in a more negative way. Gonzalo says that the island should be left untouched and the fact that everyone leaves the island at the end might also mean that Shakespeare intended to support this view more in this text, and that the negative perception of Caliban was actually just intended to make people reflect whether or not we should treat the natives in such a way. It is for these reasons that there have been different interpretations of the text regarding this topic.

Power and privilege

How and why is a social group represented in a particular way?

            In Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, the character Caliban can be interpreted as a representation of the native inhabitant of a colonized land, which in this case is the island which was colonized by Prospero. Caliban is often ridiculed in the play and is mostly represented as a character that is much less of a human being than the nobles in the rest of the play. Shakespeare most likely made this choice in order to appeal to the nobility, which also attended his plays.

Text and genre

How does the text conform to, or deviate from, the conventions of a particular genre, and for what purpose?

            The Tempest by William Shakespeare is a play that follows many of the typical conventions of Elizabethan theater. The play might be taken as an appeal to the audience by using all of the popular genres of the Elizabethan theater and mixing them all into a single play. The play has the dramatic plot of a tragedy, the stock characters and clichés of Elizabethan slapstick comedy, and a small romantic story to make it an all-inclusive play that would have for sure pleased the audiences of that time. 

The Language of the Ghosts

The “ghosts”… those beings that some believe are around us but can never interact with because they belong to another realm. Their manifestation in our world is nothing but an intangible image that can only be observed. Nothing else can be done with them. Some say that ghosts speak, but if they speak they probably have some kind of “spectral language” that we foolish mortals cannot understand. At the same time, however, they are not fully attached to our world, so our language is not really something they can easily understand. Thus, even though we and the ghosts exist in the same plane, we can never truly interact together...

Language is the main form of interaction that exists between human beings. Without language there really isn’t much we can tell others. We can grunt and wave (and if needed use violence) to make others understand us, but the messages would never be anything as concrete as what we have in our heads. If other people can’t understand us in modern society, then we become pretty much irrelevant. We are unable to truly contribute and other just ignore us. At the same time, we are unable to truly comprehend what other people are saying. Neither can we communicate what we want effectively to them. They become simple images walking around us. Only that this time they are tangible images. Images we can touch and that, most importantly, can touch us.

Going to a country where one doesn’t know the language is pretty much the same as entering an unknown realm that is ruled by ghosts. They are the majority and thus you must get used to the way they run things. Everything is designed for them and they are the ones providing it. So since you don’t really speak their ghostly language and or understand their ghostly culture you must try to adapt to it. Worst thing is, since you spent your childhood trying to live among the ghosts in order to get accepted, you end up not truly understanding your (or rather, your family’s) culture of origin. And so you end up being surrounded by a bunch of ghosts who mostly cannot communicate effectively with you, and vice-versa. You are doomed to lead a life of awkwardness and detachment. You cannot truly ever fit in with the rest. Unless of course, you learned how to speak ghost. And of course, taking into account that only those who speak perfect ghost with the same volume and intonation as the spirits are the ones that can properly communicate. Yeah, it’s really hard. C’est la vie.