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.