Daily Archives: December 20, 2022

FINAL REFLECTIONS

About Us, Final Reflection

  At the start of the course, I was new to college writing. My writing skills weren’t bad but I needed some exquisite tuning.A lot of the skills I have translated over seamlessly elevated from high school till now. I was consistently excellent at receiving details and laying down a foundation. Alongside that, I’ve consistently found writing simple once I had a literary device in mind. 

     From my research, it appears that literature is a work of figurative language or beautiful language that often contains stories in everyday life. I have learned a lot about this topic and understand that literary works from the past were published through reading them in front of an audience. The writing I was most proud of is my literally analysis essay because it’s essay based on something I stand for feminist rights. This essay was very easy for me because I could understand what the writer of “ the thirteenth night “ was feeling when they wrote this.

        The biggest challenge for me during the 15 weeks of this class was managing all assignments. I feel as though that is someone I should work on so I won’t get too overwhelmed. Although most of the work was pretty understanding as long as I clearly read through the text and understood the literary work I didn’t have a hard time completing the assignment. 

        For as long as I have been in school my writing classes have always been my favorite class, because of how creative we can be. Writing can take you many places as long as you allow it. Although this class was tougher than the usual English classes I take, I truly appreciate the art in writing. I hope to continue writing and learning new things to better my skills. 

Parents

Bambara, Fiction

Teasing and using hypothetical or joking language is an incredibly complicated thing to grasp. Often, phrases are taken literally and responded to in a way they were not meant to. This is an intricate part of the english language and will be consistently heard in life. Shielding a child from jokes entirely will hurt them in the future, if they don’t develop with this crucial understanding. Joking doesn’t mean that life is unstable, it is simply a joke. It is important to work through misunderstandings as they occur, but shielding will hurt children more than protect them. There is, however, no need to pour every hard life reality and event on to a young kid. They don’t need to know intricacies of financial ruin, or every detail about drugs and sex or assault. Answering questions when asked, but not volunteering hurtful information is a way to go about this, and padding the answers slightly can also assist in teaching. Teasing kids is much different from showing them the entirety of reality, but in that case where harder subjects are questioned, denial will only lead to later hurt.

About Us

Final Reflection

The way I view my writing, is I know I am not a good writer. I realize that in my head I know what I want to write about, but when it comes to writing it on paper, it very hard for me to writing down. Everything just doesn’t make sense no more like how it did in the beginning. I know I am always going to struggle with writing because of my hearing loss in both ears. I can’t hear certain letters to pronounce a word. Honestly, I feel my writing haven’t change, and I know it not going to change. All I could do it try my best and keep on trying.

I am not really happy with my writing because I know it not my biggest strength, but the most story i enjoy writing and reading is “Desiree’s Baby” by Kate Chopin. The other one was “Gorilla, My Love” by Toni Cade Bambara. I know back then it wasn’t allowed for black and whites to be together and the baby in the story came out dark, but nowadays that is so common. Races and culture are mixed now. Gorilla my love is when the older adults say things to kids and sometime the kids take it to the hearts. I have experiences with my own kids. Those two was my favorite and also to write about it.

This semester I had and still have a lot of challenges. It is very hard to balance myself with time. I work, and I have kids of my own and on top of that I found out that I am pregnant. For two months I wasn’t able to eat or drink anything, and now I am working two jobs and full-time student, plus a single mom. This semester is very challenging moment in my life. I hope life get better.

I feel like I could have done better, if I have more time. But I appreciate you professor for teaching us and encouraging us to do our best.

final reflection

About Us, Final Reflection

I would describe my body of work this semester as a challenge I needed. Whether, it was a success or a failure, it was something I know I will grow from. What stands out to me is my actual interest in these stories. I found myself able to relate to a few characters and authors we read about. The characters and I do not have the exact same lives or upbringings, but there were some events that happened in their lives that reminded me I experienced something similar. The feminist stories where something that naturally stood out to me being that I share a common interest. Though I feel like my writing skills may not have progressed, I have discovered new writing styles that I can use to practice bettering my skills. I realized that I like creative writings like scripts and poems more than formal writing like research essays. My journey over these 15 weeks has been daring and eye-opening.

The erasure poem is the piece I’m most proud of. Its the first time I’ve expressed the personal issues I go through publicly. Although the poem may be hard to understand, I know what it means to me and how good it felt to put those emotions into writing. My experience while crafting the poem was liberating and meaningful. I gathered words that I knew explained my journey best, and the poem developed into something that made it easy for me to share.

This semester I can say I struggle with time management. Between work and school there was a unbalanced distribution of my time. My hardest class was public speaking. The work wasn’t necessarily difficult, but it was the fear of presenting that really affected me. I felt like my anxiety would take over and I couldn’t produce the high quality performance that I would have liked to and know that I was capable of doing.

Overall, this class and this semester was an experience worth having. I interacted with people, which hasn’t happened a lot since covid, and I engaged in my classes to the best of my ability. I will always constantly try to push myself. Life isn’t an easy road but its still a road worth taking.

Writing As Activism

Bambara, Fiction

I believe that historical forms of activism, especially those that directly reflect the context of the time and the limits on activism, are some of the most powerful examples. This story by Tony Cade Bambara deals with the issue of authenticity and the unknowingness of childhood. Bambara tells a powerful story through the eyes of a young black girl and her family, along with their dynamics. She is too trusting and believes literally everything she is told. It is not simply an activist piece, it is also a reflection on the obliviousness of youth and the absence of truth, as well as the subtext of language. People look for meanings in pieces of work that are as fluid as this, making the activism more captivating and powerful. I do not think this piece is too far of a cry from modern activism in story form, instead it is just a story of the time. There is an accessible form of activism for every consumer, whether it be straightforward in a clearly outlined problems and solutions essay, or hidden in a captivating story. It is an artistic form of activism, and just as valid as any other. Writing is empowerment and telling stories has always been a form of liberation.

Feminism

Ichiyo

I believe that the female character in the story represents not just Ichiyo’s own struggles, but those of all women in the 19th century. At the time, women were not held to the same standard as men, and as such, received lower quality educations compared to men. In addition to this, once they were married, they were not considered to be a partner to their spouse, but as property. The husband had all the power in the relationship, as evidenced in the words Oseki’s father said to her. Nothing could be done about this, and if women tried to speak out against it, they would be swiftly shut down by the same men they are trying to revolt against.

Marxism

Ichiyo

The way that Oseki’s marriage is affected by her economic status is through her interactions with her husband. Her husband, Harada Isamu, is verbally abusive and constantly berated and belittles her for her lack of education. For everything that Oseki does, she is ridiculed by her husband who says that so and so is done incorrectly. She cannot socialize well with the other wives of Harada’s colleagues because she has not had the same experiences that they have. Harada would barely speak to her and it made her feel undesired by him. As the story progressed, her family even told her that it was better if she returned to her abusive husband instead of freeing herself from that toxic marriage, because it benefitted others.  Essentially, she was to be a lifeless husk of a person and to act as a servant to Harada.

What I think Oseki learns through her run in with Roku is that everyone is going through their own struggles that are equal to, if not greater than one’s own. Roku’s life was basically in shambles when he met Oseki. The significance of this meeting was to show how their separation affected both parties. Their separation is made more evident when Iseki believes herself to be the reason for Roku’s current state of being. Roku thought that he would marry his childhood love, and that dream was promptly shattered when he learned of Oseki’s marriage to Harada. Both of their dreams were.

Chekhov

Chekhov

This play signifies a crucial theme within marriages. The reoccurring instance is that marriages aren’t entirely based on love, but are rather driven by other factors. In this case, wealth drives marriage in this play. The two don’t even seem to show much care towards each other, as during the argument between Lomov and Natalya over ownership of land, she continues to pressure him even as his pains begin to worsen, rather than attempt to relieve his stress. The interaction between the two is not as most romance movies portray marriage, and is full of pettiness and bickering between the two, resulting in the opposite of what the audience is used to seeing. Towards the end, he also has no real idea why he married her and seems to go with the flow, not realizing how big of a commitment he has made. They are simply all greedy to get the benefit out of each other, instead of truly becoming one together.

Poetry Analysis Essay

Poetry Analysis Essay

Angelo Toro                                                                                                    Professor Perry

December 20, 2022                                                                                        ENG 201

Poetry Analysis Essay

The poem I selected was “Saguaros” by Javier Zamora. Part of a collection of poems from his book “Unaccompanied”, this particular poem talks about Javier’s early experiences when making his traumatizing journey to the US from El Salvador. From this poem, we can see and some of the early struggles and traumas he had when traveling with the “Coyotes”, a group of people who helped those escape the aftermath of the Salvadoran Civil war. In this poem, we can see how a young Javier viewed the world as shrouded in darkness, always having to look behind his back and always be wary of “la migra”.

The reason that I had chosen Saguaros as my poem for the blackout poetry assignment is because of the overall tone of the poem spoke to me. The feeling of intensity and the aura given off by the words and the description of Javier’s surroundings really made me feel as if I had experienced some of the hardships he did. The themes I am getting from reading this poem are themes of “New Life” and of “Desire”. There is the immediate desire in the poem of Javier wanting the red fruits to satiate his thirst but looking further into the meaning of the text we can also see that he has a desire for freedom of the situation he is in, and to begin a new life, one where he no longer has to be on the run and keep an eye on his back (Zamora, lines 6-8, lines 15-16). What this poem meant to me was that he would endure his hardships in order to make a better life for himself, by any means necessary.

This poem is free verse, meaning that there is no specific structure and that the author can go wild. I believe that this amplifies Javier’s work because he does not have to try and mold his traumatizing experiences to fit a rigid format. The line length for the poem was around the same per line, and each stanza ranged between two and three lines. I believe that the shortness of the stanzas helped his poem come off as more of memories that he was trying to repress, as he stated in an interview by Today with Hoda and Jenna, many of his works are drawn from his memories unearthed through therapy. As for the rhymes in the poem, there are not many, and the one I did find seemed to be an unintentional internal rhyme: “…bats in the lavender sky/like spiders when a fly is caught…” (Zamora, Lines 1-2). The lack of rhymes allows the poem to retain much of its weight and in my opinion, allows for the emotion to carry out better. There is also some repetition in the poem, with lines 1,5, and 9 mentioning bats, in this case the bats being the people he encountered and was with on his journey.

The way that these formal elements affected my interpretation was that they allowed me to better immerse myself and feel something akin to what he was feeling during that perilous time. As I continued to read over the poem, I was able to look beyond the surface level, finding the hidden meanings in the way the lines are constructed. For example, with the mention of bats, my interpretation is that while initially there may have been literal bats in the sky, he came to associate border patrol and immigration with bats, as they would have been prowling the night as well. This is further backed up by this line: “These bats speak English only” (Zamora, Line 9), meaning that these were likely not the people helping him, but people who were trying to stop him.

Another poem that I found that spoke to me was a poem from Javier titled “To Abuela Neli”. In this work, he is telling this “Abuela Neli” about the struggles he has had to endure and what has been going on in his life since arriving in America. This likely takes place around 2008-2009, as Obama’s election is mentioned (Zamora, Lines 3-4).  This poem spoke to me because I found it to be a very personal work, one telling not of his struggles to getting to where he was, but one of venting to a person who is extremely close to him. It is not only the journey to America that has caused him strife, but the people back at home who are proclaiming falsehoods about him. His old friends say that he has changed from who he previously was, calling him a “coconut: brown on the outside and white on the inside” (Zamora, Lines 16-18). This poem is also free verse. There aren’t any rhymes, but some lines have some alliteration, such as line 7: “There’s no path to papers”. Along with this, the free structure allows this poem to feel much more like how it is intended to be interpreted as, as a letter. The whole poem flows nicely, and the informal words used really made this poem stand out to me.

The similarities I see between these two poems are that they are both free verse and come from deeply personal points in his life. He uses images of his childhood and of his journey to help bring forth that personal feeling and honestly made me feel like I was intruding on an intimate moment between him and his thoughts.

What these two poems tell me about Javier is that he is someone who doesn’t conform to the typical standards of poetry that we see. While he may use his experiences like other poets to create his pieces, the way that he uses his words makes it so that you do not feel like an outsider to his world. His use of free verse allows for this, as it feels more like a story being told than that of a poem being recited. In his interview with Hoda and Jenna from TODAY, Javier speaks about how difficult it was to look back onto his trauma and that vulnerable 9-year-old kid; some days he had to let it out through tears or through sleeping it off. While the interview is regarding his book, Solito, he mentions Chino, a member of a family who took him in when he was not with a Coyote or his grandfather, who had accompanied him for two weeks. This “Chino” is also mentioned in another poem, “Second Attempt Crossing”, which seems to be a farewell poem and a thank you for this young man who protected him when Javier was younger.

Chopin

Chopin

I believe that the writer’s race matters when dealing with issues of race. Race is such as sensitive and controversial topic that those who speak from it do so from their own experiences and struggles. To have someone outside of their race to speak on something so personal can be seen as offensive to the targeted audience. While it is possible for a person not of the same race to speak on a topic regarding another person’s race, it is best if done within their own racial confines, like Chopin has done. We can see the differences in the portrayals between this work and in Gorilla, my love, with the way the dialogue and internal monologues are presented. Kate Chopin’s portrayal of these struggles in “Desiree’s Baby” is really well done. In this work, she was able to portray the prejudice and hate that black people faced back then and still do now.