Skilled at Life (?)

Am I skilled at life? Discovery through high school rubrics. 

Three in One

Due to a sad combination of a rather amazing and depressing quality of mine I like to call single minded procrastination and the lack of internet in the middle of Anapoima, I did not complete the blog entries for the memoir we read during October break. I did finish the reading, it was the writing that was compromised by my apparently overtaking need to lie in the sun in fetal position and ignore college applications and other important responsibilities of life. So now without further ado and excuses I present a very late, very lonely, but extensive, three in one blog post about Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Throughout this entire memoir, Winterson keeps a very intense bitter tone about her childhood and her life in general. The psychological issues that come with being adopted, unacceptable in a small community, and utterly lonely in a broken family are strong in her and they are shown slowly throughout the entire book, getting more personal and complicated as she speaks of the more recent time in her life. One lead that accompanies her throughout the retelling of her life is the importance of language and reading as she began to discover who she was and what she wanted to do with her future. The bitterness, the epiphanies about language, and the overall satirical view Winterson takes on the forgotten town of Accrington which saw her grow up make this memoir unbelievably funny, honest, and profound.

The entire book starts with a chapter titled “The Wrong Crib” in which Winterson introduces the whole premise of her childhood as an orphan and the confusion over her adoptive parents. All her doubts are easy to understand; after all, why would someone adopt a child only to constantly tell them they are the “wrong crib”? Why would someone bother to go through the process of adoption only to ignore the child and refuse to love him/her? Later on in the memoir the answer to these questions is presented in the form of a stranded birth certificate for a boy. As it turns out, Mrs. Winterson was supposed to adopt Paul, but that didn’t work out and she was stuck with Jeanette instead. At the start of the story however this information is not disclosed as it isn’t really necessary to understand what Winterson is trying to explain: abandonment and silence. According to her “unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven” (page 9).  This intense feeling of incarceration in her own life brings the author to her first language epiphany: she needed words to escape the silence. 

As the book continues Winterson eventually discusses her sexuality, but one comes to a quick reassessment of the story as soon as she does. This memoir isn’t a story centered on sexuality and coming to terms with it. It is a story centered on what a messed up family and old-fashioned town can cause someone of a different sexuality. Winterson never needed to come to terms with being gay. Winterson never doubted that she was gay. Winterson suffered at the hands of her town for being gay. Throughout her childhood she was disliked and even hated by her adoptive mother, but this gets a million times worse when Mrs. Winterson finds out that she is gay. Once the rest of the town finds out about her sexuality she is exorcized, because clearly a person who isn’t a depressed heterosexual in an unhappy marriage must be possessed by the devil. The irony of it all is that the priest tries to rape her during the final stages of the exorcism in an attempt to convince her that “it would be better than with a girl” (page 81).

Eventually Winterson comes to the second epiphany about language by stating that the main thing literature offers is “a language powerful enough to say how it is” (page 40). This happens shortly after she discovers the library in Accrington and starts her journey through “English Literature in Prose A-Z”. Slowly she begins to create a stash of books under her mattress. Obviously in a house where there were only six books, one of which was the Bible and two of which were commentaries on the Bible, this stash was a problem. As a child, the only literature she had been exposed to was Jane Eyre, but this was corrupted by Mrs. Winterson who changed the story to make Jane Eyre marry the missionary and go off to help him. This shows us just how intent Mrs. Winterson was on keeping her “daughter” within the boundaries of the traditional structure of the town they inhabited. When Mrs. Winterson found the stash she burned all of Jeanette’s books, which leads us to the third epiphany: “Fuck it… I can write my own” (page 43).

I could go on and on about epiphanies in the book. I could write about how in the end Winterson discovers that “creativity is on the side of health- it isn’t the thing that drives us mad” (page 171). I could write about what it means that she calls her adoptive mother Mrs. Winterson throughout the entire memoir and how this indicates the resentment and bitterness she carries inside. I could even talk about her sanity crisis when she decided to look for her birth mother and all the epiphanies she continued to have about writing. I won’t do any of this. Both a literacy narrative and an extremely personal memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is worth reading and I’d rather not spoil more of it than I already have. 

On Being Free Before Setting Yourself Free

When I finished reading Frederick Douglass’s memoir, I came to the conclusion that it can be divided into two main parts: his transformation into a slave and his change into a free man. The idea was given to my by Douglass himself so I can’t take credit for it, but I do believe that this division in the memoir is more important than he made it seem when he mentioned it in passing.

The exact moment where the memoir enters part two is when Douglass fights Covey to the point where the man is scared of him. It is in this moment when he becomes a free man regardless of his position as a slave, in other words, even though he was still “a slave in form, the day had passed forever when [he] could be a slave in fact” (pg. 78) It is at this point in the narrative that we notice a change in Douglass’s passion for freedom. Now he doesn’t just yearn for it, he believes fully in the fact that he deserves it and is confident that he will eventually get it.  Up to this point, Douglass was a slave inside his head as well as by the law.

This idea seems revolutionary to me. The first step towards freedom is, according to Douglass’s experience, thinking of oneself as a free man. It makes sense when considered in perspective from all these years later. Slaves had their inferiority so engraved in their heads that the idea of setting themselves free seemed impossible. It was a mere fantasy because they did not consider themselves free men. Slaves were held captive by themselves as much as they were by their masters. Consider it this way: the ratio of slaves to slaveholders in a plantation was wildly unbalanced toward the slaves’ side. Had they considered the right to be free as something that should be applied to them revolting would have been almost laughably easy.

 In the end slavery was nothing more than a play of power between an aggressive majority and a disenfranchised minority.

It could be said that Douglass was treated better towards the end of the book what with him being able to work for himself and all, but it is easy to understand how this might not be a satisfying arrangement. He was still someone else’s property according to the law. Regardless of the money he saved and the clothes he finally bought for himself, he wasn’t free. Douglass was stuck in a situation where he had the worst of both worlds: the trials and sufferings of a poor free man and the misery of belonging to someone as a slave.

Another interesting issue in the ending of the memoir was Douglass’s refusal to give away the methods he used to escape. On this topic I disagree extensively with Cristina (another blogger in the AP Lang world) and what she mentioned in her last blog post. About this idea of avoiding the escape route details in the memoir Cristina states the following: “I know, he couldn’t just give out the secret recipe for all the freedom-hungry slaves.” I think Douglass’s intention when he didn’t put the route in writing was the exact opposite of that. He wasn’t trying to keep slaves in their place, as an escapee that would make no sense and it would be extremely hypocritical. What he didn’t want was to give the white people the details of the route. He clarifies this when he talks about the well-known Underground Railroad and how it has been so publicly acclaimed that the whites that are looking for an escaped slave know exactly where to go. The open declarations of the Underground Railroad do “nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much towards enlightening the master” (pg. 100). Douglass kept his route a secret in order to keep white men away from it, not to keep it closed to fellow slaves looking for freedom.

It should also be noted that Douglass gave full names of everyone who helped him get a life once he was in New York, clearly leaving a trail for any escaped slave who arrived to free land with the same confusion as he did. He understood the loneliness and fear slaves might feel when they achieve their freedom. He grasped the “now what?” feeling perfectly and thus he left a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow if they needed help integrating into free lifestyle. A trail that started with a breadcrumb officially known as “MR. DAVID RUGGLES” (pg. 106). Come on, why else would he capitalize the whole thing?

Also important to note is Douglass’s observation that everyone seemed happier in free country. Not only the colored people but whites as well, leaving the reader the distinct feeling that everyone is better off without slavery. In the end, we probably are. Too much power is never good for men.

I say goodbye to this memoir with a quote from Clash of Kings by George R.R Martin, which is extremely relevant to my reflections in this blog post:

“Power resides only where men believe it resides…A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” 

Can Anything Stop It?

According to Quentin Hardy in his blog post “Global Slavery, by the Numbers” there are 27 million slaves world wide today. This statistic is worrying not only because of its sheer size, but because of the common belief that slavery today doesn’t exist at all. It is this belief about slavery that keeps it alive: less people are aware of it and those that are aware of it don’t know how to fight it because it is so well hidden, thus it continues to be stupidly easy for human traffickers to profit from their work.  Whilst reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave thought about writing a blog entry comparing slavery today with slavery back in pre Civil War America. Now that I am writing though, I find it more important to note and compare efforts against slavery back then and efforts against it now.

Back in Douglass’s time, slavery was countered with the idea of abolition. The north was fighting to abolish slavery, in other words they were trying to make it illegal. Now however, there are laws against slavery, its become a type of contraband, which makes the ways to fight it much harder to think out. Basically its like trying to fight the music downloads, you can catch as many people as you want but it will keep happening. Why? Because it’s easy.  So many people need help today, they need money, they need to be saved from something, and it’s disgustingly easy to trick them into debt or binds they can’t run away from.

In his memoir, Douglass mentions how slaves were divided up and given to their master’s children once the master’s died. They were tied up amongst the animals, “horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being” (pg. 56).  As deplorable as these conditions may be, I feel like they are much worse now. Sex slaves aren’t even divided amongst their master’s children; they are sold to anyone who will pay the price. There are no limits or protection. There are no records or any way to track these people after they get sold into sex trade. As the movie Taken so clearly dramatizes for us: after three days, any hope of finding these people is gone.

So how do we stop slavery today? There is no longer the choice of abolition, there are no laws to abolish. There is no option for civil war, slavery now is globalized and hidden. The only way to fight it is protesting. What types of protests are right though? Traffickers couldn’t care less if we march down the streets with banners and signs screaming “stop human trafficking!” We need to upgrade. We need something that will make people feel ashamed. We need something like this:

Questions on Slavery Today

A. Define the term glut on page 2.

Glut (n) = excessive/abundant supply of something

B. Evaluate this article's lead using the criteria we established in class.

“Slaves are cheap these days.” It leaves the why out of it à doesn’t explain why slaves are cheap or why it is such a worrying issue.

C. Create a visual organizer for some of the statistics cited.

- 27 million people are enslaved right now (more than any other amount in world history)

·      3^rd revenue earner in organized crime after drugs and arms.

- 14000-17500 people are trafficked into the US every year

- debt bondage is the most common form of slavery (traps from 15 to 20 million people)

- Slaves used to be worth $40,000 à they can be bought for $30 now in the Ivory Coast

- 80% of the people trafficked across national borders are female

·      70% of those females end up in the slave trade

D. How has the United States government tried to stave off human trafficking? Cite examples. Are these measures fair? Why? Why not?

The increase of trafficking in the U.S has been answered with new laws such as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000, a confirmation of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime which began in 2000, and an increase in the information shared between nations to fight trafficking. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act has a purpose to “combat trafficking in persons…to ensure just and effective punishment of traffickers, and to protect their victims.” While the UN Convention was more of an agreement between countries which had a similar purpose. These methods seem fair because they try to promise safety for the victims as well as punishments to those who traffic, to top it off, they were planned and discussed on a global scale, which makes them more useful over all.

E. Why does Leach use Deng's story ?

Leach uses Deng’s story to exemplify slavery today and make it more real in readers’ heads. It is an appeal to pathos from the author, where she tries to make the readers feel sympathy for a slave in this time and open their eyes in a more brutal way to the fact that slaver is in fact real in our lifetime.

F. Compare this understanding of slavery to the antebellum slavery in the United States according to Douglass.

This understanding of slavery seems a lot bleaker than it was in the United States during Douglass’s time because slaves are worth even less than they were before (this implies that they can be more easily bought around the world and that they need to be exported on a mass scale in order for the traffickers to make any kind of profit), and because it isn’t even noticed around the globe. Slavery now is centered more around women and children with emphasis on the sex trade, while before it was more centered around working. Certainly slavery is more restricted now than it was before: it is illegal in every country and most people around the world are morally opposed to it while in Douglass’s time it was a wide culturally accepted phenomenon. 

Understanding

There are exceptions to every rule, even those that seem most ludicrous and unfair. When I was reading the next two chapters in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave this thought kept jumping into mind as Douglass narrated all the changes he lived through when he moved to Baltimore. As he explains in the novel, the rule in plantations and cities is interchanged: slaveholders in plantations were cruel and seldom could you find one that didn’t beat his slaves bloody. Slaveholders in the city on the other hand, were much better masters, mainly because they weren’t willing to receive “the odium attaching to the reputation of being a cruel master” (Page 46).  I was also shocked with Douglass’ outlook on his new life (which was more positive than I would expect it to be) when he was first told about his impending move to Boston. The use of logos in chapters five and six however, gave me the ultimate surprise; not only because this was the stem of rhetoric I thought would be used least (if at all) in a memoir about slavery, but because the memoir has been so centered on pathos up to this point (you can read about the use of pathos in the book in my previous blog post).  All in all, although very short, chapter’s five and six provided twenty minutes of good reading.

When Douglass discusses his change of homes and how little it affected him, he also discusses the difference between slaveholders in the plantations and slaveholders in the city. It makes sense that social pressure and what other people may think would tame the slave owners in the city. In Baltimore it was all a concept of image: no one wanted to be the slaveholder living right beside a slave less family who hears the cries of mistreated slaves. This social pressure is what Douglass thinks makes masters in the city kinder than they were in the plantations where no one could hear or see what happened to slaves. The exceptions to the rule in the cities are masters like Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton, who mistreat their slaves beyond belief giving little thought to what others may think. The two slave girls that belonged to Mr. Hamilton were, according to Douglass, the most “mangled and emaciated creatures [he] ever looked upon” (Page 46). The youngest slave girl in the Hamilotns’ care was but fourteen years old and she was so mistreated that “she was oftener called “pecked” than by her name” (Page 47).  The exception in the plantations on the other hand was Master Daniel Lloyd, who Douglass served before being shipped off to Baltimore. Out of all the white people he knew at the Great House, only Master Daniel seemed to care about him in any way, getting to the point where he “would not allow the older boys to impose upon [Douglass] and would divide his cakes with [him]” (Page 39).  This change on the treatment of slaved dependant of social pressure is interesting to say the least. It highlights the fact that people tend to care about what others think, linking back to previous chapters where Douglass mentions that all slaves were expected to say they had kind masters.

Douglass’ attitude about his move to Boston also provided immense shock value in the story. One would think that he would feel uncomfortable being shipped off without a choice, or maybe even apprehensive of what was expected of him in a big town. To my surprise, his reaction was the complete opposite: excitement about what was to come and positive expectations of his future in Baltimore. Douglass is so excited about his new life in the city that he doesn’t care when his mistress asks him to wash off until he is pristine. He clarifies in the book that this “pride of appearance” (Page 40) is not his own, but he still does it with glee, hoping that what he will find in the city is better that what he has lived his whole life, and comforting himself with the idea that it can’t be any worse.

Notice how everyone queuing to read is white, or is that just me? 

This comfort that Douglass uses on himself leads into the biggest surprise in these two chapters: the use of logos. In order to reach the conclusion that the worst he could get is the same Douglass would have to be able to analyze his situation and compare it to what he imagined in other plantations, in other words, it requires the use of logic. The idea of a seven-year-old slave comforting himself with logos is rather unbelievable to be honest, which is what makes me think that this might be an argument Douglass considered in retrospective when he was writing the memoir. Regardless of when he came to this idea, it is a clear example of logos, which makes it noteworthy in this memoir. Yet another use of logos can be found in chapter 6, when Douglass decides to learn to read because his master said that he shouldn’t. This determination he gets from the challenge his master gave him (Mr. Auld basically said that slavery and education were wring for each other, implying that slaves are stupid and not worthy of education) required logic to achieve. Just one phrase of opposition from his master was enough for Douglass to finally understand and attribute “to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man” (Page. 45).  These examples of logos show, for the first time in the memoir, how Douglass began understanding the world around him.

These two chapters have been the most interesting in the memoir for me so far. Douglass has stopped talking about what he saw around him in plantation and began to actually delve into his own story, sharing how he began to understand the world around him and the main differences he found when he moved from the plantations. These chapters make me more eager for what lies ahead in the book. Is Douglass going to continue using logos as he explains his conclusions about slavery and how he came to them? Will we hear more about his master’s opinion of slavery and education? I guess there’s nothing to it but to keep reading and find out.

Thinking About Reading

Sherman Alexei in 2002

In class we read a literacy essay titled "The Joy of Reading: Superman and Me" by Sherman Alexie, an Indian who taught himself how to read using a Superman comic book. In his essay, Alexie reflects on the importance of reading and how it helped him knock down doors that would have been closed had he never learned. He also explains how he learned to read and how it made him feel as a small boy enclosed in an Indian Reservation. The following questions were our reflections after reading the essay:

1)   What is Superman doing in the comic book panel Alexie remembers? Why is it important to remember this detail at the very end of the essay?

When the author first learned to read, Superman was breaking down a door in the comic book he was examining. It is important to remember this detail because at the end of the essay he uses it as a metaphor in which he is Superman and the door are the small Indian boys that refuse to let him help them “save [their] lives” (pg. 18).

2)   In paragraph 7, Alexie repeats a certain verb fourteen times. What is this verb, and what effect does this repetition have? What might Alexie be trying to say about the process of his coming to literacy, in terms of both the effort required and the height of the obstacles encountered?

The verb repeated so many times in the seventh paragraph is “read.” The reason Alexie repeated this word so many times was to emphasize the fact that he learned how to read by reading, nothing more and nothing less. With the repetition of this word he implies that the way to break down all the doors and surpass the obstacles set on Indian youths is by reading.

3)   In “Learning to Read and Write,” Frederick Douglass writes, “In moments of agony I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity” (par. 6). Compare this sentiment to Alexie’s feelings about his fellow classmates on the reservation. Do you think that Alexie envied his classmates? Why or why not? How were his difficulties from those faced by other Indians?

In contrast to Douglass, who envied the slaves who couldn’t read because they weren’t burdened with knowledge, Alexie didn’t envy his classmates who refused to read or write. He says himself that “[he] was smart. [He] was arrogant. [He] was lucky” (pg. 17). This indicated that unlike Douglass, he felt empowered and (up to a certain extent) better than the rest of his classmates because of his ability to read and write. His difficulties were much less than those of his classmates because by learning to read he opened doors that would not be available to anyone else in the reservation. He could get a better job and make a better living than them because of it.