Great Works \’09

I recognize Erendira as a peripheral character in Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. She was a prostitute that one of the sons (Aureliano ?) slept with. Aureliano was  horrified at her predicament, but also deeply impressed with the stengh she displayed.  An isolated and withdrawn youth, Aureliano wanted to be the one to rescue her from this tragic life. He decided to ask her to marry him. He came to get her in the morning; but unfortunately, the tent was already gone.  

Erendira’s part in the book was very short. It shocked me, to the point that I l convinced myself that I must have “misunderstood” the context. Despite the numerous events in the novel that rely on the reader to accept a world of magical realism, I must have thought that the case of Erendira was WAY too much to ask the reader to accept without further explanation.  

Really great story. I was pleasantly disturbed.

What is the use of literature? The panelists of the event, “What is the Use of Literature?” all had the goal of answering this question. Coming into this event, I had the perception that all English majors would end up being writers, poets, or professors. The event definitely changed this view, as the first speaker began by emphasizing that many employers are impressed by an interviewee’s knowledge of literature. The second speaker continued by speaking about the relevance of literature to life. The third speaker, our very own professor, spoke about the pleasure that reading can bring.

The first and second speakers introduced the event showing the use that literature can have in getting a job, and the use that the knowledge of literature can have in life. They provided a very good transition into Professor Eversley’s speech. Since we are in a business school and the majority of us will become business majors, I felt that the most relevant part of this event was Professor Eversley’s speech. She talked about how she still remembers the first book she read, and how it made her want to spend her life as a Reader, with a capital R. This made me remember the first real book I read, which was an Animorphs book. It made me realize that reading could bring you to another world, and allow your imagination to take you inside the book. Similar to Professor Eversley’s experience, this book also sparked the Reader in me. This is the reason I felt that the speech was so relevant. Whether you’re a business major or an English major, anyone can be a Reader. The enjoyment that literature can bring is universal, and anyone who can remember his or her first real book can easily answer the question, “What is the use of literature?”

The next time you (the reader) need to exact revenge on a rival foe or just feel like reading something that will make your insides writhe in pain with burning despair and complete utter sadness, by all means, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother is the story for you. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story is so incredibly sickening that the act of just reading the story parallels itself with sadistic torture. For the people reading this post, heed my warning and avoiding reading this text if you have not yet been exposed to the adult world of misery of suffering.

Marquez writes in a way that it becomes hard to truly understand his characters. Aside from being a sad story, The Incredible and Sad Tale…, is also a confusing one. He combines both ordinary and surreal elements in the text to create the sense of magic realism. Because of his style, it is easier to compare and contrast The Incredible Sad Tale with fairy tales. The beginning of this story resembles the classic fairy tale, Cinderella. All the major characters are there, including the trapped princess, evil witch, and prince charming. The story’s “Cinderella” in this case is Erendira and like the fairy tale, she is forced to do the chores at home and a slave to her grandmother. Unfortunately, she is cast into the harrowing world of prostitution when she accidentally burns their house down.

Although the harm is monumental, Erendira’s punishment just simply does not fit her crime. Her “misfortune” is something that no human being should have to relate to and yet, Marquez spends most of time discussing the specific ways that the grandmother makes use of Erendira. From the dialogue, readers can see grandmother’s ability to bargain her Erendira’s body with grotesque simplicity. What makes the story more confusing is while we see grandmother as a despicable and soulless being; some of her actions argue against this thought. The grandmother ruthlessly sells her granddaughter’s body to strangers, but seems to show genuine care for her future. She reassures Erendira that one day, she will become a “lady” and inherit unimaginable fortunes when she passes but traffics her (Erendira) body routinely and refuses to give her a single peso. Similarly, we see Erendira as the pure and innocent victim of this tragedy. But her actions and words may account for something entirely different. For example, she abandons her knight in shining armor when he finally kills the source of her misery, her grandmother. After years of sexual abuse and dreams of escaping with Ulises, she runs away. This sudden change in character makes the reader wonder if Erendira was just using Ulises the entire time. What happened to Cinderella and why didn’t she run away with prince charming?

Needless to say, reading The Incredible and Sad Tale…left behind a wall of questions in my mind and a melancholic/unforgiving taste in Marquez’s works.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a brilliant writer, his talent is indescribable and irreplicable (I know it’s not a real word). He uses magical realism, which was hard to accept when I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but eventually I understood how this technique, his style is an extraordinary way to depict the humanty. While Orwell uses succinct sentences and horrendous images (Shooting of An Elephant) to bare the inhumanity, Marquez’s way is composed of paradoxes, oppositions, and untiring imagination that shows the powerful truth. There is no objective reality, no physical boundaries, and that in turn brings the reader to a new level of consciousness. The beautiful imagery of the places and the dresses is opposed by the harsh behaviors: Grandmother selling her granddaughter. Every description is extensive and so vivid that it pierces the skin. As Ulises kills the grandmother her green blood spurts everywhere and I could almost feel the greediness of the heartless grandmother rising from the pages. The last two pages are forceful, exposing the emotional truths and leaving the reader with questions.

It is Marquez’s imagination that always impresses me the most in his works. It is as if he literally sees all of these places clearly enough to give the reader a full, in-depth description through the use of familiar metaphors, comparing out-of-this-world things with something else anyone can easily see. His ficition: characters and plot is not relatable, but it relates so much to our society. He shows the human nature at its worst and at its best without teaching, nodding in a direction, or judging. He simply gives the reader a magical mirror that might distort the realities of physics or the laws of nature, the surroundings and the outside environment, but the image of the inside of a person looking at it is crystal clear.

I am often frustrated in English classes or in conversations with fellow readers whenever discussing anything by Marquez, because the inevitable discussion centers on how the work belongs upon the bookshelf with all of the others by Latin American authors in the genre of “magical realism.”  I recently read something on the topic that summed up the possible causes for this unavoidable label:  “Some claim that it is a postcolonial hangover, a category used by “whites” to marginalize the fiction of the “other.”  Others claim that…it is a way to cash in on the Latin American “boom.”  Still others feel the term is simply too limiting, and acts to remove the fiction in question from the world of serious literature.”   To some extent, I agree with this.  Magical realism, a type of literature “characterized by elements of the fantastic woven into the story with a deadpan sense of presentation,” is wonderful, but I refuse to believe that simply explaining the genre and throwing Latin American writers immediately into the mix without further examination is sufficient discussion on the entire history of work from a major region of the world.
Now that I’ve finished ranting about how tired I am of hearing the same old thing, I will just as openly admit that it does have a great deal of relevance and offers an amazing look into the Latin American culture and way of life.  Reading Marquez in Spanish is a delightful treat that I only discovered after giving up on his work in English.  Life is transformed, everything makes much more sense, and there is a strange peace in the place of a frustrating confusion.  In an anthropology class I took last year, we learned that language is key to understanding how people think.  The way someone speaks, the order of the words and phrases, the structure of the sentence is key to understanding the culture and the thought process of the individual.  Marquez serves as a master example, the pure sort of embodiment of a cultural quality or characteristic that defines millions.  Thinking back to Saturday evening when I was talking to abuelita in Spanish before leaving a party, I realize that magical realism is not just a literary genre, it is a technical term molded and applied from everyday conversation and a way of thinking about life.  A normal conversation can take on a sort of mystical glow, a quality that simply can’t be described in English.  And dreams are always of utmost importance.  Enderia is great.  It is crazy.  It doesn’t make sense, and then suddenly it does.  At the very least, it is worth reading for the sheer pleasure of experiencing how Marquez makes images dance across your mind as your eyes graze the page.

Time and time again, through our class readings, we have witnessed how an author’s personal experiences influence their writing. Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People is no exception.

I found a very powerful video that does a wonderful job at describing how Gordimer was immensely impacted by her experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa. The video also indirectly touches upon the question of the uses of literature. I don’t want to give anything else away, so please take a look for yourself. Trust me, you won’t regret it!

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In case that doesn’t work, here is the link:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z56GBo-QF…

So there’s been the debate about being a Reader or Not-A-Reader. I would say I am a Reader, but I have had someone accuse me of not really being a Reader since I don’t make the time to read whenever possible. Nonetheless, I do enjoy reading.

Sometimes I feel that being a Reader can be a bad influence, though, because at some point in my life (during one summer) I was reading so much that I alienated myself from my friends and family. Every hour of every day I spent absorbed in whatever material I was reading, even placing my books above my friends – sad, I know. Maybe you could even use the Underground Man as a comparison to me at the time. I even used a flashlight to read in the dark during the infamous Blackout. The days flew by so quickly, and I just felt that the action happening in the books I read was so much more interesting than my own life – REALLY SAD, I know. So I used those books as a way to make my life seem more exciting, separating myself from reality. At some point, I realized that this was becoming problematic and I needed to resurface to the real world, and so I stopped reading at that point.

So possibly what I’m trying to say is that it could be a good thing that we don’t constantly engage ourselves in literature all the time. As the professor mentioned, we all have our own lives to live and we need to choose for ourselves on how to balance our activities. It might even be healthy to take a break from fiction and engage ourselves with actual events and people.

So after attending the session on what is the use of literature, I’m sorry to say this but I feel like I did not really get much out of this discussion.  I was looking forward to the event because this is a question I ask myself everytime I have to read something for an English class, especially when it is something I have no interest in reading whatsoever.  I feel like the discussion never really answered the question of what the use of literature actually is.

When thinking about the definition of literature, I feel like it could be defined in so many different ways that pretty much anything can be considered literature.  My blog post can be considered literature…  So if defining literature to be that broad, then yes of course I feel like literature is so important especially in this day and age.

My real question about the use of literature is more geared towards what is the use of me reading something like Shakespeare, or Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (sorry to say I really did not like this book).  This is something I constantly ask myself when assigned something in an English class.  As mentioned before I think literature is useful and interesting when it is relevant to a person.  I am a person that actually loves reading, however books I enjoy reading would never be discussed in a contemporary English class I feel.

Anyway, to stop all this rambling, I feel like when considering the question of what is the use of literature, we need to look at which ways it is relevant to the person that will be interacting with this literature.  I guess this is just my personal bias of never really enjoying myself in an English class because I always always came out of the class thinking “Wow, that class was a bit pointless.”  Maybe the answer to the question of “What is the use of literature?” is that there is no use.  Maybe it just exists to serve as entertainment and a passtime for people, such as movies or music.

I took a cultural anthropology class this semester and one of our ethnographic readings had to do with the status of South Africa after the official ending of apartheid. This article shed light on a new type of apartheid: the one between the rich and the poor. I pasted the summary and analysis that I wrote of it because I believe that it is extremely relevant to the theme observed in July’s People. Nadine Gordimer aims to explain that even though July and the Smales have a different skin color, they are both equally African and equally human. There is a form of an inspiring unification visible here and it is mirrored in the real Post-Apartheid politics that exist today. This unification and disregard for difference arises from tragedy.

We Are The Poors

Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid

South Africa

In its denotative state, apartheid is defined as a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on the grounds of race. Apartheid for South Africa, however, epitomizes a time spanning from 1948 through 1994 dominated by an oppressive white regime. People were classified into various ethnic groups until negotiations for the policy’s ending were successful under the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela. Such is the history often portrayed in the media and the information that people are able to lay at peace with. However, the questions of what happens afterwards or whether the vestiges of Apartheid remain are never really posed in the current era.

Ashwin Desai is able to shed light on these questions and create awareness on the fact that South African citizens are now fighting a different type of demon arising from an unlikely source and are still dealing with various human rights abuses. Before the official ending of apartheid, individuals put their loyalty into the ANC through brave and organized revolts against the movement. Many paid the price of blood, sweat, and tears believing with blind faith the promise that the ANC will bring a future of freedom. Ironically, the efforts of these people resulted in a paradoxical victory with the ANC now carrying out a program of big capital that is as if not more oppressive as Apartheid.

People have become prisoners as the ANC has imposed its own structural adjustment program on South Africa. Taxes on the rich were cut, the exchange control dropped, and tariffs that protected unionized South African workers from imports from sweat shops were abandoned. As a result, around a hundred thousand jobs were lost each year with 1 million alone in 2001. The economic gap between the rich and poor grew larger and larger. People who weren’t able to pay lost basic necessities such as water, housing, electricity, and healthcare at the hands of the South African government. People lacked access to HIV medication and the preventative drugs for children were also inaccessible.

This irony is also visible in the harsh dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. First hailed as a hero for his leadership in the Zimbabwe African National Union against white supremacy rule, Mugabe now epitomizes human rights abuse. He is responsible for hyper inflating and leading the economy of his country into a downward spiral while actively repressing citizens.

Another ironic twist to this situation is that this tough market fundamentalism served to unite individuals of different races (victims of Apartheid) into a collective community force that actively vouches for the basic rights that they deserve as human beings. Though primarily focusing his research on the struggles of the Indian-dominant Chatsworth, Desai presents these struggles as a microcosm of a unified revolt with communities coming together in a liminal moment: the Durban Social Forum. The community movements from various oppressed areas are basically the force of the new South African revolution, with citizens standing their ground against the instrument of free-market economics that they have themselves elected (ANC). Through the experiences of Professor Fatima Meer, Desai highlights the strength, courage, and hidden leadership of these oppressed people. There is no distinction between black or Indian but all identify themselves as a community of poors and members of one common race. These community members have now actively resisted against the actions of the ANC by making themselves aware. The majority of individuals are now equipped with the skills to rewire electricity that has been disconnected as they realize that simple protest is not enough. This mirrors the NYC homeless discussed in class as these individuals, deprived of the most basic necessity (home), actively took part in a housing takeover.

Desai clearly teaches a lesson and makes readers rethink their view of South Africa as they begin to understand the perpetual struggles that citizens face post-Apartheid, a time that many believe is characterized by peace and relief.

Critical Questions: 1) Can tragedy be healing and unifying? 2) What is the true definition of human rights in terms of what every individual deserves to have in a lifetime? 3) Does the knowledge of post-Apartheid struggles make individuals obligated to make a difference?

I’m currently taking an anthropology class and earlier this semester we discussed race as a social construct.  This seems extremely significant to this class as we are now discussing a book that takes place during Apartheid and deals with many racial questions.  Mirror For Humanity, by Conrad Phillip Kottak, describes race as a “cultural category rather than a biological reality.  That is, ethnic groups, including ‘races,’ derive from contrasts perceived and perpetuated in particular societies, rather than from scientific classifications based on common genes.”

The book goes on to explain why races are social and not biological and I will do my best to summarize the main points.  The first point is that Human variation is seen only in phenotypical traits.  Phenotypical traits are an organism’s “manifest-biology,” or its “evident traits” like skin color, eye color, height, weight, and facial features.  Beyond these variations in appearance, humans are so alike that it doesn’t make sense to categorize us into races because there is no significant difference.

This leads us to the books second point: “race” isn’t clear and it is an ever changing thing.  When someone is born in Kenya, is their race Kenyan or just African?  Who’s to say?  Now lets say that that Kenyan travels the world and has a child with a person from China.  Then what race is the child?  Is it Sino-African or Afro-Chinese?  “Race” is a complicated concept in that regard.  And this brings us to the third point the book makes.

If the child appears to be just Chinese or just African, then people will think they know the childs race.  They will classify the child as one of many possibile “races.”  The child may simply be African or Asian.  Then again they may specifically label the child as Chinese or Kenyan.  And then if you ask the child his or her “race”, he or she may identify with a certain group within one of those coutries and tell you that is or her race is Cantonese.  The point here is that “race” is all based on perception and culture.  The way race is viewed changes from person to person as everyone has their own perception and philosophy on it.  This goes to show just how unexact the race concept is.  It is all based on culture and perception.