STUDENT WRITING FROM THE MONTCLAIR KIMBERLEY ACADEMY UPPER SCHOOL 2023-2024
Student Editors Faculty Editors
Suzie Elkhouri ‘26
Liam Campbell
Logan Snyder ‘26. Caroline Toman
Tyler Rizzo ‘26
Brooks Barrett ‘25
Ciara Branigan ‘25
Dilan Lalla ‘25
Jemma Potenza ‘25
Stephen Hatfield ‘24
Maggie Horn ‘24
Paul Cunningham
Patty Forbes
Contributing Writers
Christie Kim ‘26
Tyler Rizzo ‘26
Sam Lewis ‘25
Max Stanford ‘25
Irena Avalos ‘25
Rahul Madgavkar ‘25
Willow Killebrew ‘25
Aiden Maas ‘24
Maggie Horn ‘24
Bella Kuick ‘24
Katie Chung, ‘24
Kellen Ievers ‘24
Kitty Williams ‘24
Stephen Hatfield, ’24
Editors-in-chief: Stephen Hatfield ’24, Maggie Horn ‘24
Faculty Advisor: Caroline Toman
Note from the Editors
In its curriculum, Montclair Kimberley Academy constantly seeks to promote diversity and illuminate hardships endured throughout the world and throughout time that usually get overlooked. This is best exemplified in our student body’s literary and historical analyses of several outstanding works— all of which are never-ending oceans full of knowledge and lessons that our students cannot wait to delve into. In the 2023-2024 school year, our students interacted with these works and wrote provocative, creative, and witty pieces— ranging from two carefully articulated analyses of female identity in colonial Rhodesia from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions to two "Book Bentos” that showcase thematic analyses of the lush and tragic The God of Small Things alongside visuals that enrich the students’ pieces of work. With this 2023-2024 issue, The Lattice seeks to put the spotlight on the outstanding student body that picked apart the tragedies, comedies, dramas, and histories that composed MKA’s curriculum. Please allow us to present the insightful analyses and powerful expression of the Montclair Kimberley student body.
Macbeth
In the following order: Christie Kim ’26, Tyler Rizzo ‘26
Macbeth famously explores themes of fate and remembrance, and English 2 Honors students were tasked with analyzing these themes. Christie Kim ‘26 delves into Macbeth’s fate, positing that Macbeth’s subversion of the natural order of time brings forth his demise. Kim examines Macbeth’s misery and terrible fate as a result of his attempts to subvert time itself, expertly exploring the thematic connections between Macbeth’s actions and soliloquies with deterministic theory. Tyler Rizzo ’26 also explores themes of fate in Macbeth through foreshadowing. Specifically, Rizzo examines the cryptic speech of the Porter— often dismissed as comedic relief— and the subtle ways in which it addresses the ever-present theme of power dynamics.
Back to the Future: Trifling with Time in Macbeth
Time delays, time flies, time drags. Throughout classic literature, many authors utilize the natural course of time to explore characters’ actions. Similarly, the English poet William Shakespeare showcases time as a pivotal theme in his tragic play, Macbeth. Macbeth’s attempts to exploit and manage time form the basis of the tragedy. Although Macbeth’s impatience and ambition drive him urgently to propel the prophecy into reality by manipulating time, the play argues that attempting to control the future and refusing to accept mortal limitations inevitably ends in regret and emptiness.
Impatient and greedy for power, Macbeth forces the Witches’ predictions into reality in an attempt to gain the fruits of the prophecy quickly. As Macbeth internally weighs the risks and potential rewards of murdering Duncan to expedite the prophecy, he determines that “if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well/It were done quickly. If the assassination/Could trammel up the consequence, and catch/With his surcease, success…we'd jump the life to come” (I.vii 1-7). Here, Macbeth’s zeal to “jump the life to come” blinds him to the costs he will inflict upon the lives of others. Refusal to delay gratification overtakes Macbeth’s morality and character. By acting upon the prophecy, Macbeth attempts to cheat fate, overwhelmed by a lust for Duncan’s power. Moreover, when Macbeth encounters Banquo on the way to Duncan’s bedroom, Macbeth deflects Banquo’s attempts to
discuss the prophecies, promising that “when we can entreat an hour to serve,/We would spend it in some words upon that/Business,/If you would grant the time” (II.i 29-32). Here, time is presented as a means of delay, distance, and flattery. Macbeth uses the excuse of time to politely distance himself from Banquo, his closest friend, displaying the great extent of his ambition and greed for power. Instead of choosing to wait and let fate unravel itself, Macbeth presents time as an escape from Banquo’s logical approach to the prophecy. Ultimately, Macbeth’s desire for a higher status motivates him to utilize time as a means of manipulation and delay.
By contrasting impulsivity in the pursuit of power and Macbeth’s traumatic realization of regret, time becomes a double-edged sword for those who attempt to exploit it, evoking a desire to manage the outcomes of time and creating guilt as a result. Experiencing the aftermath of murdering Duncan, Macbeth laments that “had [he] but died an hour before this chance,/[he] had liv'd a blessed time; for, from this instant/There's nothing serious in mortality./All is but toys” (II.iii 107-110).
Here, the dichotomy between Macbeth’s former impatience to wait for his rise in status and his current state of regret reveals the dangers of attempting to control the course of time to fulfill personal desires. Macbeth’s impulsive decision to hurry his fate causes him to feel remorse, as now, he cannot determine right from wrong.
While Macbeth’s pursuit of higher status is a success, his decision to accelerate time diminishes his ethics. Furthermore, in Macbeth’s soliloquy following the announcement of Lady Macbeth’s death, Macbeth mourns that "life's but a walking
shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more" (V.v 27-29). Juxtaposing his ambition and greed, which cause him to trifle with the course of fate, Macbeth demonstrates regret later, equating the passage of life to a mere shadow. Macbeth’s short-lived time “upon the stage” leaves his remaining future at a standstill, pointless and poignant. The consequences of expediting fate display themselves through Macbeth’s lack of happiness and eroding ambition, as over time, he is forced to reflect upon his impulsive decision to kill Duncan. Attempting to overcome the natural course of time for personal gain sets Macbeth's life on a trajectory of tragedy.
Seeking to expedite his path to royalty ultimately leads Macbeth to a reckoning. After Macbeth learns of Lady Macbeth’s death, Macbeth berates himself and the way he has wasted his life, despite the relentless approaching of “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/[which] creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To the last syllable of recorded time,/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death” (V.v 22-26). Examining how his life has been ultimately pointless, Macbeth determines that the urgency he felt to achieve glory is now futile and meaningless. The contrast between Macbeth impulsively killing Duncan to accelerate his rise to power and how time now traps Macbeth in a slow wait for his own demise exemplifies the punishments, one being the futility of life, that result from striving to manipulate the course of time. Likewise, as Macbeth prepares for Macduff’s invasion of his castle, he realizes that ”[his] way of life/Is fall’n into the
sere, the yellow leaf,/And that which should accompany old age,/As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,/[he] must not look to have” (V.iii 26-30). Macbeth compares his state to that of a withering autumn leaf, emphasizing both his diminishing will to live and his meaningless life despite his quick ascension in status. Moreover, Macbeth’s life is pointless as he has no person or future to live for and to look forward to. While Macbeth’s impatience spurs his decision to cross mortal boundaries in an attempt to hastily gain power, Macbeth’s regret of the miserable life he has reveals the unfortunate outcome of attempting to accelerate fate.
Although Macbeth’s ambition successfully drives him to gain power by attempting to expedite the results of the prophecy, the consequences of utilizing the course of time for personal gain and greed reveal themselves in the forms of guilt and feelings of worthlessness. Throughout Macbeth, time is never at a standstill, yet Macbeth’s trifling causes his last moments to be a slow reflection upon his fruitless and regretful life. The play explores the contrast between Macbeth’s urgency during his rise to the throne and his delayed descent into despair leading to his final moments. The discontent and remorse Macbeth experiences as the consequences of his urgency reveal the importance of patience and respecting the natural cadence of time. Ultimately, Macbeth’s cautionary tale is a reminder of the dangers of overstepping mortal limitations to command factors outside of human control.
Themes of Macbeth in the Porter’s Speech
Despite being one of the Porter’s most iconic lines, the full value of “I pray you, remember the Porter” (Shakespeare II.iii.21) may be lost on the audience because of the character’s reputation as comic relief. A surface-level analysis of this line reveals that the Porter is asking for a tip from Macbeth’s visitors, Macduff and Lennox; however, it may also be interpreted as a request of the audience to remember the themes the Porter explores. Despite the Porter’s apparent irrelevance to the events of the play, his musings explore the roles of punishment, manipulation, and power throughout the plot of Macbeth. By “remember[ing] the Porter,” the audience, as well as the soon-to-be rebels Macduff and Lennox, gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of power between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as well as how each character comes to their demise.
The Porter’s description of an equivocator foreshadows Lady Macbeth’s role in bringing about her own misery. The Porter first mentions equivocation in the context of one “equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale” (II.iii.8-10), whom he pretends to welcome into the gates of Hell. The Porter defines an “equivocator” as somebody who holds two contradictory beliefs or aligns themselves with two opposites. Lady Macbeth could also be described as an equivocator because of her changing relationship with guilt and violence
throughout the play. Toward the beginning of the play, Lady Macbeth incites the murder of Duncan and afterwards, exclaims that “A little water clears us of this deed./How easy it is then!” (II.ii.86-86). Initially, Lady Macbeth feels no guilt for the murder of Duncan, and believes that she will be cleansed of her crime just by removing the evidence of her guilt. Lady Macbeth insists both that she desires this violence and that she will be without guilt for her crime; however, she is later tormented and begs for freedom from this guilt. In her deranged fit of sleepwalking toward the end of the play, Lady Macbeth motions to wash her hands and whispers, “What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that” (V.i.45-46). While Macbeth’s violence continues in order to maintain their power and security, Lady Macbeth pleads the opposite of her initial wishes: for the violence to cease and for her to be truly cleansed of her guilt. Similar to the equivocator, whom the Porter describes as being able to swear loyalty to two conflicting sides, Lady Macbeth holds conflicting beliefs and wishes at different points in the play. The imaginary equivocator’s damned fate mirrors Lady Macbeth’s torture and ultimate end because of this contradiction.
The Porter’s musings about the effects of drinking serve as a parallel to Lady Macbeth’s manipulation and sexual subversion of Macbeth. When inquired as to his drunkenness, the Porter describes the effects of alcohol as being contradictory, saying: “Lechery… it provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with
lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; makes him stand to and not stand to”
(II.iii.30-36). The Porter explains that drinking stokes his sexual desire but impairs his ability to find sexual partners or perform sexually, and he muses that this qualifies as equivocation. The Porter analyzes drunkenness through personification, describing it as both encouraging and discouraging to a man. Lady Macbeth’s manipulation of Macbeth is similar, as she simultaneously encourages and insults him. While convincing Macbeth to murder Duncan, Lady Macbeth says, “When you durst do it, then you were a man;/And to be more than you were, you would/Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place/Did then adhere, and yet you would make both./They have made themselves, and that their fitness now/Does unmake you” (I.vii.56-61). Lady Macbeth incentivizes violence for Macbeth, telling him that it will improve his manhood, while also telling him that his hesitence is detrimental to his manhood. Lady Macbeth’s fixation on Macbeth’s virility as her target for both encouragement and insults is similar to the Porter’s description of “an equivocator with lechery,” and the fates of the two manipulators are also similar. As he describes the effects of alcohol, the Porter says, “in conclusion, [drunkenness] equivocates him in a sleep and, giving him the lie, leaves him”
(II.iii.36-38). Lady Macbeth’s death follows the same pattern as the Porter describes: she describes her conflicting wishes while sleepwalking, having lied to Macbeth about the effectiveness of the murderous plot and her ability to remain
without guilt, and ultimately leaves Macbeth by committing suicide.
The Porter’s imagining of a damned tailor hints that Macbeth will be unable to fulfill the role of king following his dishonest rise to power. While pretending to send another spirit through the gates of Hell, the Porter exclaims, “Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither for stealing out of a French hose” (II.iii.13-14). According to the articles of John Harcourt, Dr. James Hirsh, and F. M. Kelly, the Porter’s description implies that the tailor stole French hose, which are large and baggy, and sewed each of them into several smaller garbs, therefore charging his customers a regular rate for a dishonest product (Harcourt 395; Hirsh 82-83; Kelly 94; Kelly 97). In addition, the differing national loyalty between the English tailor and the stolen French hose is salient. The tailor’s theft of clothing shares thematic similarities with Macbeth’s usurping of Duncan’s throne; in doing so, Macbeth steals the robes of the king, to which the play frequently draws attention. In one instance, it is said about Macbeth that he feels “his title/Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe/Upon a dwarfish thief” (V.ii.23-25). The royal robes Macbeth steals from Duncan are described as too large, just as the tailor steals the French hose, which are larger than his product. The tailor’s crime also mimics Macbeth’s criminal rise to power, while the distinction between English and French loyalties is similar to Macbeth’s disloyalty to the Scottish throne and mistreatment of Scotland. In the Porter’s imagination, the tailor is damned to Hell for his crimes, and Macbeth similarly falls from the throne because of his crimes, dishonesty, and
inability to fulfill the great responsibility symbolized by the size of Duncan’s robes.
The Porter draws the attention of the audience to relevant themes which explain the moral, political, and personal downfalls of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, such that attentive viewers may understand their mistakes more deeply. The messages imparted by the Porter warn against manipulation, lechery, and degrading oneself for power; however, their culmination in the events of the play serve as a cautionary tale of tyranny. Macbeth shows a rising power in Scotland to be overcome by greed and the desire for self-preservation, resulting in a suffering nation and war; this could be viewed as a warning and an appeal to the morals of Shakespeare’s royal and ruling class audience. Macduff, like the Porter whose drunken ramblings he hears toward the play’s beginning, also reminds the audience that tyrants like Macbeth must be remembered. Macduff taunts Macbeth, saying that if captured, they will “have thee, as our rarer monsters are,/Painted upon a pole, and underwrit/’Here may you see the tyrant’” (V.viii.29-31). The Porter and Macduff both serve to urge the audience to remember tyranny so that it may be prevented in the future. Though drunken, confusing, and comical, the Porter’s message is ultimately as powerful as that of Macduff, who serves as the hero of the play.
Harcourt, John B. "I Pray You, Remember the Porter." Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 4, 1961, pp. 393-402. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2867456. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
Hirsh, James. "<em>Macbeth</em> and the Convention of Self-Addressed Speech." Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 33, 2020, pp. 67-88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26976233. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
Kelly, F. M. "Shakespearian Dress Notes-I: Doublet and Hose." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, vol. 29, no. 159, 1916, pp. 91-98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/860284. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
Shakespeare, William, et al. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Updated edition, Simon & Schuster paperback edition. ed., New York City, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013.
Nervous Conditions
In the following order: Sam Lewis ’25, Max Stanford ‘25
After reading Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, students in 20th Century World Literature analyzed the role that misogyny and colonialism play on female identity in colonial Rhodesia. While both Sam Lewis ‘25 and Max Stanford ‘25 were tasked with this assignment, their analyses diverged in unique ways. Stanford’s essay not only hones in on Tambu’s character and how she looks to break free of the constricts placed on her gender, but also emphasizes the psychological toll resulting from navigating multiple identities. On the other hand, Lewis takes a broader view which demonstrates the universality of Tambo’s experience and shows how cyclically oppressive societal expectations erode women’s sense of self-worth. Together, the essays reveal how Nervous Conditions highlights the harmful effects of colonialism and misogyny on women’s lives.
Sam Lewis
In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, the burdensome expectations of womanhood in postcolonial Rhodesia repress women physically and emotionally, and at a deeper level, erode their sense of self-worth and their agency over their very existence.
Nervous Conditions demonstrates this erosion of self-worth from childhood through old age. In Rhodesia, women are made out to be unclean, dirty, and disgusting creatures. These conclusions are drawn from women’s simple bodily processes which draw shame and implicate one's very dignity and self-respect. This societal stigmatization causes the notion that women must remain subservient to males, and the idea that they can only be valued as mothers and wives, to become fact in the minds of both males and females. Essentially, by explicitly ostracizing females and associating them with a wide swath of negatives, males develop feelings of superiority over women, demonizing even their own mothers and sisters and unleashing a catastrophic erosion of young females’ sense of value and agency. Many characters in the novel embody this, but Tambu is the clearest example of the evolution of a child conditioned to female inferiority since birth. As Tambu has been told, she now believes that not only are male authority figures such as Babamakuru superior and godlike but also that women and their bodily functions are unsightly and revolting. While men are strong and powerful, giving off “strong aromas of productive labor,” women smell “of unhealthy reproductive odors”(12). Menstruation is especially
something to be treated as a “shamefully unclean secret that should not be allowed to contaminate immaculate male ears” (108). As women are considered inherently dirty and lacking in value as humans, they are cornered into believing that they possess a singular path forward to motherhood and marriage. Of course, this is recognized as a crucial societal role, but it is intrinsically a degrading process, where women must “choose between self and security,” and “accept deprivation” of a future, ambition, and self-regard (153). In the rare case when women step outside the womanly domain, they are treated as “vicious and unnatural….uncontrollable,” as demonstrated by various characters in the novel (215). As previously stated, these ideas are especially asserted during the formative years of childhood and adolescence, as young children naturally wish to explore more possibilities. These desires are quickly suppressed and the inferior position is quickly reasserted. Tambu, for example, wishes to attend school and broaden her horizons, but her father quickly labels these desires as “unnatural inclinations,” reminding her that she cannot “cook books and feed them to [her] husband,” so she really should “stay at home and prepare [herself]” for disappointment(57,32). Tambu beats the odds, though, and is able to attend an incredibly prestigious school on a British mission, a massive rebuke of the patriarchy. Although this is a feminist triumph, the insecurity, shame, and self-hatred that is imprinted upon women from birth closely follow her and other young females throughout education. Just as the prospect of following her ambition and alleviating the burdens of femaleness rises, “Marriage….always cropped up in one form or
another, stretching its tentacles back to bind [her] before [she] had even begun to think about it seriously, threatening to disrupt [her] life before [she] could even call it [her] own”(264).
The threat of marriage and motherhood on hopeful and optimistic girls, are the main mechanisms of enforcement of this inescapable female entrapment. The threat of these institutions is so chilling and destructive to the female consciousness that Tambu even begins to have dreams about future marriage and motherhood in which she comes to some horrific end that she is deserving of for “deserting” her family (137). In Tambu’s case, guilt and self-hatred arise from stepping outside the traditional bounds of womanhood, by going to an institution of education. Tambu questions why she formerly believed herself worthy of liberation from the heavy burden of femaleness, and even why anyone would wish to be around someone “as ignorant and dirty as [herself]?” someone who “deserved to suffer” (178). Tambu is overwhelmed by this new world that promises a lightening of burdens, something greatly contrasting to her subconscious belief that female suppression is only natural.
Additionally, in this new world, Tambu witnesses more and more cases of women rejecting the burdens of womanhood and receiving swift punishment from their male superiors, something that causes her to fear radical feminist actions. For example, her cousin Nyasha is extremely confrontational, and has a strong sense of self-worth–both traditionally male qualities. In one case, Nyasha in more than one way steps outside the acceptable bounds of womanhood, and in response Babamakuru violently and
ruthlessly “[condemns] Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of her femaleness,” strongly asserting “Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness”(173). This is a perfect example of how every young woman’s step out of line must be tied back and considered a symptom of femaleness. No matter what the infraction, femaleness is always invoked, and the cycle of suppression is continued. This experience is universal among women of all ages. As evidenced by the gathering of women in Tambu’s home for Christmas, there is a palpable understanding of “the sensitive images that the women had of themselves” and how it is “frightening now to even
begin to think that, the very facts which set them apart as a group, as women, as a certain kind of person, were only myths”(205). Essentially, after lifetimes of being told that women are lesser, it is near impossible for women to acknowledge that these negative self-perceptions are not grounded in reality. Sadly, in the case of most women, it is too hard to defy what’s been imprinted on one’s mind and to break out of this unending cycle of oppression. Typically, such as in the case of the character Mainini, this causes a progressively strengthening numbness, that entails a total acceptance of inferiority, and a lack of will to break free. In other cases, such as the 17 year old Nyasha, her spirit is broken down much more quickly, with devastating consequences. Nyasha, who was once a feminist spitfire, now sees with all clarity that there is no future for women who wish to live outside the bounds of motherhood and marriage. After many attempts to break free and many violent and verbal assaults by her father, she becomes afflicted with a ravaging eating disorder and declares herself an “evil girl” due to her disobedience (294). This system of female suppression has truly trapped Rhodesian women in a cycle of oppression that destroys women’s very will to resist and liberate themselves.
Madame Kupka Among Verticals is a 1910 painting by Czech Painter Frantisek Kupka. It depicts the painter’s wife drowning and succumbing to a sea of vertically painted, colorful slashes. The woman is barely visible and nearly entirely covered by the lines. This connects to Nervous Conditions and the erasure and suppression of female identity.
As is the case in both Nervous Conditions and The God of Small Things, Season of Migration to the North presents characters who are stuck between two worlds: both the colonizers and the colonized. On one hand, Mustafa who grew up in Sudan before being whisked away to a life of Western education abroad represents the journey of an anglicized man who ascends from his lowly African position in the South to a life of promise in the North. On the other hand, Mustafa is a man who retreats to Sudan and accepts a simpler and more traditional lifestyle in a small village. This dichotomy can even be physically represented by his two opposing homes: his apartment in London which is decorated with relics of his homeland, and his “secret room” in his house in Wad Hamid which serves as a shrine to English culture. Mustafa’s “mind was able to absorb Western Civilization but it broke his heart”(29). Essentially, after serving as a darling of the British elite, the true embodiment of the “Good African,” Mustafa’s education inadvertently opens his mind to the horrific nature of colonialism and what tragedy the British have reeked on his homeland. Mustafa’s early life is an “illusion, a lie” and the manifestation of textbook colonial invasion in which hatred is sown in “the hearts of the people for their kinsman, and love for the colonizers, the intruders” (28, 45). That is all the British were when it came down to it: intruders, but decades of forced dependence on their resources allowed Sudanese natives like Mustafa to come to revere and respect the British over their own culture. By receiving education, this truth is exposed to Mustafa and his reality is shattered. In what is a twisted way of recovering from this revelation, Mustafa flips the script of colonialism,
through his romantic relations with women in London.
Mustafa’s opposing and conflicting identities are demonstrated through the mechanism of love juxtaposed with domination and violence, a unique manner of showcasing the layers of a man who lives in the shadow of history. Through his various escapades with British women in London, Mustafa adopts the role of a colonizer and conqueror, even describing his love life as a battle and a “murderous war” (133). In his relationship with one woman, Jean Morris, Mustafa even explicitly categorizes his affair with this woman in terms of historical role reversal, with Mustafa serving as “the invader who had come from the south” and “history [becoming] his pimp”(132,119). Mustafa’s relations with several British women all represent this reversed historical dynamic. In most of these cases, Mustafa chooses a fairly traditional, rich, white woman as his “prey,” an outlet to channel his anger at the evils of colonialism, and to exact vengeance for history’s brutality. Part of this process entails luring women into his traps by presenting himself as a mysterious and fetishized version of an African man. As previously mentioned, Mustafa chooses to decorate his apartment with pieces of his African heritage to create a false sense of connection with his native culture. For these women, Mustafa serves as a new and intriguing experience. The “love” that they feel is not real in the traditional sense but is more of a novelty, an act of rebellion and excitement from their normal Western lives. One woman, Isabella Seymour, demonstrates this fetishization perfectly, calling Mustafa an “African demon,” and a “black god,” who she wishes would “burn [her] in
the fire of [his] temple” (88). Common amongst these women is a reductive and objectified colonial perception of Africans. In another sexual relationship, the shadow of history is even more explicit, with Ann Hammond playing the part in this relationship of a “slave girl” and Mustafa serving as her “master and lord”, a truly horrific history reenacted for sexual pleasure, making a game out of Mustafa’s people’s struggle (121). No matter what, though, the fetishized version of Mustafa is captivating to these women, with every last detail of Mustafa being drawn back to his African identity. She even says that Mustafa’s musk smells “of rotting leaves in the jungles of Africa, the smell of mango and the pawpaw and tropical spices” (118). Furthermore, Mustafa and this woman recognize that “what happened had already happened between [them] a thousand years ago” (121). This is the true nature of these relationships. Mustafa lures these women in with a falsified image of a godly, yet primitive, African and asserts complete control through physical and psychological domination, just as colonialism has done for centuries. Once these women discover the truth, that his love and his proclaimed identity are a farce, that there is no African God in Mustafa, it becomes too much to bear, and results in multiple suicides. This is Mustafa’s vengeance, the vengeance of a man who is trapped between two worlds. A man who after all the years of education in Western circles, still is perceived as “if [he’d] come out the jungle for the first time” (78). Mustafa, a victim of anglicization and colonialism, transforms himself into this ruthless colonizer, one who takes control of women, causing obsession with his African culture, just as Britain caused
infatuation with the West in Africa. Repeating history is a form of coping for Mustafa, a strategy of violence that he uses to make sense of his jumbled and confusing identity, essentially reclaiming the power stolen by colonialism. Colonial occupation teaches people to “open up their minds and release their captive power. But [they] cannot predict the outcome”(125). For Mustafa, this outcome is a tragedy, a total identity crisis in which he loses himself entirely in the grand scheme of history and culture. To find respite, Mustafa returns to Sudan, embedding himself within the village. Still, to achieve some semblance of clarity around his identity he must hide his true self.
Photo of
In visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, I was overwhelmed with the sheer vastness of the collection. I felt as if choosing one painting over all the others was an impossible task, and I was unsure what factors I should consider in this decision. Surprisingly, what drew me to this piece, The Eternal City by Peter Blume, was partly how little came to mind when I first saw it. With most of the other artworks, I was immediately struck by a certain quality, such as the use of color, line, or shape. With this piece, though, my first impression was more along the lines of “What on earth am I looking at?” Most of the previous artworks I had seen, I felt that I “got” the point of the piece, but with this one, I did not know what to think. At first glance, it appeared to be a rather simplistic and classic painting of a landscape including buildings, trees, and ruins of an ancient civilization. Then, there is this large and absurdly exaggerated blue face that is popping out of the ground. I think that paintings like these, which combine elements of the surreal, are the most powerful and thought-provoking. To me, paintings that portray reality often don’t leave enough room for imagination, and artworks of abstraction may be too undefined to provoke imagination. Paintings like this one, which combine elements of reality with elements of the fantastic and absurd, can really ask the hard questions. Of course, art is interpretive, but especially with surrealist art, there is a puzzle to be solved. How do objects that seem to convey a sense of randomness, actually represent the intentionality of the creator of the piece? Additionally, part of what is so interesting about this painting is how the background of ancient Rome and the man
in the front appear to be taken from different universes. After researching this piece, I came to understand that the conventional “meaning” of the piece is meant to show the rich history of Italy, dominated by the brutal dictatorship of Mussolini. While I can’t say I understood this from the beginning, I don’t think that the point of art is to have the viewer take away the same ideas as the painter. In viewing this piece, I see a key theme of history and culture. The background is curated to carefully represent bits and pieces of Italian history throughout the ages, and the name The Eternal City, creates a rich and complex tapestry that demonstrates everlastingness and persistence. To me, the alien-looking man is a symbol of modernity and possibly outside forces, specifically the threat it poses to the very serene and traditionallooking background of the composition. All in all, one can certainly find beauty and meaning in this absurdity and surrealism.
Max Stanford
In Nervous Conditions, colonialism and misogyny discourage the development of Tambu’s authentic identity by defining the very parameters by which African women are able to succeed and establishing a moral framework of what makes a “good,” acquiescent African woman. The cognitive dissonance of knowing this and still being compelled to modify her identity in a way that lends her to fit better into these standards in order to succeed causes Tambu to develop a debilitating “nervous condition” that is itself an insidious part of the way that the system functions.
The evolution of Tambu’s identity is controlled by her assumption of the ways in which she will be able to succeed under colonialism and misogyny. Throughout the novel, Tambu is extremely success-oriented. She wants nothing more than to be able to get the best education possible in order to emulate her aunt, Maiguru, who is starkly different from her own mother—Maiguru is wealthy and educated, and from the outside her life looks charmed. When Tambu arrives at the missionary, she “expected to find another self, a clean, well-groomed, genteel self who could not have been bred, could not have survived, on the homestead” (Dangarembga 91). She expects, in fact eagerly anticipates, her sense of self to change. The proximity to Babamukuru’s world of wealth and privilege, though unattainable for Black people under colonialism and for herself as a girl because of misogyny, enchants her as her grandmother and mother implied it would. The identity she expects to find there without any effort to cast away her old, poverty-ridden self is clean above all else.
However, the “cleaning” of herself would end up being much like Maiguru’s “kitchen… clean,” yet “scour[ed]” and “dull” (104). Instead of becoming a more sophisticated version of her previous self, the identity that Tambu develops at the mission is merely a toned-down version. In one instance when she accompanies Nyasha to a party, she states that “At times like that I wanted so badly to disappear that for practical purposes I ceased to exist… I do not know how I came to be like that… when I was at home before I came to the mission, I could assert myself and tell people what was on my mind… I had grown very tentative” (165). Tambu’s bold, defiant identity before she went to the mission has become replaced, completely without her awareness or expectation, by a timid and quiet girl. She stops being so assertive because of the values she sees reinforced around her—Babamukuru and Maiguru do not like the bold way that Nyasha acts, and Tambu strives to be the opposite of that in order to be accepted and supported. She has been made to minimize herself and her identity. She comes to believe the narrative that the missionaries present about Sacred Heart being the best possible school for her, and does not put stock into the warnings she gets from her family, the calls of “Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget. Nyasha, my mother, my friends. Always the same message. But why? If I forgot them… I might as well forget myself. And that of course, could not happen. So why was everybody so particular to urge me to remember?”(275). In this tragic way, Tambu stumbles into the point. If she forgets her family, her community, she will lose sight of herself. She does end up forgetting them in the way that they predict. She believes she has finally
achieved everything she wanted, but loses herself in the process. This is part of the process of colonialism, and it is so insidious because it takes place without violence or even with Tambu knowing what is going on—this white institution has been positioned as being so far above the mission that she wants to go there. However, it is segregated; she cannot succeed to the same height as her white peers. If Tambu ever went to England like Babamukuru, Maiguru, Nyasha, and Chido, she would not find herself free from the constraints of these forces—she would have them all the more ingrained in her. The theft of her sense of community directly leads to her losing her sense of self, and this individualistic path is also one set out by colonialism specifically to divide people—to have them divide themselves—in order to make them easier to conquer.
Tambu develops a “nervous condition” because of the cognitive dissonance between her desire to assert her own identity and her feeling that appealing to Babamukuru with a more acquiescent identity is key to achieving acceptance and success. After Babamukuru and Nyasha’s fight, Tambu begins to think even more about her cousin’s opinions, yet tries not to linger on the idea of “femaleness” because “I was beginning to suspect that I was not the person I was expected to be, and took it as evidence that somewhere I had taken a wrong turning. So to put myself back on the right path I took refuge in the image of the grateful poor female relative… by keeping within those boundaries I was able to avoid the mazes of self-confrontation” (184). At this point in the novel, Tambu begins to realize that the “self” she seeks at
the mission is very different from who she expects to be, and she also begins to believe it is wrong—she is terrified of Babamukuru believing she is rebellious like Nyasha and cutting off the love and support she has been relying on. To try and save herself from having a “wrong” self and from thinking too much about the things which make her doubtful of her place in life and her true identity, she further reinforces gender roles in her life, widening the gap between her true self and the one she portrays to the outside world. This pivot from doing what she wants in order to succeed to becoming “grateful” with an emphasis on being a girl and coming from poverty provides insight into how she acts around Babamukuru for much of the novel. Tambu knows that to succeed she needs to appeal to what he wants from her, and so she plays the character he wants her to. She knowingly uses the boundaries of this archetypal self, a role created largely by Babamukuru’s ingrained upholding of the norms for African women, to protect herself from having to take a deeper look into the inequalities she faces, and potentially becoming rebellious and thus “evil” like Nyasha. However, Babamukuru and Nyasha’s fight is also a turning point when Tambu realizes that the man she has been worshiping all her life is not all good. Her fear of not being grateful to him is in conflict with her desire to make her own identity and opinions known, particularly when he mandates her parents to have a wedding. She believes doing this is wrong, but it has been pressed into her throughout her childhood that nothing Babamukuru does can be wrong, which enforces the widening separation between her lived experience and the “truths” that are told to her. On the
morning of the wedding, Tambu “...could not get out of bed because I did not want to…. I was slipping further and further away from her, until in the end I appeared to have slipped out of my body and was standing somewhere at the foot of the bed…” and when Babamukuru says that Tambu “‘...is growing into a bad child… she knows she is in my house not because of herself but because of my kindness and generosity,’” she is able to snap out of it, because “it was something concrete that I could pin down and react to…” (245). Tambu has an out-of-body experience because she knows that she should obey Babamukuru’s wishes and go to the wedding, but is desperate not to because she strongly believes that it is the wrong thing to do. The stress of being torn between the image of the “grateful female relative” that she has until now upheld and her true self tears her in two—her consciousness, representing her identity, floats out of her motionless body, which represents the persona she is forcing herself to maintain. She only becomes one again when Babamukuru yells at her, equating her in “badness” with Nyasha. Going forward from this event, Tambu resumes protecting herself by appealing to Babamukuru, attempting to avoid the split between consciousness and body that she experiences when she fights back against him and the powerful, colonial world he represents. She goes to Sacred Heart against Babamukuru’s real wishes, but in line with the mindset he has impressed upon her— that she must continue along the colonial line of success. Tambu spends the rest of the book avoiding all conflict in an attempt to prevent her dissociative experience from happening again, changing herself until she is unrecognizable in pursuit of
idealized success and in flight from her true identity’s despair at her situation.
Tambu’s “nervous condition” that arises out of her cognitive dissonance at her life, her true identity and the one she is forced to play to be accepted, ends up controlling her and her future identity development as an agent of colonialism insidiously planted within her own mind.
Tambu tries to fill the role that her communities prescribe to her, in hopeful attempts to gain the love and acceptance of her family members. Fighting against norms and for equality is very important, but can be exceedingly lonely. Having a set place for herself within a family structure, even if it decreases other opportunities for her, feels good. The role of the revolutionary is not a comfortable one, and the warm embrace of community against the cold knowledge of the world and one’s unfair placement in it is sometimes enough to make one want to return to how life and relationships were before they became aware. The complicated identity of rebellion finds its largest opposition in the clear and accessible, if sometimes inauthentic, sense of self that is produced in a community.
The Swing (after Fragonard) by Yinka Shonibare features a headless mannequin wearing a French dress made of African fabrics and white stockings. Tambu longs to be crafted into the "perfect young lady" through schooling and success but because she is African and in a colonial education system, ends up losing integral parts of her identity.
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and this course show that violent suppression and fetishization, while on the surface opposites, are both tactics used within colonialism to dehumanize the oppressed group, and are rooted in very similar ideas. The nameless narrator of the novel spends years becoming obsessed with the grim life story of a mysterious man named Mustafa Sa’eed, with whom he shares the uncommon trait in their small Sudanese village of having had a European
education. Over the course of the novel, the reader comes to understand the life of Sa’eed as a general fraud—he wrote books on economics with shaky foundations, adopted the same fetishized Arab persona that the white women he seduces tell him they expect him to have, and ultimately when he is ready to give it all up and be given the death penalty for murdering his wife, white liberal acquaintances continue his fraud by describing him as a better person than he really was because they want to make themselves seem benevolent and progressive. The narrator struggles to understand how “just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lines the mean? Where the middle way…” and ponders his grandfather: “I am certain that when death comes to him he will smile in death’s face. Isn’t this enough? Is more than this demanded of a son of Adam?”(Salih 90). This quote shows how explicit dehumanization and absolute idolization and reverence are both “mad” ways of looking at another person, and the fact that many of the Europeans involved in Sa’eed’s story treat him like a god is a continuation of colonialism. The narrator longs for the normalization of non-white people in Europe, and the language of being a “son of Adam” calls into mind even more religious context — that treating a human being as a god and as a devil are both unnatural. The narrator recalls hearing from Sa’eed that Isabella Seymour said to him things like “‘‘Ravish me, you African demon. Burn me in the fire of your temple, you black god. Let me twist and turn in your wild and impassioned rites,’” and when in the desert, the narrator makes a point of noting that “right here is the source of the
fire; here the temple. Nothing. The sun, the desert, desiccated plants and emaciated animals… we pass by the bones of a camel that has perished from thirst in this wilderness” (Salih 88). The way in which Isabella and the other women characterize Sa’eed, in the same manner in which he characterizes himself in order to seduce them, is very much aligned with other racist stereotypes about Africans used to violently conquer Africa. She describes him as “wild” and a “demon,” and creates an imaginary “temple” in which he performs mysterious “rites,” all descriptions very similar to the characterizations of “savagery” seen in works like Heart of Darkness. The narrator shows how the landscape Isabella Seymour creates with this imagery is not real at all—the desert contains no temple or mysterious, potent flame, but instead is a place hostile to all life, tolerated and traveled rather than “understood” in some “exotic” way. In the real desert, the night is a time of relief from the hot sun, rather than a mystical, dangerous force, and the sun is an annoyance but not powerful enough to drive someone to kill another. The narrator shows the real, practical world of his life in Sudan in defiance of the fetishized African world created by Europeans. The passage conveys this European behavior as strange and fictional. The significance of the idea of different “worlds” is further shown in Binyavanga Wainaina’s famous essay “How to Write About Africa,” in which the author sardonically critiques the ways that white Westerners talk about the continent. The essay details the stereotypical archetypes by which African characters are portrayed by Western media. Animals and the continent itself are treated more as
people than the humans within it are, showing how Western portrayals are obsessed with their imagined “world” of Africa while dehumanizing African people through their characterization. Wainaina sarcastically advises writers to “establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this… thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests… treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated” (Wainaina 2005). This segment of the essay highlights the ways that Western narratives try to take control over Africa, through “pity,” “worshiping,” or “domination.” All of these exaggerated treatments, while seemingly having different causes (the love of the continent versus the hate of it) both are obsessed with an imaginary Africa that does not reflect reality there. Both of the thought systems create their ideal image of the continent as something that can and should be fetishized, conquered or both. Sexual desire and desire for resources and land are in this case part of the same acquisitive aspiration. Both of these are manifestations of the doctrine of colonialism that objectify African people and make them into subjects, regardless of the supposed intent with which the European liberals fetishize Sa’eed. The excuses that they make for him during his trial, too, ring of self-centeredness: one of Sa’eed’s professors defends him by saying that he “‘...is a noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a
deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.’ It occurred to me that I should stand up and say to them: ‘This is untrue… I am a lie…’ But Professor FosterKeen turned the trial into a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which I was one of the victims” (29). Mustafa Sa’eed knows full well that he was the reason that the women killed themselves; he drove them to because he adopted the untrue disguise that they put upon him. Sa’eed’s story is a tragedy in which he plays an instrumental part, but the jury absolves him instantly of the deaths for which he was responsible while not granting him the respect to interrogate the situation further and find the truth. The idea of a battle between “two worlds” continues the narrative of Africa and Europe being completely different from one another in every way, and this idea leads to the kind of fetishization that the women and Mustafa Sa’eed both treat one another with, a desire for the world that the other represent. The women elevate Sa’eed to the level of a god or a demon, either way having the same magnitude and distance from humanity, while Sa’eed associates them with his desire for status, and misogynistically treats them like objects and extensions of the environment as well. The professor takes this complicated situation and oversimplifies it, pitying Sa’eed and the struggle that the professor imagines he goes through to exonerate him when he would not have done the same for a European man. The Europeans are attempting to control the narrative of Sa’eed’s life through both “pity” and “worship” in the same way as “domination,” as Wainaina describes, in order to make themselves seem like better people to one another. By not allowing Mustafa Sa’eed to be a complicated
person but taking away all his unique facets and reducing him to the stereotypes of either a god or a primitive man overwhelmed by the modernity of the west, they dehumanize him, all the while congratulating themselves for how they, as Wainaina puts it, “care.”
the
Website.
Photograph of
Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper) from the Brant Foundation
Close-up photo of the installation by the author.
Over Thanksgiving break I visited the Brant Foundation, a small private gallery in New York City that is currently showing a collection of collaborations made by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early eighties. The paintings blend Basquiat’s more painterly and Warhol’s silk screen styles to make a dreamlike effect that looked like a thought working itself out on a canvas. The work that captivated me seemed almost excessively strange at first sight. Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper), made between 1985 and 1986, features (as the name suggests) a line of ten white punching bags hanging from the ceiling by 20-foot chains and each painted with a slight variation of the same image of Jesus (the oversized, silk-screened original of which hung behind the installation). The faces are covered by the word “JUDGE” repeating in blue paint, as well as Basquiat’s iconic crowns, and small ™ and ⓒ symbols reflecting the theme of consumerism that was even more present in some of the other paintings. The work made me think of the connections between violence and religious faith, with other people made into punching bags. Shame and judgment can often make someone lash out at others, and when this is combined with religious guilt and a feeling of divine judgment, emotions only become more complicated. It also brought to mind the connection that many athletes have to religion, and the idea of sport as a constructive outlet for anger. Boxing in particular, at least practicing on a punching bag, is a very repetitive and painful sport. The images all being similar to one another but different in notable ways felt like repeating the same thing over and over in the hopes that it would mean something different, like a desperate kind of
prayer. The third Jesus has a Basquiat crown hovering over his head, and the eighth one is painted over even more with a shape resembling a human figure staring faceless at the viewer. The different modifications of the punching bags viewed from left to right brought to mind the image of a character trying to deal with all of this judgment - first trying to comply and accept the judgment, then to assert themself as a person, before finally returning to self-blame. The caption by the work said that this sculpture was made about Catholic guilt and the AIDS epidemic. Knowing this made the small splotch of pink paint on the ninth bag, the only color other than blue or black, alongside the crossed-out “JUDGE”s on the same bag feel far more important. The fact that three of the figures from Leonardo Da Vinci’s original “Last Supper” are conspicuously missing, and all are erased and painted over with the same image of Jesus, also felt particularly important in context of the AIDS crisis, in which the personal histories and lives of many of the people who died were forgotten and smothered in religious blame.
The Handmaid’s Tale Epilogue
Irena Avalos
Students in Satire class studied Margaret Atwood’s speculative, dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale, and they had the opportunity to write an epilogue to the novel. Irena Avalos ‘25 channels Atwood’s abstract and poetic style and continues
Offred’s chilling journey, weaving in vibrant metaphorical imagery to intensify her harrowing tale.
I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t have a choice where I will end up either.
As I make my way into the black van, the Commander and his wife staring at me in disbelief, I can’t help but feel as if maybe staying here is what’s best for me. I’ve made a life here; the Commander has taken a liking to me, but the arrival of the van has turned that all to shit.
The Commander doesn’t trust me anymore. His wife knows what I’ve done. She found the robe, she found the lipstick, and she probably wants nothing more than my neck tied in a noose. What am I thinking? I can’t stay here. Nick wants me to leave; he’s helping me. This is the way to freedom.
I’m in the van. It’s dimly lit. All I can see is the vague silhouette of my wings on each side of my face.
“You can take those off now, you know,” the driver tells me. “You’re not a Handmaid any more than I’m an Eye. We are safe now.”
We. Why did he say we? He has always been safe. He is a man.
“I know,” I respond, but I don’t move an inch. My wings are the only symbols recognizable to me in this van. They’re all I know. They’re all I see. I can’t take them off; that would be like stripping a part of myself I’ve been forced to identify with for so long. Without them, I am a chameleon with no place to camouflage into, a scorpion in bioluminescent light. I’m exposed.
Still, I take my wings off, and to my left is a window I didn’t notice before. It is
the only window in the back of the van that isn’t blacked out and, as the driver steadies the vehicle forward, I see the Republic of Gilead fading away behind me. The sight of its crimson-clad enforcers, the memories of the Salvaging and the Particicution, all mere remnants of a nightmare that cling to the edges of my consciousness.
Looking away from the window for the first time since I notice it, I can just make out the silhouette of the driver who spoke to me before. The Eye, concealed behind the anonymity of his mask and uniform, navigates the winding roads. It’s just him and me in this van, I realize. Nick sent him, so I must be safe, right? Staring back at the window, I feel hope for the first time in years. It courses through my veins like a drug. A forbidden emotion that has been locked away for so long, I forgot what it feels like. But even as the road ahead promises freedom, a shadow of doubt creeps into my mind.
As the landscape shifts, I can’t help but wonder if my rescue is just an illusion, like a carrot dangling in front of a pig, desirable, but forever out of reach. Through the one crack in my window, I can hear the wind whisper through, carrying that voice of uncertainty in my head, amplifying it, consuming my thoughts. The driver turns to me and then, in one fleeting moment, lifts part of his mask to reveal his crooked, demented smile and turns the steering wheel, veering off the road.
“For Gilead,” he raises his voice defiantly, but I can barely hear him.
The world outside blurs as the van plummets into the abyss, swallowing it whole. And for an instant, time freezes, my fate already decided as the sudden drop shoots me out of my seat.
Despite the chaos that surrounds me, I don’t scream. Instead, I find solace in the situation I am in. The vehicle, a representation of both my escape and possibly my demise, hurtles toward the unknown. Whether it is the promise of a new beginning or the lonely embrace of oblivion, I can’t tell you. The world around me disappears, and all that remains is the echo of my fate, the same as the Handmaids before me, and the same as the ones after.
But as the van dances on the precipice of fate, I can’t help but remember Moira, Luke, and my mother. I have to survive for them. So I cling to the fragile hope inside me and vow in my mind to defy the destiny that awaits me, for them—knowing that in this moment, their lives rely on my escape. I’ll get out of this. I have to. Because who’s going to tell my story if I don’t?
Things Fall Apart
Rahul Madgavkar ‘25
After reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, students in 20th-century World Literature were tasked with explaining how Achebe’s works “Shifts the Gaze” of public perception of both the Igbo community and other colonized societies. Rahul Madgavkar ‘25 focuses on the multifaceted character of Okonkwo and the complex belief system of the Umofian people—countering the common stereotypes of savagery and primitiveness. He then illustrates the arrival of Christian missionaries and colonizers which disrupted the societal fabric of the Umofian people and ultimately led to the unfortunate demise of Okonkwo. Through his piece, Madgavkar demonstrates the manner in which Achebe gives voice to colonized people and stresses that their stories must no longer be ignored.
The drums beat and the people of Umuofia sing and dance as their community is lit up by the stories of elders, the energy of the children, and the athletic contest between two respected members of the clan. This scene, which opens Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, immerses readers in the richness of Igbo culture. As Achebe’s novel progresses, readers learn about the complex social, cultural, and religious norms of the Umuofian people in pre-colonial Nigeria. However, the arrival of Christian missionaries and colonial servants forces readers to question how indigenous people are viewed and the far-reaching consequences of ignorant colonial narratives. Thus, Achebe explores Okonkwo’s character and the rituals and traditions that shape Umuofian religion, challenging pervasive colonial narratives of savagery and primitiveness while confronting the multifaceted erosion colonization brings to native cultures and civilizations.
Through the characterization of Okonkwo, from his humble beginnings and rise to clan elder to his deeply flawed personality, Achebe challenges colonial stereotypes of African societies as simplistic and uncivilized, revealing the complexities of precolonial Umuofian social structures and hierarchies. Despite his father being “poor” and Okonkwo having “barely enough to eat” (Achebe 5), Okonkwo amasses considerable wealth through his diligent toil, evidenced by his “two barns full of yams,” three wives, and two titles from “incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars” (8). Early in the novel, Achebe makes clear the complex nature of status and success
in Umuofian society, writing that “a man [is] judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father” (8). Achebe uses Okonkwo, “one of the greatest men of his time,” to challenge the idea of social standing being determined solely by lineage and inheritance, a narrative commonly advanced by colonialists (8). Instead, Achebe demonstrates the multifaceted roots of admiration in Umuofian society – a combination of strength in combat, contribution to family and clan, wealth and achievement, and commitment to clan tradition. Nevertheless, even considering all his accomplishments, Achebe also depicts Okonkwo as a highly flawed character prone to bursts of violence and anger. During the sacred Week of Peace, Okonkwo flies into a rage after a minor mistake from one of his wives, “[beating] her very heavily” (29). Later, he violently kills Ikemefuena, a boy whom he cares for, out of fear of appearing weak in front of his fellow clansmen, but also, himself. Achebe establishes Okonkwo as a man who holds a deep, intense fear of resembling his father in any way. His strained relationship with his father, Unoka, and turbulent upbringing lead him to despise any virtue embodied by his father, including “gentleness… [and] idleness” (13). Driven by this pervasive dread of becoming his father, Okonkwo believes that he must embody ‘male’ attributes of strength and power, virtues that grow to control his every action. Interestingly, this characterization of Okonkwo’s deeply flawed personality serves as a key tenant of Achebe’s broader argument of challenging pervasive colonial narratives of savagery and primitiveness. Instead of depicting Okonkwo in an idealistic manner, Achebe
reveals the raw, complex emotional trauma that dominates Okonkwo’s identity to represent him as a fully realized, nuanced individual rather than a savage stereotype. Okonkwo’s inner turmoil serves to make him more human, as does the trauma he feels after striking down Ikemefuena. For days after the incident, Okonkwo’s mind is tormented by thoughts about his non-biological son, as he is unable to “taste any food” and shivers at the memory of Ikemefuena (63). Thus, Achebe’s multifaceted portrayal of Okonkwo, the main protagonist, serves to confront simplistic tropes about colonized people, often propounded by colonialists. Achebe accomplishes this through ‘shifting the gaze,’ an expression popularized by American painter Titus Kaphar, thus forcing readers to confront colonized people as actual human beings rather than ignorant stereotypes.
Alongside his portrayal of Okonkwo, Achebe explores the intricate religious and spiritual belief system of the Umuofian people, including their Gods, sacred practices, and the Oracle, revealing various sophisticated spiritual traditions and belief systems that starkly contrast colonial notions of ‘godless’ primitive savagery. The Umuofians devote themselves to appeasing their Gods, believing them to hold the key to the success of the clan as “when a man is at peace with his gods and his ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm” (17). At the epicenter of this devotion is Ani, the earth goddess who determines the quality of the harvest which is paramount to the survival and success of the Umuofian people. Moreover, the Oracle serves as the chief interpreter of the Gods’ will and thus plays a crucial
role in determining religious practices that appease Ani. Achebe challenges prevalent colonial beliefs that Igbo people are ‘godless’ or areligious by revealing the extent of devotion in the character of Obierika, who states that he would not stand in the way if “the Oracle said that [his] son should be killed” (67). However, Achebe makes it clear that this devotion is not wholly irrational or absolute, as Obierika says he “would not be the one” to kill his son, even if the Oracle demanded that it must happen (67). This nuanced approach to sacrifices to the Gods indicates the intense, but certainly not absolute, devotion the Umuofian people hold towards their religion, further strengthening Achebe’s broader assertion of the complex nature of Umuofian thought and society. Furthermore, not dissimilar to the societies of the colonizers themselves, the morality of the members of the clan rests on the word of the Oracle, as when Okonkwo beats his wife during the sacred Week of Peace, the Oracle declares him to “have committed a great evil,” commanding him to present sacrifices before the “shrine of Ani” (30). Achebe highlights the complexity of this moral code enforced by the Oracle in fear of the Gods’ retribution on the clan, through the burning of Okonkwo’s house later in the novel. For his “crime against the earth goddess [of killing] a clansman” (124), Okonkwo’s compound is burnt down by his fellow clansmen, including his best friend Obierika and he is banished from the clan for seven years. Interestingly, Achebe mentions how there is no “hatred in their hearts against Okonkwo”; instead, they simply execute the “justice of the earth goddess,” a punishment that Okonkwo readily accepts (125). Achebe’s intricate portrayal of
Umuofian religious practices seeks to confront the idea that native peoples were either areligious or possessed rudimentary systems of superstition. While the burning of Okonkwo's compound appears brutal through a colonial lens, Achebe's depiction reveals it as enacting divinely ordained justice to protect the clan, showcasing the intricacy of Umuofian spirituality and ethics. Still, Achebe is careful not to make ethical evaluations of Umuofian practices which can often be brutal and grotesque such as the mutilation of a dead baby. As Renato Rosaldo notes, “To understand is not to forgive. Just because you come to terms with how something works in another culture doesn't mean you have to agree with it” (Rosaldo 8). Achebe’s goal here is not to condone all aspects of Umuofian religion but rather to engage with it in its full complexity. Thus, Achebe mainly aims to humanize the Umuofian faith through its portrayal as flawed, very often alarming, but nevertheless, sophisticated and profound.
The arrival of Christian missionaries into Umuofian society brings about vast changes in power dynamics, revealing the colonizers' limited and flawed perspective of the Umuofian people. The white men establish not only a church but a court where the “District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance” (174), imposing colonial rules and justice on the Igbo practices they deem to be uncivilized. Even Mr. Brown, a relatively accepting figure of Umuofian customs, warns the people of the consequence of not readily accepting Christian doctrine, that is, that “strangers would come from other places to rule them” (181). Despite the Umuofian people initially tolerating the
missionaries, their ominous presence soon makes itself evident to Okonkwo, who laments: “Now [the white man] has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (176). Achebe highlights how the missionaries’ arrival not only disrupts the religion of the Igbo people, but the social and political fabric of their society, corroding bonds that hold the community together, a community that “can no longer act like one” (176). Furthermore, the very discourse between Okonkwo and Obierika itself serves to emphasize the profound understanding of culture, religion, and the intentions of the colonizers that the two friends display. However, the District Commissioner’s view of the Umuofian people, especially Okonkwo, lies in stark contrast to the complex relationships and beliefs that are presented throughout the novel. Achebe’s novel culminates in Okonkwo’s apparent suicide as his “body [is found] dangling” from a tree, by his fellow Umuofian clansmen (207). This tragic end for the novel’s main character starkly contrasts the profound cultural understanding of his friend Obierika, who declares Okonkwo "one of the greatest men in Umuofia” (208). Disturbingly, the District Commissioner reduces Okonkwo's entire life to a single dismissive paragraph in his planned book, as he condescendingly muses about how he “must be firm in cutting out details” (209). However, the reference to the entirety of Okonkwo’s life, and thus nearly the entire novel, as simply being an inconsequential detail in the District Commissioner’s book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, serves as the profound tragedy that Achebe
delivers through the novel. Agonizingly, despite hundreds of pages exploring the sophistication of Umofian culture, religion, and society, as well as the highly complex character of Okonkwo, the District Commissioner views the Igbo people to be no more than “Primitive Tribes” (209).
This devastating final image highlights Achebe's vehement indictment of the dehumanization associated with imperialism, as despite intricately chronicling Okonkwo's multi-faceted characterization and Umuofia's sophisticated traditions, in the end, the arrogant colonizer remains tragically oblivious to the humanity and complexity of the colonized. However, Achebe provides a powerful condemnation of the ignorance displayed by the District Commissioner, and every person his character seeks to represent, by giving a voice to the Igbo people throughout the novel. Thus, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart serves as a protest against the pervasive force of colonialism’s cruel ignorance. Even though the real-life trajectory of colonization could not be prevented, Achebe’s brilliant text shatters the falsities it has advanced and gives a voice to people whom history has ignored, but whom we can no longer leave in the shadows.
Kaphar, Titus. “Can Art Amend History?” Titus Kaphar: Can Art Amend History? | TED Talk, TED, Apr. 2017, www.ted.com/talks/ titus_kaphar_can_art_amend_history?language=en.
Rosaldo, Renato. “Of Headhunters and Soldiers.” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University, 12 Nov. 2015, www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ ethical-decision-making/of-headhunters-and-soldiers/.life’s ups and downs.
Book Bento
In the following order: Willow Killebrew ’25, Aiden Maas ‘24
In 20th Century World Literature, students Aiden Maas '24 and Willow Killebrew '25 created insightful "Book Bento" projects for Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Killebrew explores the novel's "Love Laws" and their consequences, using objects like an Angelite stone and a rose to represent complex themes of forbidden love, trauma, and social taboos. Her analysis also examines how European beauty standards in post-colonial India impact characters' self-worth, particularly through Estha and Rahel's experience watching The Sound of Music. Maas skillfully analyzes the siblings' relationships in post-colonial India and the boat as a central symbol, connecting family dynamics with themes of love and division. His work prompts reflection on the lasting effects of British colonization across generations.
Willow Killebrew
The background of this Book Bento is made up of two stories printed from Genesis in the Bible about the city of Sodom: Sodom’s Depravity and Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed. The common interpretation of these stories is that acts of homosexuality and sexual violence are inherently sinful. These ideas are very similar to the concept of “Love Laws” in The God of Small Things. In Roy’s words, these laws define “who should be loved, and how. And how much” (33). These laws apply to all kinds of love and affection, as well as sexual situations. Some of these rules pertain to the legal system in India, which has perpetuated strict class divisions across a caste hierarchy. Others have more to do with social taboos and expectations than literal laws. In this novel, child protagonists Estha and Rahel learn the full significance of these “Love Laws” as they, and the people around them, break these rigid rules and suffer the consequences. Their mother Ammu violates a rule by leaving her abusive husband, which causes her to be socially disrespected for failing as a wife and a woman. She then breaks yet another “Love Law” by initiating a rebellious affair with Velutha as a member of the upper middle class, despite the fact that he is a member of the untouchable caste. They are both punished by society for this when Velutha is murdered at the hands of the police, primarily because of his role in their affair. Estha is molested as a child by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, by whom he is heavily traumatized. He even believes that this moment negatively taints him as a person despite it not being his fault at all. Lastly, years ahead of when most of the novel takes place, the traumatized twins Estha and Rahel break the “Love Laws” one
last time by having sex with each other. Although no one else knows about this forbidden act of incest, they are both still forced to suffer the pain and shame of having done something considered so wrong.
Object 1: Angelite
“Who was he, the one-armed man…Estha carried into The Sound of Music in his sticky Other Hand” (207).
The Angelite, a small stone used in spiritual practices, represents the “God of Small Things” as a despair-filled yet momentarily hopeful concept explored in Roy’s abstract rendering of Ammu’s dream about a one-armed man. She speculates who this man in her dream is, wondering if he is “The God of Loss? The God of Small Things?
The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles?” (207). These Gods could only represent one person–Velutha, a rebellious Paravan man whom Ammu finds herself incredibly attracted to. Despite the fact that most of these titles seem contradictory, such as “God of Loss” and “Sudden Smiles,” Velutha fits all of these roles. He is “The God of Loss” because the discovery of his affair with Ammu and his subsequent violent death at the hands of the police are the primary sources of personal despair for Ammu’s family. It is logical that this title would be placed first, as Ammu is very doubtful at this time that she could possibly interact romantically with Velutha without something awful occurring due to their difference in caste. On the other hand, the fact that he is “The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles” implies that being able to
further explore their affection for each other will be worth any consequence later.
“Goosebumps” alone implies the thrill and anticipation of something that could be just as beautiful as it is ultimately destructive. “The God of Small Things” encompasses all of these meanings, as “Loss” connects to the smallness of personal despair on a large scale while “Smiles” and “Goosebumps” are small but meaningful pleasures that Velutha and Ammu share when they are around each other. Velutha is also suggested to be the God “Of Sourmetal Smells–like steel bus rails and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands from holding them” (207). This is a reference to the class difference between Ammu and Velutha, which makes Ammu very hesitant about beginning anything with him.
Shortly after these descriptions, a different kind of “Small Thing” is referenced which deals with individual anguish due to trauma. The light that filters into the room in which Estha and Rahel watch their mother dream illuminates a tangerineshaped radio. Immediately after this description, Roy mentions in parenthesis:
“Tangerine-shaped too, was the Thing that Estha carried into The Sound of Music in his sticky Other Hand” (207). Estha’s personal despair includes not just the death of Velutha, but also the traumatic incident of his molestation by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man in a movie theater. This moment with Ammu is completely separate and unrelated to this traumatic incident. Roy shows just how much Estha’s brain has been affected by trauma by bringing it up in a context that is unassociated with this horrible event. The phrase is even placed in parenthesis, making it feel to the reader
like it truly is a stray, unrelated thought that has been alarmingly brought up again.
Alongside Estha, the reader is uncomfortably jolted from Ammu’s peaceful nap back to a moment of trauma despite the fact that time has moved on and the physical side of the abuse is no longer occurring. The capitalizations of “Thing” and “Other Hand” also puts us in Estha’s perspective as a child who does not have the words to properly express what happened or the tools to properly cope with it. The drink he is holding right after his trauma and his hand which is involved in the molestation have taken on bigger, more profound significance to him than they inherently would. These “Small Things” are suddenly larger than life, representing one of the worst events that has happened to him in his life and bringing him back to a moment that should have never happened.
Object 2: Rose
In The God of Small Things, roses are recurring objects that primarily symbolize Velutha’s blood. While the rose is presented a few times as potentially symbolizing something more soft and romantic, this is merely a pleasant disguise for a much darker warning. After witnessing two officers violently beat Velutha, Estha and Rahel observe that his blood smells “Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze” (293). The use of the term “Old” importantly illuminates the idea that at this moment, “History [is] in live performance” (293). In other words, the act committed upon Velutha is not motivated by anything personal on the part of the policemen; it is
motivated by the need to maintain rules of hierarchy and order decided long before the modern-day. At some points in the novel, the rose seems to be a symbol of the love and attachment between Velutha and Ammu. However, there is substantial evidence to believe that it is still always a symbol of carnage. After their first sexual encounter, both Ammu and Velutha are growing scared of the possible consequences of their actions, so Velutha “[folds] his fear into a perfect rose. He [holds] it out in the palm of his hand. She [takes] it from him and [puts] it in her hair” (319). Although on the surface this seems to be a tender gesture, the knowledge that Velutha will die a horribly painful death due to this affair makes the rose seem more like dark foreshadowing. The rose is metaphorically infused with Velutha’s fear, and so it becomes an omen of future bloodshed. Additionally, the fact that Ammu is the one with the rose at the very end of the novel is an indication that when Velutha’s life is ruined by violence, hers will be as well. This sentiment is foreshadowed much earlier when Ammu dreams of lusting after a one-armed man who presumably represents Velutha. While she sleeps, sunlight filters through her window and casts the shadows of “pressed roses from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on her cheek” (207). There is a very optimistic aspect of this dream, especially considering Ammu ends up carrying out this exciting affair with Velutha. This might indicate once again that the rose could symbolize something positive like love, hope, or fantasy. However, shortly after this: “Ammu looked at herself in the long mirror on the bathroom door and the specter of her future appeared in it to mock her…Cross-stitch roses on a slack, sunken cheek”
(211). Once again, the rose is a warning of the decay that awaits Ammu later in life.
The same roses that reflected onto a young face will reflect upon an old face of someone with even less of a belief in the romance and dreams that one may wish the rose to symbolize.
At its most cheerful interpretation, the rose could be viewed as a reminder for the characters to take life one small step at a time. Ammu is not an old woman at the time of the dream and the shadows of roses, so she has more time to enjoy her youth if she can slow down enough to appreciate it. When Velutha gives her his rose, he is still alive and healthy. The two silently vow to “Stick to Smallness” to enjoy their time together in the moment and avoid thinking about their inability to have a future together (321). But the knowledge of their fates incessantly hovers over them. At the furthest point forward in the timeline that the novel explores, Ammu is dead and so is Velutha. They have met the depressing fates that they anticipate, regardless of whether they fearfully enjoyethe small, happy moments while they last.
Object 3: Photo
The photo in the Book Bento represents the effect of European beauty standards in postcolonial India — more specifically, how they cause Estha and Rahel, who are Indian, to feel that they are inherently less deserving of love than the ideal white child portrayed in The Sound of Music. While watching this film in the movie theater, Estha in particular takes note of the things that make these children on
screen so different from him. They are characterized as “Clean children, like a packet of peppermints” (100). “Peppermints” are notably associated with both freshness and whiteness. This quickly begins to erode Estha’s self-worth, as he asks himself questions about himself and his sister: “Are they clean white children? No” (101). These notions of European cleanliness are especially present in Estha’s mind during this scene as he has just been molested by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. Despite the fact that this assault is in no way his fault, Estha internalizes a feeling of being dirtier and more different from the children on screen who have not “ever held strangers’ soo-soos” (101). While before the assault the appearances of the characters in The Sound of Music are not described in great detail, they are described almost obsessively after it: “Baron von Trapp’s seven peppermint children had had their peppermint baths, and were standing in a peppermint line with their hair slicked down, singing in obedient peppermint voices to the woman the Baron nearly married. The blonde Baroness who shone like a diamond” (105). These beauty standards, especially regarding whiteness, cleanliness, and neatness, reflect moral standards as well. Viewing this film contributes to Estha’s absorption of ideas not only regarding how children who are loved look, but also how children who are loved behave. Estha’s mother Ammu has just begun to emphasize the importance of politeness and acting in socially acceptable ways by these same European standards, implying that by not following these guidelines, “people love [them] a little less” (107). Estha quickly links the supposed cleanliness of the children’s appearance to the goodness of their nature,
and from there how much they deserve to be loved, even though appearance, morality, and loveability are in reality very separate. He observes in The Sound of Music that:
“[Baron von Clapp Trapp] loved her (Julie Andrews), she loved him, they loved the children, the children loved them. They all loved each other. They were clean, white children…” (100). This kind of involuntary thinking ultimately results in a kind of trauma that is complex and difficult to unravel, affecting the daily lives and growth of Estha and Rahel for the worse. But in the end, it is this feeling of smallness and lack of personal value that European standards infuse them with that prevents them from ever solving such a profoundly deep problem.
Aidan Maas
Object 1: Photo of a decaying colonial house in Kerala
Decay is everywhere in Ayemenem. The tropical climate invades from all sides and, for the Ipe house, the climate ultimately wins the battle. When Rahel returns to her family home as an adult to visit her brother, she describes the old house in disrepair, “the walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground” (Roy 4). The physical appearance of the house is merely a place setting for the internal decay of the characters and the terror they unleash on each other and Velutha. In the end, their bitterness and perpetual sense of inferiority seep into one another and corrode their lives from the inside out. It
just takes time for the physical decay of the house to catch up. In the meantime, it provides the stage for the cast to do their worst and propel themselves to their own hearts of darkness.
Object 2: The two intertwined bracelets that belong to Rahel and Estha’s mother, Ammu
They represent Ammu's two very different relationships, one with her adult relatives and the other with her children and Velutha. The decaying bracelet represents her bitter and destructive relationship with her adult family. It’s fraying, old, and falling apart as if representing the decay of the family relationships that suffer from the continual scorn and judgment that the members cast upon one another, eating away at them like a growing cancer. The other bracelet is colorful, strong, and new, which represents the positive love that Ammu, Velutha, Rahel, and Estha have for each other. The bracelet is strong in the way that their love for each other is alive and enriching. The two bracelets are intertwined, as are the family members — forced together, but worlds apart.
“You’re not angry, Ammu.” In a happy whisper. A little more her mother loved her.
“No.”
Ammu kissed her again.
“We be of one blood, Thou and I.” (referencing from p155: The way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, thou and I. Her goodnight kiss.)
Ammu leaned against the bedroom door in the dark, reluctant to return to the dinner table, where the conversation circled like a moth around the white child and her mother as though they were the only source of light. Ammu felt that she would die, wither and die, if she heard another word. If she had to endure another minute of Chacko’s proud, tennis-trophy smile. Or the undercurrent of sexual jealousy that emanated from Mammachi. Or Baby Kochamma’s conversation that was designed to exclude Ammu and her children, to inform them of their place in the scheme of things.
As she leaned against the door in the darkness, she felt her dream, her Afternoon-mare, move inside her like a rib of water rising from the ocean, gathering into a wave. The cheerful one-armed man with salty skin and a shoulder that ended abruptly like a cliff emerged from the shadows of the jagged beach and walked towards her.
He could do only one thing at a time. If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win. Ammu longed for him. Ached for him with the whole of her biology. (Roy 312)
In this moment, Roy juxtaposes the two worlds that Ammu stands between: the
toxic, self-loathing environment of Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, and Chacko who drown in the past, and the world of her children, which represent what little hope she has for the future. This passage is the whole book in a nutshell: alienation, shame, oppressive hierarchy, and casual cruelty for the purpose of covering up one's own suffering by lashing out at the others. Everyone is longing for validation, while simultaneously working to undermine one-another’s potential for any sense of well being. They each sabotage those closest to them with reproachful surveillance and criticism or by chasing a false idol of Anglophilia — particularly when they seek approval by the avatars of their former oppressors. Ammu is able to see all of this clearly in this moment because she has just allowed herself a moment of vulnerability and true affection with Rahel. Earlier at the Abhilash Talkies, she lashes out at Rahel with the sort of easy nastiness that her family specializes in: “When you hurt people, they begin to love you less” (Roy 107). Of course, Ammu is doing exactly the same thing she cautions Rahel against, only Rahel is too young to feel anything but shame and regret at the possible loss of her mother’s affection. What’s remarkable about the bedroom scene is that it offers a rare moment of reconciliation and tenderness. With her defenses down, Ammu is physically incapable of returning to the dining room and the ongoing symphony of family dysfunction. Instead, she dreams of Velutha and experiences a profound visceral longing for a genuine connection “with the whole of her biology.” If Chacko feels trapped because his “footprints had been swept away,” Ammu wants to ride the ocean inside of her that is “gathering like a wave” (Roy 51,
312).
Roy describes Ammu’s internal battle between the past and future as “an unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber” (Roy 44). She is at the end of a long line of people who despise themselves, which fuels her rage. But she also might possess the ability to make a break from the past through her tenderness towards Rahel and her love for Velutha, an untouchable Paravan she is unafraid to touch. It’s remarkable that Ammu finds the strength to resist the tidal wave of recrimination all around her. Mammachi condemns her decision to divorce as causing suffering for the children “far worse than Inbreeding” (Roy 59). Chacko lords his Oxford education over her while going unpunished for bringing the family business to collapse with his terrible management decisions. When Ammu’s brave relationship with Velutha is revealed, Baby Kochamma “[sees] Grief and Trouble ahead, and secretly, in her heart of hearts, she rejoice[s]” (Roy 75). Ammu was always more willing to break out of the family mold, perhaps because she had the connection with Estha as a life raft to keep her above the surface of the “troubled seas” that Chacko finds so overwhelming. (Roy 52) Now with her connection to Rahel and even more so with Velutha, Ammu can envision an opportunity to emerge from the shadows. While Ammu stands in the darkness outside Rahel’s door, she seems ready to take a step into the light and to do so with purpose — versus the aimless moth that circles “around the white child and her mother as though they were the only source of light” (Roy 312). Chacko may feel he “may never
be allowed ashore,” but Ammu can walk the beach to love on her own terms (Roy 52).
Ultimately the novel’s tragic outcome is not the result of cosmic fate, but instead the cruel actions of the family that decides that some dreams and lives are “never important enough… to matter” (Roy 52). Roy establishes Ammu, Rahel, Estha, and Velutha as a quartet that might have sailed beyond the troubled seas, but who are sabotaged by a family that feels compelled to break them apart in a narcissistic effort to preserve their sense of honor and privilege — that in reality was never more than an illusion.
Object 3: Photo of an old wooden boat in Kerala
The boat is central to nearly every major plot line and shuttles the characters to freedom as well as despair. Throughout the novel, anguish and catharsis are as hopelessly intertwined as the lives of the characters themselves. There is hardly a moment where joy is not soon followed by pain, often at the hands of another family member. Ammu uses “by night the boat that her children used by day” to “love by night the man her children loved by day” (Roy 44). The boat unlocks freedom for the children to escape their oppressive, imagination-suffocating home, and facilitates Ammu’s loving relationship with Velutha that allows her to come out from under Baby Kochamma’s relentless disparagement. But it also terrifies Velutha’s father who sees the boat as a continual threat “night after night … being rowed across the river,” and leads him to reveal Ammu’s relationship to Mammachi, which sets up all of the
horrors that follow (Roy 74). Finally, the boat brings an irrepressible Sophie Mol to her doom — like Charon’s ferry — and snuffs out any remaining hope for the characters in the novel who dare to pursue a moment of joy. Shame drives endless emotional abuse throughout the novel, but the boat offers a chance to emigrate to a new shore that offers a promise of kindness — until it capsizes.
It’s all the more tragic that the boat results in so much pain since it is both the product of love as well as love’s vessel. Rahel and Estha discover the boat in a chance moment that would be a memory they’d share the rest of their lives if it didn’t end so badly. Love gets worked into the boat through effort and hopeful ingenuity. Velutha helps them mend the boat with love and attention to detail and the “twins fell to work with an eerie concentration that excluded everything else” — free at last and “delirious with joy” (Roy 203). It echoes the moment where Velutha lovingly produces a small boat among one of the “little gifts he had made for” Ammu (Roy 167). The gesture invites her to notice his smile and see him as a man who shared “a living, breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she so raged against” (Roy 167).
The boat imagery climaxes with a beautiful description of the area where Ammu and Velutha consecrate their love in the “boat-shaped patch of bare dry earth, cleared and ready for love” (Roy 318). After unending suffering, this passage in the boat-shaped earth offers the characters a lifeline of pure love that allows them to cut the anchor of history, family baggage, and murderous caste bigotry.
Object 4: Picture of the Cochin Club in the city of Kochi, Kerala.
Less than 40 miles up the road from Ayemenem, also known as Aymanam, the Cochin Club embodies the Indian identity caught between shrugging off their former colonial masters while also adopting the trappings of their colonial past. Their website explains that “The Club was once the exclusive preserve of British nationals and membership was restricted to persons of British origin. With the Indianisation of British owned mercantile and tea plantation companies, many British nationals returned to England and the Cochin Club Membership became fully Indian” (Cochin Club). On the one hand, it’s encouraging that Indians didn’t feel the need to burn everything to the ground in order to reestablish their sovereignty. Yet at the same time, it’s hard to escape the sense that they’re “living in the master’s house” and putting on the costumes of their former oppressors rather than creating something new out of their blended cultures. The website goes on to describe how “The property incorporates the very essence of 'English Living' in ways more than its architecture. Keeping in tone with its colonial charm are impeccably furnished, spaciously built rooms which assure privacy and cater to contemporary needs.” It promotes “English Living” (capitalization suggests it’s a proper noun rather than an adjective) as something aspirational, desirable, and, most importantly, refined. There is an identity crisis in which “English Living” is the validation of culture and refinement in a world where Indian history and culture is oddly missing. We see this painful identity crisis in many of the characters in The God of Small Things. It prompts terrible behavior within the family and ultimately towards Velutha — with Ammu and the children
suffering as collateral damage.
Early in The God of Small Things, Chacko describes how the History House represents the failure of Indian liberation from British rule, and how they are still captive to the shadows of their former oppressors. As usual, Chacko holds forth pompously and at length like the Oxford Don he imagines himself to be, wrapping himself in the robes of pretension that belong to another culture. Without a sense of his own irony, he describes how India’s emancipation resulted from “a war we both won and lost … A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves” (Roy 52). It’s a moment of rare truth-telling in the novel, but also demonstrates how the characters remain imprisoned by the language and culture of England. As an Oxford man, Chacko can quote at length from non-Indian texts to describe India’s failure to emerge as fully independent. His thoughtfully sad tone seems straight out of a London gentlemen’s club in its condescending and hopeless appraisal of postcolonial India. Except he’s talking about his own people — and himself — though he (and the family elders) reserve the right to look down on their own people. It’s all well and good for Chacko to bemoan that “our dreams have been doctored,” but he has steered his own path in pursuit of the doctored version. (Roy 52). As Ammu teases him, he chooses to “marry our conquerors” (Roy 52). Chacko is aware that he’s following this path and willingly throws on its chains (click, click), while despising himself for doing so. The family is trapped in a post-colonial purgatory where they are
unable to land safely on either cultural shore, and instead spend their energy battling to stay afloat amid a never-ending storm that rages inside all of them.
The Ipe house may as well be a stand-in for the lost war Chacko describes as it is the product of Indian success derived from the blessings of the conquerors. It’s a historical record of the family’s thwarted ambition. The original patriarch, Reverend Ipe, was “the man who had been blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch,” which made him a part of the “Ayemenem folklore” (Roy 22). From there, the family spent their history chasing approval from the British only to end up broken and bitter, but still clinging to a class identity rooted in the approval that never comes. Pappachi spent his life in pursuit of academic recognition only to have his genuine discovery stolen from him, like colonizers extracting precious metals. Baby Kochamma chased Father Mulligan, converting to Roman Catholicism and entering a convent. Ultimately she was thwarted by the system that also made her feel diminished as the “senior sisters monopolized the priests and bishops with biblical doubts more sophisticated than hers would ever be” (Roy 25). The fact that Catholic priests can’t marry aside, Baby Kochamma seems unable to recognize that her pursuit is ultimately self-defeating and undermines her sense of self. Instead, she retreats into the imagined aristocracy of the family’s past and her degree in ornamental gardening. The house becomes a bulwark against the family’s crumbling fortunes and she “cherished the furniture that she had inherited by outliving everybody else” (Roy 28). Together with Mammachi, Baby Kochamma’s self-loathing
boils over as she finds a way to focus her rage as a colonial ruler would: by taking it out on her defenseless inferior, Velutha. In particular, Mammachi’s anger is rooted in what she sees as a violation of her colonial identity. To Mammachi, Ammu’s relationship with Velutha had “defiled generations of breeding (The Little Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial Entomologist, a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its knees” (Roy 244). What has truly undone the family is its need to cling to a world that rejects them. Chacko gets it intellectually, but still proclaims that “Gatsby turned out all right at the end” (Roy 38). It’s absurd and tragic that Chacko would lionize a character who couldn’t escape his own sense of inadequacy, continually pursued a woman to validate his legitimacy, and lived a life that was completely fabricated to appeal to the upper classes that continued to reject him. The Ipe household embodies the inevitable futility that Fitzgerald captures in his closing line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 180). Chacko, Mammachi, and Baby Kochamma chase their own green light across the water, with even more disastrous results.
Infants of the Spring and the “Racial Panopticon”: Failure’s Call for Change
Maggie Horn ‘24
Wallace Thurman’s Infants of Spring wrestles with the authenticity of art during the Harlem Renaissance; a topic which is increasingly relevant amid present-day discussions of cultural appropriation. In her essay for New York City Literature, Maggie Horn ‘24 thoughtfully explores how the fetishization of black culture amidst discrimination fuels the personal struggles of Thurman’s characters. Horn references a scholarly critique of the novel by Terrel Scott Henring in order to comment on the implications of Thurman’s work, positing that the author calls for thoughtfulness and authenticity in exploring culture.
Despite the irresistible justice of literary, artistic and social trends, the passionate supporters of new movements often forget their fervor before the decade is done. Indeed, the white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance supported the boom of African American singers, writers, and artists, all of whom mysteriously failed to affect significant literary and civil impact. Author Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring and Terrel Scott Herring’s literary critique, “Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity,” explore this pained movement and its implications for American race relations and trending culture. Although Herring’s depiction of Harlem as a “racial panopticon” underscores a failed artistic reckoning with racial oppression and white publicity, Thurman and Herring’s cynical interpretations ironically imply room for progress in critically understanding complex truths.
Professor Terrel Scott Herring’s 2001 “The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor . . .” exposes the fetishization behind Harlem’s public image and thus lowers its idealized status to that of a “racial panopticon.” Raymond, the protagonist of Infants of the Spring and an aspiring writer who resides in a boarding house with his fellow members of the “Negro Literary Renaissance,” observes his manor mates, including the eccentric and poetic genius, Paul, the delusional singer, Eustace, and the servant-turned painter, Pelham, with an eye of a foreshadowed solemnity. Remarking to Stephen, his “Nordic” companion and
briefly-infatuated visitor of Harlem, Raymond declares, “ . . . the more intellectual and talented Negroes of my generation are among the most pathetic people in the world today” (Thurman 139) As a proud patron of these “pathetic people,”
Samuel, a white change-maker who antagonizes the Manor residents with his superficial progressiveness, encourages Eustace to sing spirituals for an audition downtown. After he sacrificed his artistic identity to satisfy the fetishizations of a white audience reminiscent of slavery, Eustace returns home crying with rejection. The narrator notes, “ . . . his voice broke into a sob . . . ‘they said I wasn’t good enough . . . and . . . I didn’t get a chance to sing Schubert” (Thurman 159).
Choked on tears of shameful failure, Eustace’s dismissal from the whims of the white majority represents the loss of complex self experienced by many Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Observing the manor artists’ powerlessness against the “blinding” force of white audiences, Herring observes, “What should open up avenues to artistic success instead appears to be a racial panopticon” (Herring 584). Trapped in a prison of their aspiring success, Raymond and his friends struggle to define their artistic identities against the demands of a fetishized cultural melting pot.
Consequently, both Herring and Thurman draw on the distinct plights of several characters in Infants of the Spring to illustrate the conflict between racial reckoning, artistic aspiration, and white publicity that hindered the Harlem Renaissance. Herring contends that, according to Thurman, “ . . . the institutions
of publicity paradoxically thwarted, rather than advanced, the Negro artist's career” (Herring, 584). In fact, Pelham’s search for artistic expression through poetry and consequent trial for sexual assault powerfully demonstrates reality’s disturbing distance from the movement’s ideal and expectations. The narrator describes Pelham, an escaped victim of modern slavery, and his short-lived stay as an aspiring artist as “ . . . a sad interlude in the life of one who had been seduced by the elusive spectere of future artistic success. He was now a convict . . . nothing could be more disastrous and degrading” (Thurman, 153).
With the jarring juxtaposition of a romanticized cultural role and a demonized racial stereotype, the narrator highlights the emotional suppression and loneliness beneath the glorified image of the Negro Artist. Consequently, when Paul commits suicide toward the end of the novel, his failed attempt at eternal recognition and final loss of dignity expose the poison of white publicity. Forced to suppress artistic dreams for the sake of public recognition, the artists of the Infants of the Spring drown following the current of passing white approval.
While these interpretations of the novel’s end suggest futile hopes for social, artistic, and racial change, Thurman’s emphasis on the dangerous allure of stereotypes and oversimplified truths open doors of escape from this “racial panopticon.” Professor Scott Herring concludes that the “ . . . Infants of the Spring exemplifies through its fallen, failed characters and its tell-all narrative strategy, the price of fame paradoxically cost personality” (Herring 595). Indeed, with the
novel’s endings of suicide, conviction, and the abandonment of even the Manor, Thurman portrays the pained failure of the Renaissance itself. However, inherent in the descents of Thurman’s intentionally ill-fated characters is his message of hope. For example, during Pelham’s court trial, the narrator concludes the poet’s sentence and the scene with the clearly unjust actions of the “martyred motherhood, the “merciful instrument of justice,” and the “communal menace” (Thurman 154). By describing the roles of America’s court system in such satirical and unsatisfying terms, Thurman powerfully poses the danger of oversimplification in social relations and encourages a reexamination of racial narratives. Towards the end of the novel, Raymond searches for closure on Paul’s suicide and the end of the Harlem Renaissance. On the nearly-destroyed title page of his manuscript, Paul had drawn a sketch of a black skyscraper inspired by the Manor. The narrator observes, “At first glance it could be ascertained that the skyscraper would soon crumple and fall, leaving dominating lights in full possession of the sky” (Thurman 175). While the last line of Infants of the Spring seems to denote the ruins of a well-intentioned attempt at artistic revolution, the narrator’s careful choice of words— “At first glance . . .”—suggest a more complex message of social progress: the long-term success of movements for change must come from the integrity, not the height or external support, of its social foundations.
As a result, both Infants of the Spring and Herring’s commentary reveal the
pressure and superficiality of Harlem’s acclaimed limelight. Each forced to advertise themselves as the “New Negro” amidst their artistic pursuits and quests of identity, Thurman’s characters demonstrate the extreme difficulty with which Black artists addressed the expectations of the white publicity. Thus, Thurman exposes the stereotypes and fetishizations of the white entertainment industry to encourage an eventual movement of real civil and artistic progress that celebrates the diverse realities of minorities and groups rather than suppresses them. In order for privileged societies to pride themselves as agents of social and cultural change, we must recognize our unwillingness to confront the discomfort of our complex truths.
Holden Caufield: Abhorring the Hustle and Bustle
Bella Kuick
‘24
After reading J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye for New York City Literature’s summer assignment, Bella Kuick ‘24 explores main character Holden Caulfield’s abhorrent attitude towards the Big Apple. Kuick explores the contrast between the alienation and isolation Caulfield experiences to the relentless pace of the city life.
Through her analysis of key moments and quotes from the novel, Kuick’s essay illuminates how New York’s apathy and chaotic environment aggravates Caulfield’s mental health, offering a fresh perspective on why city life, though lauded by many, can be a source of discomfort.
J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has become the cornerstone of high school literature across the country as it examines the transition from childhood to adulthood against the backdrop of the vibrant, and at times phony, New York City. Unlike countless authors, poets, and artists, Salinger’s main character, Holden Caulfield, detests New York City where others would sing its praises, successfully showing the hardships of isolation that accompany the act of committing to the city.
New York City is repeatedly treated as the destination for reinventing oneself in the media—a place to pursue one’s dreams without the confines of a small suburban town; however, these qualities are not suitable for all. A bigger pond with more fish is accompanied by loneliness and a struggle to find where one fits. For teenagers who may not be at a point in their life where they are seeking reinvention but instead simply who they are to begin with, undertaking the Big Apple and all of its quirks might do more harm than good. In Holden’s case, the latter quickly proves to be true. It is clear from the start of the novel that Holden feels isolated and unsure of his future but his chosen remedy of leaving Pencey in favor of returning to New York City clearly worsens his afflictions. Shortly after forcing himself on several women old enough to be his mother in his hotel’s nightclub, Holden reflects on the city’s vastness, stating: “New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed” (Salinger 106). The sheer size of New York City contributes to his
tumultuous feelings. Laughter can be heard for “miles”—everyone else’s lives perforate one’s own in the city and it is impossible to escape. It is the unavoidable experiences of strangers’ lives that force Holden to face his isolation, thereby further worsening his poor mental health condition. New York is apathetic to everyone, if someone is walking alone at night on the street without a companion to laugh with, the buildings will not lean down and coddle them. Holden is again reminded of the city’s apathy towards individuals or minors when he visits a bar later in the novel.
After repeatedly trying to procure liquor and repeatedly failing, he visits an establishment he knows will serve him and, perhaps inadvertently, reveals a concerning truth about the city: “If you were only around six years old, you could get liquor at Ernie’s, the place was so dark and all, and besides nobody cared how old you were” (111). The cold nature of the city is well-encapsulated in this brief moment. A visibly young minor could walk into Ernie’s and no one would bat an eye while slinging a whiskey their way. The city and the people in it have little regard for the safety and well-being of those around them. No one has the time, no one has the patience, and no one has the morality to keep children safe. It is undeniable that New York has a “head down and keep walking” culture but this is the ugly underbelly of it. Holden has already felt let down by other authority figures such as his parents and teachers, but the clear lack of attention paid to him by others in the city deepens the wound.
Although many adore the hustle and bustle of the city’s crowded streets,
Holden makes it abundantly clear that the lifestyle is not for him but is instead only suited for those not worth liking. Holden, growing more boisterous the more time he spends in the city, announces his dislike for the city and its nature to his unsuspecting date, Sally, disrupting what was supposed to be a pleasant outing: “I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you…being introduced to phony guys…going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside…” (169). Clearly, the concrete jungle is not for everyone. Despite being born and raised in New York, Holden despises the fast-paced nature that other New Yorkers adore. Whereas he would like to sit and chat about the ducks in Central Park or inhabit a cabin in the woods, everyone else in New York appears to be hooked on the rush of hurried, angry interactions—an addiction he cannot imagine. It is apparent that New York is for a specific breed of people, one Holden could not be further removed from. Additionally, Holden seems to detest the life that awaits him if he puts down solid roots in New York. He continues agitating Sally on their date, stating, “And I’d be working in some office, making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers and playing bridge all the time…” (173). Salinger reveals little about Holden’s father but one can infer that Holden essentially has just mapped out his old man’s entire week—a week he would hate to inherit. The accumulation of “dough” does not interest him if it comes at the cost of constant movement and isolation. To most New Yorkers, even the city’s Dutch founders, this
would be a blasphemous statement, but Holden stands by it. Throughout the novel, it is clear that where most New Yorkers see benefits worth ridiculously priced housing, Holden mainly sees faults he must stomach during his time there.
the prince’s son: Machiavelli’s Step-by-Step Guide to Gentle Parenting
Katie Chung ‘24
When asked to create an editorial inspired by theorists in the Political Theory elective, Katie Chung ‘24 subverted expectations by creating a comic inspired by the teachings of Niccolo Machiavelli. She chose to explore the topic of gentle parenting with expertise and wit, making a funny and educational comic that displays Machiavelli’s theories of politics. Chung’s ingenious ability to connect modern ideas of parenting with Renaissance-era philosophies smoothly highlights the intricacies and invites the reader to dig deeper into both topics.
AP Literature: “Diction” and “Plants”
In the following order: Kellen Ievers ’24, Kitty Williams ‘24
After reading the following excerpt from White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo, students in AP Literature were tasked with examining DeLillo’s use of diction to portray the shopping experience of Jack Glander the main character, and the complexity surrounding both the text and Gladney’s inner turmoil. Kellen Ievers ‘24 deftly examines this diction, highlighting that Gladney’s perception of himself heavily correlates with fulfilling his family’s tangible desires. Ievers connects this idea of Gladney’s reliance on material goods to further his self-image with a loss of a genuine identity and an attempt to restore his status as both a father and a husband.
After reading the poem “Plants” by Olive Senior, students in AP Literature and Composition analyzed Senior’s perspective on the “deceptive” nature of plants. Kitty Williams ‘24 examines Senior’s use of rhetorical devices and his idea that plants will take over the human world with their intelligent and cunning nature. By exploring this text, Williams shows how Senior is able to create a sense of uneasiness with the reader and a fear of the domination of plants.
Excerpt from White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo: The encounter put me in the mood to shop. I found the others and we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in the Mid-Village Mall, a ten-story building arranged around a center court of waterfalls, promenades and gardens. Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirts they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things they thought I might want or need, running back to get me, to clutch my arms, plead with me to follow. They were my guides to endless wellbeing. People swarmed through the boutiques and gourmet shops. Organ music rose from the great court. We smelled chocolate, popcorn, cologne; we smelled rugs and furs, hanging salamis and deathly vinyl. My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf. I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface. We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men's wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less
important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepingly generous, and told the kids to pick out their Christmas gifts here and now. I gestured in what I felt was an expansive manner. I could tell they were impressed. They fanned out across the area, each of them suddenly inclined to be private, shadowy, even secretive. Periodically one of them would return to register the name of an item with Babette, careful not to let the others know what it was. I myself was not to be bothered with tedious details. I was the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh. The children knew it was the nature of such things that I could not be expected to engage in technical discussions about the gifts themselves. We ate another meal. A band played live Muzak. Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction.
Kellen Ievers
Smells of cheap mall court food, people whirling around dozens of stores, shuffling through items in search of the perfect gift, merchants shouting advertisements and chasing potential buyers. In the middle of it, Jack Gladney and his family get caught in the bustle of obsessive shopping, sweeping the racks and picking through merchandise to empty their pockets. Jack does not seem exhilarated by this trip and, despite hints at his non-wealthy status, takes little regard for the large sums that come with exploring the mall carelessly. DeLillo uses a distant yet content diction in describing Jack’s luxurious and busy shopping experience, hinting
that Jack’s possible existential decline is being revived through an attempt to fulfill his family’s material wishes.
The word choice that DeLillo uses to describe the day at the mall portrays Jack as mild yet careless and beyond financial reality. When Jack and his family enter the mall, he explains, “I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it.” Though Jack and his family could be wealthy, there are moments when he would describe his daughters’ excitement and pleading, which spoiled children would not do if they were used to such treatment. The repetition of “shopped” and the frivolous reasons for various items show Jack’s lack of thought and care for what he is buying, as if he does not need to pay attention to the cost. However, his careful appreciation for the merchandise he does not care to purchase displays his yearning to find value in the materialistic, to find value and detail in the rest of his life, and he is shopping and looking for the items that will fill him with feelings and care that he does not have when describing this experience. Jack also narrates that during his shopping experience, “I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed.” One could take “growing in value” as arrogance in careless spending, but the metaphor for filling himself out while fulfilling his and his family’s desires shows that the mall trip is not a far-fromreality experience for Jack, but rather a way for him to ground himself and explore the existence that he was losing.
Jack’s distant and formal tone narrates the mall experience in a way that shows that he is not simply rich and careless, but rather trying to search for and buy into an existence and purpose that he had lost before. As Jack immerses himself in the busy atmosphere of the mall, he explains, “The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums came back to me in the form of existential credit.” He seems careless and financially distant when describing how the high prices seemed “unimportant,” and the metaphor of money falling from him like rain brings a seemingly arrogant light to his experience. However, his appreciation for the “existential credit” that carried more value than the price of the new item demonstrates Jack’s far-removed tone is not due to financial status, but rather his feelings of aimlessness and loss of purpose. Also, as Jack finds himself searching the dozens of stores, he feels pride in finding materials for his daughters and wife. He says, “I myself was not to be bothered with tedious details. I was the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh. The children knew it was the nature of such things that I could not be expected to engage in technical discussions about the gifts themselves.” Jack’s description of being unbothered by the “tedious details” and disregard for discussions about the gifts that he was buying for his family airs a conceited and self-absorbed tone, but this disengagement with his family while shopping expresses that Jack feels a disconnect with himself and the rest of his reality, where he wants to carry out the gifts for the children to make them happy rather than asking any questions or engaging with them. Though the tone reflects
that he does not seem to care about what the girls want and that he is simply there as the “benefactor,” Jack is rediscovering his purpose as both a person and a father, and doing so through items throughout the mall rather than opening up to the children directly.
Jack Gladney and his family’s shopping experience is described in a list-like and unbothered fashion, despite the amount of materials he buys for himself and his family. However, it reveals Jack’s hesitance and awkwardness in attempting to reconnect with himself and his family, as he does not approach his wife or kids with activities that can truly connect them in a loving sense. Spending excessively is often connected to greed, so the day at the mall is a trivial attempt at showing care for his family after being far removed from reality for so long. Also, Jack’s self-reflection is short and shallow, as he sprinkles it in amongst his shopping details and careless money-related remarks, but his busy experience in “retail therapy” shows his attempt at trying to find meaning and purpose in his life, even without directly addressing the feelings he had felt. Many who do not know how to express themselves with words will try to make up for it through actions, and the careless yet reflective diction in Jack’s narration shows his attempt to buy back into his own life and his family life.
“Plants” (2005) by Olive Senior:
Plants are deceptive. You see them there looking as if once rooted they know their places; not like animals, like us always running around, leaving traces.
Yet from the way they breed (excuse me!) and twine, from their exhibitionist and rather prolific nature, we must infer a sinister not to say imperialistic grand design. Perhaps you've regarded, as beneath your notice, armies of mangrove on the march, roots in the air, clinging tendrils anchoring themselves everywhere?
The world is full of shoots bent on conquest, invasive seedlings seeking wide open spaces, matériel gathered for explosive dispersal in capsules and seed cases.
Maybe you haven't quite taken in the colonizing ambitions of hitchhiking burrs on your sweater, surf-riding nuts bobbing on ocean, parachuting seeds and other
airborne traffic dropping in. And what about those special agents called flowers? Dressed, perfumed, and made-up for romancing insects, bats, birds, bees, even you –
– don't deny it my dear, I've seen you sniff and exclaim. Believe me, Innocent, that sweet fruit, that berry, is nothing more than ovary, the instrument to seduce you into scattering plant progeny. Part of a vast cosmic program that once set in motion cannot be undone though we become plant food and earth wind down.
They'll outlast us, they were always there one step ahead of us: plants gone to seed, generating the original profligate, extravagant, reckless, improvident, weed.
Kitty Williams
Olive Senior’s “Plants” explores the threat of the seemingly innocent, yet witty, plant species. The poet antagonizes the growth and clinginess of plants, stating that plants are powerful and even sly in nature. The poet’s antagonization constructs plants as a character, personifying them as multiplying beasts who wastefully occupy spaces and deceive humans, showcasing the irony of how pigheaded humans are in considering themselves the superior, dominant species.
Senior purposefully asks rhetorical questions before asserting comparisons of plants to humans in order to convince readers that plants are so deceitful and cunning that they have begun to dominate natural life without humans noticing. The poet states, “Perhaps you’ve regarded, as beneath your notice, armies of mangrove on the march, roots in the air, clinging tendrils anchoring themselves everywhere” to persuade the reader that plants have been clinging onto nature everywhere, underneath the noses of humans (Senior 9-12). Then, in the next line, Senior implies that the plants have ambition, “bent on a conquest” of invasion (13). The poet tries to hide these far-reaching desires for domination by slickly stating the idiocy or dismissal of the human race, while having her priorities ironically concerned with plants outliving humans. Senior’s comments that plants will outlive humans by “anchoring themselves everywhere,” are ironic in that humans are egotistical enough to believe they are the most intelligent species, pig-headed in all respects by putting themselves in a position to control all other beings; meanwhile,
a species without eyes will live longer than humans. Moreover, Senior continues with her questions later on in the poem, asking, “And what about those special agents called flowers?” And later on, Senior says, “Dressed, perfumed and made-up for romancing… even you… Believe me, Innocent, that sweet fruit, that berry, is nothing more than an ovary, the instrument to seduce” (23-28). Yet again Olive
Senior compares the seduction and romancing of flowers to the seduction of a human organ— the ovary, which is in charge of releasing pheromones in humans as a mating signal. The “romancing of flowers” worries the poet, once again alluding to the hubris of humans through the, hopefully satirical, examination of plants’ clingy nature.
The poet’s repetition of the words “us” in the first and last stanzas of the poem asserts a common theme that plants are as cunning and smart as humans, posing a competitive threat to the human race. Within the first stanza, Senior immediately states that “plants are deceptive” and they “know their places; not like animals, like us always running around, leaving traces,” intentionally foreshadowing the poet’s idea that plants are witty and deceitful (1-4). Then, in the last stanza, Senior writes of the plants saying, “they’ll outlast us, they were always there one step ahead of us” (33-34). By comparing plants’ scavenging to that of humans and then establishing the deceptiveness of plants using “us” repetition, Olive Senior reinforces the threatening competition of plants, who should not be able to romance and outlive humans, the self-proclaimed dominant and most
Olive Senior’s placement of questions and the threat of plants to “us” help personify plants as a devilish species. Her constant antagonization of the multiplying and deceitful plants allude to the prideful nature of humans, who let a few greens build a future that might consist of outliving the human race — a threat which the poet believes humans should be embarrassed about.
