Tag Archives: knowledge

Week 14: The Deep

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One common theme I saw in chapters 5 and 7 was the importance of knowledge and history. When Yetu and Oori are talking about their histories, they come to a disagreement about the importance of history. Yetu says: “‘If the past is full of bad things, if a people is defined by the terror done to them, it’s good for it to go, don’t you think?… It was a very holy thing for my kind. It meant I held onto all the memories so no one else had to, generations and generations of them. Six hundred years of pain.’” (p.94). In contrast, Oori says: “‘I would take any amount of pain in the world if I meant I could know all the memories of the Oshuben. I barely know any stories from my parents’ generation. I can’t remember our language. How could you leave behind something like that?’” (p.94). These are two very different perspectives. One knows all, and one lives without knowledge. If you compare Oori and the wajinru, both live in ignorance of their past, but the wajinru are able to live in the present, while Oori seems consumed by questions of her history and unable to move forward. Is it because the wajinru have the Remembrance? Or is there another difference? Would Oori really want to know her people’s history? As they say, curiosity killed the cat. In addition, this comparison between knowing history and not knowing mirrors the relationship between Yetu and her mother, as her mother often said that Yetu could not understand what it was like, when in reality, Amaba was the one who struggled to realize the pain Yetu underwent. Similarly, Oori is struggling to realize how traumatizing a history can be, especially when relived in such detail. Often, when we consider trauma, we see it as an event that happens to a person, and that person is the one who is traumatized. However, there are some theories that people who are close to the person who is traumatized (partnerships, parental, etc) can be traumatized just by hearing what has happened to someone they care about. Yetu has been repeatedly traumatized by these memories, but no one will acknowledge it because it is ‘history’ and decidedly over with, and because it has happened, they believe one cannot be traumatized by the pure memory. I think this end of the chapter raises the question of the importance of history, as well as how we choose to define ourselves. Do we define ourselves by history, by culture, by community? These two characters show sharp differences in where they find identity; Oori has no culture, community, or history to lean on to shape her identity, while Yetu feels very defined and shaped by her culture and community, and the history she was forced to bear. 

Week 13: The Ones Who Swim Away from Omelas

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A short story that’s stuck with me for years since reading it for an English class is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s a story describing the fictional city of Omelas as a utopia. Everyone is happy, everyone is educated, everyone is housed, everyone is well-off, everyone is fed. If there’s one place you’d want to go and stay, Omelas is the place.

There is, however, one caveat to this paradise: everyone in Omelas knows of the child. The child is miserable, kept locked away in a windowless room that’s more akin to a broom closet and is tormented by those who would dare to look upon it. It begs to be let out with the promise that it will be good, holding onto the memory of its mother and the light that it was born into like every other citizen of Omelas. The child has a purpose: to bear the burden and experience of misery so that no one else in Omelas has to experience it. It serves as a reminder for the people of Omelas, especially for the children, that at least they are not the ones trapped alone in a dark room sitting in their own waste and abused constantly. It reminds the people of Omelas that they have it easy, that the source of their joy comes at the cost of the child’s misery. It would be easy to pull the child out of the room and into the light, to care for it and treat its wounds. But taking the child out of that room and letting it live amongst the people of Omelas exposes the fact that their joy has been at the expense of the child’s misery.

I noticed how similar this dynamic is in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep between the wajinru and the historian. Unlike the child, who is reviled and abused, the historian is lauded and praised for their duties towards the wajinru. The historian bears all of the memories of their ancestors, no matter how mundane or painful. Every year, all of the wajinru gather and allow the historian to share their ancestors’ and their collective memories before separating once more into their mostly-solitary lives, able to forget those memories but leaving the historian to remember it all. Yetu, the historian we are introduced to, bears the burden of holding all of these memories but is extra-sensitive to it, constantly torn between the pain of the past and the pain of the present while also bearing the burden of being seen as a guide amongst the wajinru.

Like the child of Omelas, Yetu the historian has a duty to fulfill. The wajinru forgetting their ancestors’ memories enables them to live peaceful lives in The Deep without the burden of remembering that their peaceful existence was born from pain. Yetu, on the other hand, cannot live as freely as they can because she must chronically experience the pain that their ancestors went through and remember that the wajinru only exist because of that pain.

Week 10: Vast Expanses

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What I found most interesting in the readings this week was the second article, Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans. In the article, the author discussed how knowledge has played a role in our changing perspective of the ocean. Through new knowledge, we have strengthened the connection between mankind and the ocean. But, this knowledge is a double edged sword, as this knowledge has also given more opportunity for exploitation of the ocean, control, expansion of power, and increased accessibility. As the author states: “Knowledge about the ocean–created through work and play, through scientific investigation and also through the ambitions people have harbored for using the sea–has played a central role in mediating the human relationship with this vast, tackless, opaque place” (p.4). The ocean has been discovered through both scientific investigation, and ambitions for use, as Rodzadowski states. This is important to note because it reveals that while we have what appears to be a scientific, objective interest in the ocean, we also have a deep urge to capitalize and dominate the ocean. Perhaps we can chalk this up to differences in people–scientists versus entrepreneurs and capitalists–or perhaps we can argue that every person will face a similar struggle at some point in their lifetime. Even the scientific approach has selfish reasons, humans crave to understand everything in this world; of themselves, of the other, of the distant. One can argue that science is objective, and studying the ocean is purely for the attainment of objective knowledge, yet, as this passage argues, this knowledge can have a negative effect. I do not believe that scientific investigation and ambitions for use are different; they tend to overlap far too much. Rodzadowski also describes the ocean as ‘vast, tackless, opaque’. In this way, he almost makes the ocean less human, less personified than many other texts we’ve read. Tactless is to be without manners or rude, and this word creates an ocean that has little regard for the rest of nature, including us humans. His use of the word opaque also makes the ocean mysterious, separate and hidden from us.