Tag Archives: reading response

The Deep

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In River Solomon’s “The Deep,” the concept of memory and the stories associated with it can take on a life of it’s own. Depending on the context of these memories, they can ground the person experiencing them and give them context that informs their identity as wajinru. However, these same memories can also leave wajinru untethered and hollow, like a pried open clam shell who’s meat has been scooped out by a predator. In Yetu’s case, she is the actual vessel for these memories. Both her sense of self and the remembrances fight for control over her body. In a way, these memories are almost parasitic as Yetu has to fight to keep herself from slipping into them, and at times gives in until she can break free from their grasp.  On page 69, Yetu states that she left the Wajinru to endure the full weight of their history, and that for the first time in many years her body felt weightless. The history and the memories associated with this history have a living dimension to it, they are physical agents that can press or interact with the bodies of the Wajinru. As a historian, the memories need Yetu’s body to be physically alive in order to carry them. However, this doesn’t account for both the mental and physical anguish the Rememberances have on her as she states that “it’s killing me (p.94),” when referring to the memories. Because memories themselves are alive, they encompass the duality of suffering and understanding and can cause a palpable effect on the people experiencing them.

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.

The Water Will Carry us Home

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In the stop motion animation ‘The Water Will Carry us Home,’ the water serves as a tool to help transform the spirits of enslaved Africans in the Middle Passage into mermaids, and helps to transport them back by setting them on a path to find freedom within the ocean. The ocean in the context of transatlantic slavery and the Middle Passage is interesting because the concepts of ownership, specifically the ownership of human bodies, are terrestrial-based; you can’t physically own anything in the ocean. 

In the beginning of the stop motion animation, enslaved Africans are lined up and bound, their bodies confined in a way that maximizes the ship’s space instead of prioritizing the comfort of the people within it. The ship acts as a vessel for land and terrestrial based concepts as it carries out the act of enslavement by stealing people away from their homeland and taking them a new world where they would face terrible conditions. On the boat, the enslaved Africans cannot move but as mermaids, the spirits are able to move freely within the water as they are not chained or constricted. In the title of this animation, water and transportation are once again linked through the phrase ‘carry us home’. The water and the Yoruba Orisha associated with it help to guide the mermaids back to their homeland after being violently taken from it. 

Week 11: Horror for Whom?

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Watching Emilija Skarnulyte’s short film “Sirenomelia” reminded me of found footage, a subgenre of horror movies that heavily involve cameras and employ a first-person point of view (POV), which also reminds me of why found footage movies are a thing. In found footage movies, a group of characters use cameras to record their “discovery,” which happens to be the home or resting place of a monster or a deadly nature spirit. Often, one of the members of the group will disrupt the monster’s home or break a rule, which will understandably upset the monster and give them cause to come after them. We always view the movie from the disruptor’s/enabler’s POV, but never from the monster’s POV. Perhaps the monster is going through a horror movie of their own, seeing someone disrupt their home and break their rules so brazenly.

“Sirenomelia” is an interesting short film because it feels like a found footage horror movie, but instead of being from the POV of a human exploring the decommissioned submarine base, we get it from the point of view of a “monster”–a siren. If this found footage film was made from the POV of a human, we would only get a view of the base at the beginning of the film. We’d see the mountains, the surface of the icy sea, the inside of the base, and the lonely expanse of the land. Without the siren’s POV, we wouldn’t be able to see the underwater rail and the sea life that has made its home on the metal poles holding up the base. Exploring the submarine base from the siren’s point of view essentially turns us away from our terracentrist, anthropocentric view and asks us to explore another POV that is not human and not land-based.

Week 10: When is the ocean’s birthday?

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Helen M. Rodzakowski’s Vast Oceans made me think and rethink my perception of so much more than the ocean. It also made me rethink the things considered just as timeless as the ocean–for example, Barbie. Barbie dolls and Barbie movies were a personal childhood staple. There wasn’t a day that went by in the first six or seven years of my life that I didn’t watch Barbie’s “Rapunzel” or sing the songs from Barbie’s “The Princess and the Pauper” or happily receive a new Barbie doll from my aunt. Barbie’s presence in my life was a constant, so it didn’t occur until later in life that Barbie wasn’t always a constant in every kid’s life. We can trace Barbie’s beginnings back to the 50s, down to the name of her creator and why she was named Barbie in the first place. Barbie has history, but in the eyes of time, Barbie is barely a twinkle in it.

One of the quotes that stood out to me in Rodzakowski’s Vast Oceans is: ““…the connections between people and oceans, though ancient, have tightened over time and multiplied with industrialization and globalization. Although we think of it as being starkly different, in this sense the ocean resembles the land. This trajectory runs counter to wide-spread cultural assumptions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human activity.” (9) The ocean has seen all of human history, existing long before humans even became humans. If the ocean were a person, it would know more of our history than we know of it. Even though our knowledge of the ocean’s history is limited, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Week 10: Deterreiorializing Preface

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In ‘Deterritorializing Preface,’ the text reveals how descriptors and common word associations with the land are a conscious act that centers land over the ocean. This reading offers precise language to recenter the ocean as a place with its own merit and agency outside of its proximity to land. Even before presenting these alternative definitions, the author states that ‘moving offshore reshapes our vocabulary (xv),’ which allows for the structure of the text itself to also deterritorialize as it provides a mental shift that moves the reader’s focus from the land to the ocean. In all seven alternative vocabularies, the author places the word ‘formerly’ next to the terrestrial-based vocabulary and is enclosed within a parenthesis. This confined position within the parenthesis minimizes the presence of the terrestrial vocabulary and highlights the aquatic/ocean-based vocabulary. This visual focus on the oceanic word continues to shift the gaze of the reader toward the ocean and further pushes them into the open waters of a new way of interacting with language. In the last section of the text, the author states that they nearly wrote down the phrase ‘change the world’ instead of ‘change the ocean.’ The phrase ‘change the world’ has been used as a call to action to inspire individuals to try to fix injustices or problems that Earth faces. However, the ‘world’ usually calls to mind images of land and solid ground and largely excludes the 70% world that’s covered in water. By changing this common phrase to ‘change the ocean,’ the text once again centers on the ocean as a physical place where an active change can occur, especially one that involves connotations that certain vocabularies can bring.  

Steve Mentz, Ocean (Bloomsbury, 2020): “Deterritorializing Preface” (pgs. xv-xviii)

Week 9: Blue Humanities

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In the blue humanities reading, the author showcased how Western attitudes towards the sea/ocean changed over time from disinterest and fear to one of fascination and awe. This mimics the attitudes that individuals held towards the “wilderness” as the cultural values associated with both these natural spaces changed to suit the desires of a western audience. I believe that the coast and sea shore itself became a kind of frontier myth for those living in the 19th century. In both the terrestrial and aquatic frontier myth, people looked back to these places as a romanticized version of the past. In the reading, the author states that, “pristine nature now in short supply in the industrialized heartlands, found a refuge in the oceans…Simultaneously, the sublime, previously associated with mountains and forests, came to be associated with the wild water.” In this quote, the author is mentioning how people are once again searching for a space that is untouched/unaltered by humans which is highlighted by the addition of the words ‘industrialized heartlands’. This phrasing positions the sea as something that people saw separate from them and because of their separation, there was a type of sacredness to it, which matches the sacredness that people felt towards national parks. The use of the phrase ‘wild water’ is interesting as well because the water is being personified and altered to fit this idea of untouched wilderness even though people had utilized the open ocean and other bodies of water for hundreds of years.

Humanities: The Journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Web. 2013

Week 8: The Trouble with Wilderness

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What stood out to me was Cronon’s return to his main argument, “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.” (16) Cronon challenges the widely believed perception of wilderness as a natural, undisturbed state. He begins by claiming that the concept of wilderness is not natural or innate, but rather a product of human society. He challenges the notion that wilderness exists irrespective of human impact. He contends that wildness is a product of the society that values it, highlighting the importance of cultural values and views in creating our understanding of nature. Furthermore, Cronon emphasizes the contradictory character of wildness, claiming that it is “a product of the very history it seeks to deny.” He contends that the romantic idealization of wilderness as a clean and unspoiled landscape ignores the rich human history associated with these locations. By recognizing the historical context in which wilderness ideals developed, Cronon encourages readers to critically evaluate the cultural structures that impact our impressions of nature.

However, I am in partial agreement with his argument. I value Cronon’s critique, but I also believe that preserving select wilderness regions is beneficial to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem health. I agree that the distinction between wilderness and civilization is arbitrary, and that humans have influenced ecosystems throughout history. However, I appreciate the value of designated wilderness regions for conservation. Also recognizing both the cultural creation of wilderness and the significance of preserving specific landscapes for their biological value. But I believe it is critical to prioritize the preservation of wilderness regions as a means of conserving biodiversity and ecological health. I believe that wilderness is valuable in and of itself, regardless of human impact, and that rigorous protection measures should be implemented to keep these areas clean. I would argue that Cronon’s critique hinders efforts to protect wilderness and natural places from further degradation. What concerns me is that stressing human influence on wilderness may lead to complacency or a reduction in conservation efforts.

Week 7: Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid

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I remember being about ten years old when I first read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Needless to say, I was horrified by how different it was from the lighthearted 1989 Disney adaptation so many kids grew up with. It was more graphic, more painful, and, for lack of a better word, more sad.

Andersen’s mermaid does not have a name, whereas I wished to be named Ariel after my favorite Disney princess. The rules of going to the surface are also less restrictive than in the Disney adaptation, as a merperson’s journey to the surface is seen as a coming-of-age ceremony, and after that point, could go to the surface whenever they want rather than being forbidden from ever going up. Ariel’s tail becomes two legs from flashes of light and swirls of smoke, while Andersen’s mermaid mutilates herself by cutting off her tongue to pay the price for her transformation. The presence of the little mermaid’s grandmother and her sisters is noticeably absent from the Disney adaptation, which, in some ways, enhances the little mermaid’s loneliness rather than detracts from it. It’s also notable that the little mermaid experiences pain with every step she takes on her human legs, while Ariel does not seem to suffer any adverse effects of her transformation other than being unable to use her words. The most notable difference between Andersen’s story and the Disney adaptation is that Andersen’s little mermaid does not get her prince charming in the end; all of her sacrifices are rendered useless and go unappreciated because they are unsaid.

Rereading this story as an adult almost made me cry in my living room, especially knowing what I know now about Hans Christian Andersen and his rocky romantic relationships. Because of that, it’s no wonder that mermaids and many mermaid stories are often read through a queer lens, and no wonder that this story is so full of yearning and suffering.

Melusine and the Importance of Privacy and Personal Boundaries

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In this weeks story, Melusine and her relationship with Raymondin highlight the importance of respecting someones personal boundaries and their privacy. When Melusine and Raymondin first meet, the two outline certain expectations and objectives for their relationship. This includes never seeing each other on a Saturday. In this scene, Melusine explicitly says, “You must swear by all holy sacraments as  a christian that on each Saturday, from sundown till the following day, never – and I will say it again so there is no doubt about it – never must you try to see me in any way whatever, nor seek to know where I am” (pg. 27). This isn’t a simple request or suggestion. Instead there’s a heavy weight of responsibility to Melusine’s words, especially through using the term ‘holy sacraments’. This implies that to break this oath is akin to breaking a promise to God, which usually carry severe punishments. She didn’t say this once, but twice in order to further emphasize this clause in their agreement. This statement is unbreakable and leaves no wiggle room for potential change in the future. With all this laid out, Raymondin agrees to marry her. The two share a prosperous life together and are deeply committed to each other which makes Raymondin’s betrayal of their promise and Melusine’s privacy all the more heart breaking. When Raymondin uncovered this secret, he didn’t bear it alone, but instead revealed it to all those who were in the castle. Because of this public spectacle and exposing of her secret, she would never again get to be with Raymondin as husband and wife. This reveal captures the nature of secrets: once revealed, the circumstances surrounding the secret will forever be altered. Had Raymondin kept the discovery to himself, Melusine would have been able to die as a mortal Christian woman besides him. By violating these boundaries, these actions lead to the downfall of both their happiness and contentment, which shows the importance of treating boundaries in relationships with respect and continued acknowledgement. 

Knight, G. The Romance of the Faerie Melusine. Skylight Press, 2011.