Journal 15 - Response to Adam Bakiera

I completely agree with what Adam’s saying about the author Silko not providing the other side of the story and how it’s not only border patrol that attack immigrants, it’s also the other way around. I’d also like to add that when she compares Germany’s “Iron Curtain” to the “10 feet high” steel wall that the US government is building. I feel those to things have nothing in common. Germany’s wall was erected to stop east Germans from fleeing to the west. This is not the reason why the U.S. government is starting to put up their wall. That reason is because of illegal immigration that is hurting our economy. Yes we are trying to stop Mexicans from coming over the border, but this is for legal reasons, where as east and west Germany were technically one country, The US and Mexico are two different countries, so if people come over to the US illegally, it messes up the whole balance of the US economy and other parts as well.

Journal 14: If I were a soldier

In Tim O’Brian’s “The Things They Carry,” There is a sense of secrecy in the soldier’s true emotions and in the meanings of the items, they carry. For example, some of the men were superstitious and carried things such as a rabbit’s foot. “Lieutenant Cross, carried his good luck pebble”(1465). This pebble had come from his girlfriend, Martha. He keeps this pebble to remind him of his life back home and of his girlfriend.

 If I were a soldier in a war, the most of the things I would bring are things that or of the necessity. Of them, I would have a canteen for water, some kind of gun, a few items of clothing and plenty of food.  I would also my Bible. This book would not only remind me of God, and how he watches over us, but also of my parents and their strong faith in the Lord. I’d also take with me pictures of my parents, sibling and of extended family and some stationary so that I would be able to write back to them. I’d probably also carry some kind of water tablets, wo I wouldn’t have to deal with all the infected water and maybe some kind of pills that could help with disease. Finally for comfort, I’d bring a small stuffed animal, because whenever it gets lonely and I get scared, I can hug that stuffed animal to make me feel better. I’d probably try not to let anyone see it though.

Journal 13: Zitkala-Sa

            I do not think that “The School Days of an Indian Girl” is a story about fulfilling the American Dream. This story is about perseverance through the hardships placed on an Indian girl by white people. If this was a story about the American Dream then the little Indian girl would have chosen to go to a boarding school and dreamt about moving up in society, but instead she was forced to go to school. Isn’t the American Dream all about choosing your own future? I mean isn’t that what people came over to American for? Sure, they came so they could become successful, but in their own way and isn’t success subjective to every person. For example one person might think he’s the richest man alive because he has the most money, but on the other hand another man might think he’s the richest man alive because he has a family. So success isn’t the same thing to every person. I think success is subjective to what that individual person wants and if something is forced on you, then obviously you didn’t want it. This is what happened to the little Indian girl. The quote “I laughed no more in triumph when thus alone. The little taste of victory did not satisfy the hunger in my heart” (438) describes how unhappy she felt after being pushed through school. She did not fulfill her dream of success, which is what the American dream is all about.  

The Overthrow of the Queen of Hawaii

“Let it be understood that I have not failed to notice it, and to be not only flattered by its universality, but further very grateful that I have had the opportunity to know the real American people, quite distinct from those who have assumed this honored name when it suited their selfish ends.”

         This quote really stuck out to me. From reading it, I think she understands that not all Americans wanted to overthrow her and the Hawaiian monarchy, at least not the “real Americans.” Only the ones who wanted control over capitalism and resources in Hawaii wanted control of it. The previous line says that most Americans are sympathetic with her and encouraged her.

Journal 11 – White Cruelty

It is evident in both Claude McKay’s works and Pauline Hopkins’ story that even after the civil war blacks still weren’t treated as equal. Both of these authors seem very outspoken and almost fed up with everything that is happening.

            In Hopkins’ story “As the Lord Lives, He is One of Our Mother’s Children”, people mistake a man for a murderer, and only after his execution did they figure out the truth. I think that overall this had a message of “don’t judge a book by its cover”, especially blacks. Hopkins was trying to convey that just because a person is black does not mean they are automatically and evil person and a murderer.

            Out of McKay’s poems, I feel that “Outcast” and “The Lynching” were the most emotional. It seems that these to poems seem to convey a message of sadness that he can’t ever be equal with white and especially in “The Lynching”; he says that they will never learn from the errors. “And little Lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced around the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.” It’s almost too horrific to read. That fact that little boys would be laughing and dancing around a lynched dead man just makes me sick. If I had children and they started doing that, I’d spank them so hard their butts would fall off. “Outcast” also pulls at your heart a bit, because no one wants to feel like his or her different from everyone else and almost everyone can relate to that poem in some way. The most gut wrenching part of the poem is the last two lines, “For I was born, far from my native clime, / Under the white man’s menace, out of time.” These two lines are both sad and interesting, because it gives you a kind of glimpse into what life was like for slaves and how they felt about it.

Journal #10: The Aha Moment

My Aha moment came from "Learning To Read" by Francis Harper. As I read through the poem it explained to me how after the civil war, teachers came down to the southern states to start educating emancipated slaves, but it wasn’t all sunflowers and daisies. Southerners still resisted the thought of teaching former slaves to read. “Well, the Northern folks kept sending / the Yankee teachers down; / And they stood right up and helped us, though the Rebs did sneer and frown.” The “Rebs” is referring to the southerners and the poem goes into detail about how many slaves tried to teach themselves to read before the war by little things such as listening to kids spell out words and hiding books and papers in a hat. Even after the civil war, people still didn’t want African Americans to read. It was thought that for some blacks, learning to read was hopeless because they were too old, but they learned non-the-less.

Also in previous works we read, it seemed that Yankees didn’t help the African Americans before the war, but now they are sending all these teachers down to help educate them. It kind of says something about their character. Only after they won the war did they start to help the slaves, only after they knew that no one could come after them, did they start to help educated African Americans.

Also, I learned that African Americans wanted to read not only to be seen as equals but also so, they could read the bible. “So I got a pair of glasses, / And straight to work I went, / And never stopped till I could read / The hymns and Testament.” It’s interesting to me that the thing that southerners were afraid of, was the thing that African Americans wanted, but not for the purpose that the slaveholders thought.

Journal #9: Response to Devin Spencer

I agree with most of what Devin is saying about how today we are hostile towards Mexicans as in the past we were hostile towards the Chinese. I especially agree with the fact that we as Americans want to have a unifying culture and language like all other countries, but the fact is, is that we aren’t like other countries. All other countries had one people that grew up there as a whole, but here in America, we come from everywhere. We stand for something different then other countries. We stand for equality no matter what ethnicity you are. We are the only country that is so diverse that people nowadays find it hard to trace back to where our ancestors came from.

I agree with this notion however, I do believe there is another difference between now and then. My question is was there such a thing as illegal immigrants? Was there such a thing as having to do something to become a legal US Citizen or could someone just walk right on to US soil and just say “Ok, I’m a US citizen now,”? If this is the case and there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant then we have to think about now is that we have illegal immigrants and that is why we are so hostile towards them because we all go by the rules and it’s unfair for someone to get the same things as us by cheating. In this country, we are all about Equality for everyone and that means in opportunity and in punishment. If one of us were to cheat to get something we are likely to go to jail, but if an illegal immigrant cheats, well one you won’t know it, because you don’t even know that they are an illegal immigrant and two they’ll probably get off somehow because of somebody somewhere who pities them.

Anyway back then and now are very different when you look at immigration. Back then, there were no rules, but now there are probably too many. I agree we do need to be a bit less hostile towards immigrants, but as for illegal immigrants, I am not so sure.

Journal 8: Response to Denzel Greene

While I agree with you that Brown and Garnet's use of christianity in their speeches helped address everyone, I also think that there was another motive behind it. Some slaveholders backed their view of slaver with the Bible, so to counter argue that view with other things from the Bible, it would make the christian slaveholders, who, as we have seen in other texts we read, were the most brutal, see the issues of their reasoning behind slaver.
I'd also like to point out that in Garnet's "From a Memorial Discourse" He uses God a lot in phrases like "in the name of God" and "if it shall please God" and "mercies and favors of God." So, you can clearly see that Garnet is a christian man and wants the audience to see he is a christian man and that he wants to please God. "In the name of God, the universal Father, we demand the right to live, labor and to enjoy the fruits or our toil." So I do agree that he is using Christianity as an overall theme because everyone practices it and he is also saying that God has given these rights to "live, labor and to enjoy the fruits of out toil," to every men, black and white.

Journal 7: Abolitionist Poetry

I am choosing to focus on the imagery of the poem by Frances Harper named “The Slave Mother”. She invokes a sense of woe in the reader in telling how a young boy is taken from his mother. Her imagery of how the mother clings to her son, terrified that he will e taken away is sad and almost brings the reader to tears. “She is a mother, pale with fear, / Her boy clings to her side,/ And in her kirtle vainly tries/ His trembling form to hide.” This is very moving to mothers because the thought of someone tearing your child away from you is terrifying. Also it is terrifying for the child because the child has no knowledge of where he/she is going to be sent. The last stanza in this poem, to me, is the most saddening. “No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks/ Disturb the listening air: / She is a mother, and her heart / Is breaking in despair.” The mother is crying out in agony for her child who is being dragged away by the slave owners. This sad story drives women, both black and white, free or enslaved to fight for these mothers and their children to maintain the family unit.

Journal #6: Race and Culture

            The main characters in the stories Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and “The Quadroon” by Lydia Maria Child both suffer from not being fully white. In The Life of a Slave Girl the main character Linda was a daughter of a well known black carpenter and so didn’t realize she was a slave until she was six years old. Also, she wasn’t fully black, she was what they called back then “Mulatteos”. “In complexion my parents were a light shade of brownish yellow and were termed mulattoes” But that did not have any difference she was still a slave. The problem of race and culture is more prevalent in the story or “The Quadroon”. The story starts out explaining how a little girl named Xarifa, comes to be. The mother who is a black woman falls in love with a white man and they marry, but not legally. The have a little girl together, whom they name Xarifa. So Xarifa is half black half white and her skin is an almost golden brown and deemed really beautiful, but she still isn’t accepted by the “white world” After bother her mother and father die she is sold into slavery were she becomes really depressed and is eventually killed by her owner.

            Both of these stories are really sad in that both Linda and Xarifa where white in part, but were still sold into slavery and not treated as equals. They were still treated as lowly as regular whole blacks were. Reading these stories I realized how bad it was back then. Now a days we just kind of shrug off the whole slavery thing and not really think it was a big deal, but it was. People who had even 1 past relative who was black, if people knew about it, then you would be old into slavery because you weren’t as good as whole whites and that’s just wrong. Obviously they just wanted to fit in and I know that all people should be treated equally, but if we are going off what the morals of the whites were back then, then at least the people with some white blood in them should be treated better.

Journal #5: Societal Reform

Both Lydia Sigourney’s “Indian Names” and William Apess’ “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for The White Man” exhibit an overall theme for societal reform, specifically to that of the treatment of the Native Americans. However, the two authors go at the issue differently. Sigourney seems to be more aggressive in her poem, while Apess’ work is more mild, but still gets his point across.

Lydia Sigourney’s “Indian Names” addresses the issue of how can the Native Americans be forgotten when many of their names are names for our land features? “but their memory liveth on your hills their baptisms on your shore,” How can we forget these people when their names are present in our daily lives? In a way, she is almost mocking the United States saying that if you really wanted to completely wipe out these people you wouldn’t use their names at all. “Your mountains build their monument, though ye destroy their dust,” Instead you raise up their names even though you’re destroying their very lives.

I can very much relate to this. I spent most of my life in a town called Okemos near Lansing, MI. The town was actually named after a chief of the Saginaw Chippewa tribe named John Okemos. We also have a middle school called Chippewa and a river called the Saginaw River. However I did not learn all of these names were after Native Americans until about the seventh or eigth grade.

William Apess takes a very different approach to try to bring this issue of societal reform to the “white man’s” attention. Being raised in a white family’s home, Apess takes an approach that is more of an “I want to say something, but I don’t want you to get angry,” tone. Almost like he wants to give his opinion, but is almost too shy to. He wants more to be accepted by the white people than stand up for his own race. However, he does get his point of treating the Native Americans equally, across and he does it in a rather biblical way. He uses the example of how Jesus Christ was born a Jew so he was of color. However, he did not judge on color, but on “the hearts” of men. Apess devotes a whole paragraph and a half to different scripture backing up his point of “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is very significant because the major religion in that day and age was Christianity.

Even though Lydia Sigourney and William Apess had different means of getting to the point of treating the American Indians as everyone else, the point is that they got there. All people, no matter their color, should be treated equally.

The American Beauty

Beauty is a major part of the American Dream. Money and the aspect of getting money are concepts that drive the American Dream. When you look at it, all the millionaires, and billionaires are either marvelously, hot movie stars or insanely, ingenius geeks who have had things done so they look better for the public. You’ve never seen a Barbie doll that does not look anorexic or a Bratz doll without some kind of make-up on. This is what the “ideal” woman should look like and what the world sets the standards as for the women of America. This is why the whole make-up business is booming and why there are thousands of dietary books and plans out there, so that you can better fit the standard of the “American Woman”. This goes the same for men. A ken doll has a six pack, but does the average man have a six pack? Not with what the fast food franchise is feeding us. This world is driven by not only what you look like, but what everyone else thinks of you and what everyone thinks of you affects what you think of yourself. Asenath was a classic example of that. People thought she was ugly and wasn’t good enough to be married and didn’t hold back in telling her so. In turn, she grew to think these things were true and beat herself up about it daily. She grew to think she wasn’t good enough for her fiancé and died thinking it.

Journal #3: The Wife

Irving is very optimistic when it comes to the societal issues of early America. In “The Wife” He recognizes that being married is better than being single. He exclaims that women are remarkable creatures who “had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to every trivial roughness while treading the prosperous life” (p. 526) and then turn around and be supportive and strong for her husband in times of misfortune. He also goes into detail about how married men who go into misfortune come out a whole lot better than the single man, because they don’t have anyone to support him in his time of need. She is his rock when it comes to horrible times in fortune. All of this is also stating his thoughts about marriage. The husband is the supporter of the family and the woman is the supporter of the husband through hard times. He is also explaining here about what the ideal woman would be. She should be supportive of her husband no matter what happens and be happy no matter the circumstances and be strong for him when he needs strength and dependent on him when he needs her to be. In a way, I guess you could put it as; she needs to be what he needs her to be at times that he needs her to be it. Irving could be both belittling the woman and  uplifting her, depending on the way you read his story.

Journal 2 - Reader Response

It surprises me that when the printing press came out, most of the books or pamphlets being written were about politics or religion. Also it gets me to thinking of how today’s “press” got its name. It was because of the printing press and that most people printed the news about what was happening with taxes and Britain. Most everything that was printed was newspapers. Other than that most of the things that got printed were news related. The played a central role in people’s lives, circulation news and made a big contribution to the first presidential election.

            The printing of books increased slowly after the Revolution. There were some books of poetry that were printed like that of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first published by an African American. There were also a few biographies like Some Account for the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, which was a biography about a spiritual Quaker “The war and its heroes provided ready materials for American writers…” (p. 329) Biographies of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were wildly famous, although the most read books by common people were almanacs and the Bible.

            All of the pamphlets, almanacs, book and newspapers printer were facts, but none were really fictitious. Although there was the story of George Washington not lying about cutting down the apple tree that could be fiction. Other than that most stories were the truth or viewed as such and this intrigues me. When did the genre of Fiction surface? Is it an older genre or did it start later in history like the 1800’s or 1900’s? I guess they didn’t really have time for fiction. With the great craze of the printing machine came the circulation of news and people wanted to hear what was going on in the real world rather than what could be made up.

Journal 1 - The American

Everyone has his or her own interpretation on what an American is and what makes a person an American. De Crevecoeur believes that an American is an Englishman who came from England who discovered and settled here. He is excluding, of course, the women and children. He also excludes anyone not from England and slaves. Furthermore, by saying “discovered and settled” he is claiming that there was no one on this land when they came here, which is very wrong. De Crevecoeur’s definition is very exclusive and narrow. This is in no way what I believe an American to be. For me an American is anyone, no matter his or her race, gender, or age who is loyal to this country and the foundation on which it stands.

There are others who believe that only Christians are Americans. “Unguarded Gates” by Thomas Bailey Aldrich talks about Lady Liberty as a sort of guardian over America. Aldrich believes she should gate American and not let all the free loaders, invaders, and intruders in, believing that they will contaminate or disgrace the land of the free. In the poem he uses phrases like “clustered stars be torn and trampled into dust” and “waste the gift of freedom”. In other words he thinks that these people who penetrate our borders will not appreciate what this country has to offer. Although there might be some truth to some of the things Aldrich says, all in all I believe that anyone can become an American as long as they are patriotic and believe in this country and what it has to offer. Americans today come from every background imaginable and there is no room for people who segregate and say others can’t be American because of what they look like or their gender or age.

blogging

This will be my first time ever blogging. So we will see how it goes.