End of Semester

My friend Matt put finals week very eloquently the other day:

Finals week is for everyone else -- for English majors, finals week is the week BEFORE finals when they turn in their final papers.
(For more on Matt, check out his Blesis -- Blog for my Thesis -- here)

So very true. So, in lieu of a real post, an excerpt from the paper I'm working on now, my second-to-last Post Colonial Lit paper.

In the great Literature family, we could say that Post-colonialism is something like the middle child, trying to stand up to the reputation of their older, more recognized sibling while at the same time trying to strike out on their own to form a new reputation altogether.[1] Trapped by accepted modes of transmission for stories, both in terms of language and form, Postcolonial authors still continue trying to tell stories that are relevant to them and counteract the last generation’s misinformation. This has been the case in all of the seven postcolonial novels we have read so far this semester, authors trying to tell stories that are relevant to themselves, their people and place, and their causes. Such is also the case in Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago, a 2007 novel about the lives of Egyptian immigrants and some of the Americans in their lives living and working in and around the city of Chicago. Throughout his novel, Aswany uses many of the same techniques the authors we read in class did to make a point about how we think we understand life and minority populations in the United States.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gives us a wonderful example not only of middle child trying to step beyond older child’s shadow, but middle child openly making fun of the whole concept of the western construction of novels. With his absurdly omnipotent Saleem, the young man narrating the story with a healthy helping of god-like panache who takes credit for everything that happens to anyone in the story, Rushdie suggests that one person is insufficient to knowing the whole story, and that many perspectives are needed both to relate the story and also provide connections between all of the characters. That Saleem should be responsible for all events, large and small, is almost laughable. Rushdie’s other lesson in this book is that, at the same time one person cannot know a whole story, a single character cannot be a story unto themselves, and many characters are needed to fully form a cohesive tale. Saleem makes himself into the embodiment of the country of India, just as older sibling’s novels once made other main characters into the embodiments of virtue or experience, held up for the world to see and compare to. Saleem cannot possibly be India, and the experiences of the west’s chosen main characters cannot possibly be everyone’s. Aswany uses both of these concepts to a certain extent in Chicago – realizing that one person cannot know the whole story, he distributes the experiences of the story between many people, providing the necessary perspectives to fully understand the events. And none of these characters are the stereotypes the western audience is accustomed to seeing in their literature – the women are not submissive and veiled (or at least, they do not seem so), the men are neither feminine no brutish, and their culture is not one that wants to blow America to smithereens. Aswany uses his diverse and different cast to show his readers that the story of ‘the immigrant experience’ cannot be shown by one voice alone, just as Rushdie shows India’s story cannot be told by one voice alone either.

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[1] I am aware that the ‘older/ younger’ divide is a poor choice of words. Certainly the argument can be made (and proven) that non-western literature has been around for generations longer than western literature. However, the west refuses to see it that way, (the entire reason we have this divide in the first place) and so, for the purposes of this paper, the categories will remain as I have named them.

Scholarship and Creativity Day

Today, as many of you who read this blog know, was Scholarship and Creativity day here at Saint Ben's and Saint John's. It's an opportunity for the students to present research that they've been doing throughout the year and be recognized by their peers and their professors.

I was fortunate enough to be chosen to present some of my linguistics research on fanfiction, and so I spent the rest of the afternoon putting together a YouTube video of a live audio recording of my presentation, with my slides, for everyone (family, freinds, writing buddies) who couldn't make it to Saint John's this morning to hear me speak.

New Stories to tell

A few of you might have known that next fall I will no longer be in the good ol' US of A for my academic enrichment. I'll be going to Ireland, to a little village called Spiddal in Galway. I've started a new blog, The Galway Rover, to cover my exploits of being a stranger in a strange land, and I advise you to all add it to your follow lists -- it'll be a different side of me, I think.

We had our second orientation session today, and our Faculty Director (aka The In Loco Parentis Unit Abroad) for good or ill gave us homework -- to write a future history of our trip, as if we'd just gotten back and were recounting our travels. Since I haven't done much else in the way of writing lately (except Song of a Peacebringer, which has gotten no new reviews...sadness.) I thought I would post this futurist history for you all. It's very reminiscent of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. If you're not familiar with that text, go find it and read it. I think it's a wonderful piece of writing.

It seems strange, thinking back on it now, the first few days in this new green country, tentatively foraging forth from the airport into parts unknown. Some of us were returning to the motherland and some of us strangers to all of it. But we were all of us ready, and willing, to learn. Those first few days were hard, getting used to the way the people spoke and the money and the pace of life in small, rural Spiddal. But it grew on us, and we, in turn, grew to love it.

We were told stories, dozens of stories, stories about men still living and men long dead and some about men who had never lived at all, except in the hearts of other men. Ireland is a land for storytellers, and even the ground sometimes speaks, strange stories out of a long past. All of us shared stories – Megan told us things on our trips we would never need to remember again and Professor Davis told us things we would, indeed, need to know for the quiz later. And we made our own stories too – like the time we got lost in Galway and found our way to the best fish and chip shop on the planet, or the time the girls went thrift shopping and came back with articles of clothing with their own interesting stories to tell, or the time in the pub when the guys…well, there were a lot of times in pubs. We drank our way through none too few good times in the city. We were kings and queens in our own age, heroes in our own time, unafraid to go out and see the world as it would have itself be seen. Not to conquer but to be conquered by the sights and sounds of Eire. We were open, and we had to be, to see everything that needed to be seen and a few things that didn’t. We went everywhere, and like good soldiers we never left a man or woman behind, though some of them might have wanted to be left.

We had skills, and we shared them – Our english and communication majors checked and double checked our papers, our accounting majors helped us budget, our management majors kept us all in line. We all shared laughter. We all shared pain, the pain of being away from home and the sweet pain of adventure and the pain of wearing new shoes you forgot to break in the summer before. We shared each other’s weight, carrying each other home from the pub or shouldering the burden of a day gone wrong. Not that there were too many bespoilt days, mind you.

We fed each other everything we had – enthusiasm, which came in droves from all fronts, and knowledge, which came from our professors, and food, in all kinds. The food! Katie kept us in cookies and muffins and all sorts of warm, fresh from the oven goodness and Megan, heaven bless her, made us dishes we couldn’t name with ingredients only she could identify and we put up with them anyway because eating them made her smile. Not that she ever tried foisting on us anything unfit for human consumption – she had limits just like the rest of us did. We put up with singing, too, singing and whistling and all the manner of music making, because humans like to express themselves in song, even if their singing could wake the dead.

When we were annoying, we were tolerant. When we were angry, we remembered to count to ten. When we needed silence, we gave it, and when talk was needed, we listened.

Inspiration, or Lack Thereof

Some days, writing is easy. You sit down, and by some act of god or the alignment of the cosmos or the fact that you're just having an awesome day, the words come. My inspiration has a lot to do with weather, and when it's about thirty degrees outside and then you get a new full blanket of snow (and then, of course, a snow day in which you would like nothing better than to write all day), trying to write a scene that takes place in a desert becomes a lot harder than you would think.

This wasn't any snow, either -- it was wet snow, the kind skiers hate because it clumps and sticks to everything and slows you down. I would know -- I went out and snowshoed in it. Powder, the light, airy kind of snow, behaves like sand -- it drifts, forms snow dunes. Looking at wind swept powder looks a lot like looking at a desert. Looking at wet snow...looks like looking at a winterscape. Not helpful at all.

I have a new chapter due this Friday (I use the word 'due' as an indication that I am giving myself deadlines, one new chapter a week, to make sure this story goes faster.) and I haven't edited it yet. Tomorrow I go to a conference on Medieval History in the Twin cities at the University of Minnesota. Topics being lectured on will include the following:

10:15am - Introduction to Exhibit of Medieval Books
10:30am - On the Road with the Crusades
11:15am - Food, Feasting & Fasting
1:15pm - Beowulf: Fact, Fiction, & Film
2:00pm - Exploring a Medieval City
2:45pm - Readers’ Theatre: The Chase: Harts & Hearts

Needless to say, I'm terribly excited, because most of these speakers (with the exception of Beowulf) have something to do with Song of a Peacebringer. I'm also the only CSB/SJU student going with someone from the HMML, who sent out a free range invitation to the entire history department. I'm the only one who responded, and I'm not even part of the history department! Hopefully more inspiration will strike after the conference is over.