Monthly Archives: March 2023

Braschi

Week 11: Yo-Yo Boing and the Art of Spanglish

Reading Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina Braschi was a unique and thought-provoking experience for me. As someone who is semi-bilingual and interested in linguistics, translation, and multicultural literature, this book provided me with a deeper insight into the complex nature of language and culture.

One of the central themes of the book is bilingualism and the challenges of translation. The characters in the novel often switch between English and Spanish, reflecting the reality of many bilingual individuals who navigate between two or more languages on a daily basis. I really liked Jon’s visual of characters “yo-yo-ing” between tongues and cultures. Everyone I know who is bi- or multilingual experiences language like this; not in distinct, black-and-white realities, but in oscillating sounds and voices.

The text also highlighted the struggle of immigrants to maintain their cultural identity while adapting to a new linguistic and cultural environment. Braschi uses language creatively to capture the unique experiences of bilingualism and the cultural clash that occurs when different languages and cultures come together. This felt very familiar to my own lived experience, growing up in Pennsylvania and watching my family wrangle with English and the midwestern American culture. I felt particularly reminded of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican writer Junot Díaz while reading Braschi’s text; this book also uses a liberal patchwork of Spanglish dialogue and linguistic clashes to portray the experience of Hispanic immigrants in the US.

Moreover, the novel explores the role of translation as a tool for bridging cultural gaps. Translation is a way of preserving cultural identity and heritage, as characters try to translate cultural traditions and beliefs into a new context. Hurdling language barriers with code-switching and bilingual slang becomes an essential means of understanding each other. Linguistically, it felt like a third language was born in the expanse between English and Spanish. I thought this was beautifully executed with Braschi’s focus on a chorus of nameless dialogue; it concentrated all the focus on the poetry of spoken translation in action.

As a bilingual person, I could relate to the characters in the book and their experiences of navigating multiple languages and cultures. The book made me reflect on my own linguistic and cultural background and the challenges that come with maintaining my cultural identity while living in a different linguistic and cultural environment.

I think Yo-Yo Boing! is a powerful reflection on the complexities of language, culture, and identity. It challenges traditional ideas of code-switching and offers a fresh perspective on the immigrant experience. Braschi turns Spanglish into an art in and of itself; something that I was once very ashamed to resort to is made into something quite beautiful and singular here.

Question for discussion: Do you have any words, phrases, or discourses in mind that you feel are untranslatable? Language that can only be understood and appreciated in its original form?

Standard
Menchú

Week 10: Rigoberta’s Resistance

I feel so grateful to carry Rigoberta Menchú’s story of resistance with me. Although the events of her life are deeply painful and tragic, it feels cheap to classify her life’s story as just that, a tragedy. Rigoberta’s story is one of incredible and unyielding resistance, in every form, from the seemingly mundane to the most compelling. This is evident immediately from the introduction by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. She talks about Rigoberta’s cultural resistance practiced intentionally and thoughtfully even while making tortillas. “By resisting ladina culture, she is simply asserting her desire for ethnic individuality and cultural autonomy… Rigoberta’s refusal to use a mill to grind her maize is one example… a way of preserving the practices connected with preparing tortillas and therefore a way to prevent a whole social structure from collapsing” (xviii). Throughout Rigoberta’s testimonio, we see that resistance is an active practice, taken on by necessity. Her own survival becomes an act of resistance in itself as the profile of her community rises and her family is steadily taken from her.

Rigoberta’s many references to secrets also carry this practice of resistance. For Rigoberta’s community, secrets provide security of more than one kind: physical security from enemies, social and emotional security from violence, and cultural security from colonization. It is so simple yet so powerful in its defiance, as if saying, you may think you’ve conquered all of us, but you’ll never have this; this being Quiché traditions, customs, ceremonies, practices, or wisdom we can hardly imagine. Rigoberta’s final words in the text are monuments to this kind of resistance. As if she’s speaking directly to Burgos-Debray and her readers, it’s a chilling and unequivocal reminder that through everything, she retains her autonomy and narrative agency. “Nevertheless, I’m still keeping my Indian identity a secret. I’m still keeping secret what I think no one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets” (289).

I’m especially grateful to carry Rigoberta’s story, because, upon graduating this May, my friends and I will travel to Guatemala for two weeks. We have been planning this trip for over a year, committed to doing months of research to make ourselves aware of the cultural context we’ll be guests of. In this, I’ve learned an incredible amount about the Indigenous communities of Guatemala, which represent more of the population than non-Indigenous Guatemalans. As travelers, it’s paramount to make ourselves sensitive to the cultures we are passing through and resist treating local customs as circus spectacles when we encounter them. I’m glad I will be able to carry Rigoberta’s voice with me as I enter her home and remind myself of my responsibility to her memory and survival. Decolonization and resistance is a daily practice we must all undertake no matter where we find ourselves.

Question for discussion: Do you think Rigoberta Menchú and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray were as close as the introduction would lead us to believe? Rigoberta’s final words make us question what we’ve just read and how much we’ve been trusted to hear; it reveals that Rigoberta is much more aware and intentional about her narrative agency than Burgos-Debray may have implied.

Standard
Lispector

Week 9: The Hour of the Star and the Arrival of Self

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector is by far one of my favorite reads of the class so far. It was chilling and deeply moving, and had a very intense effect when read in one sitting. Macabéa, the subject of Rodrigo’s narration, lives a life of great external suffering yet even greater internal freedom. All of Rodrigo’s musings on perception and reality, in combination with Macabéa’s uncertainty of her own existence, made me wonder if she was even a real person or rather a figment of Rodrigo’s imagination. Upon finishing the book, I think it may be fair to say that both are true, for, as the narrator states, “[Macabéa] believed in angels, and because she believed in them, they existed.”

I was struck by Rodrigo and Macabéa’s characterizations of solitude. Having just finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, the concept was still top-of-mind. Both Rodigo and Macabéa find great peace and strength in their solitude: “My strength undoubtedly resides in solitude. I am not afraid of tempestuous storms or violent gales for I am also the night’s darkness;” “[Macabéa] could enjoy at long last the greatest privilege of all: solitude” (18; 41). These passages stand in stark contrast to those of the Buendía family, who felt endlessly haunted and tormented by their solitude.

Throughout the book, we are aware that Macabéa is enduring abject poverty, with barely enough to feed or clean herself. The narrator says that she is so poor that she cannot even afford to possess self-awareness, “Were she foolish enough to ask herself ‘Who am I?’, she would fall flat on her face. For the question ‘Who am I?’ creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need?” (16). I thought it was beautiful and devastating that right before the moment of her untimely death, she seemed to finally encounter her own self. She had become fully embodied and conscious from the pure excitement of her promised future. “For at the hour of death you become a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes” (28). As foretold, when Macabéa had finally possessed self-awareness, she fell on her face, knocked over by a lavish car, and was serenaded by a fiddler, a candle, and on-lookers who finally “gave her an existence” (81). At the closing moments of her life, she had finally arrived at herself and became the star she’d always dreamed of being.

There are so many other things I’d like to say about this book that unfortunately won’t fit here. But I will certainly be reflecting on Lispector’s words for a long time to come. Question for discussion: What, if any, do you think is the purpose or symbolism of the narrator, Rodrigo’s, recurring insecurity around blame, ethics, and perception? Claiming to be the only one who loves Macabéa and yet the one who fails to save her life, what, if anything, does Rodrigo owe her?

Standard
García Márquez

Week 8: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Collapse

I found that I enjoyed the second half of One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez significantly more than I enjoyed the first half. Many of the symbols, broader themes, and patterns started to become more coherent for me, and this awareness infused each chapter with much more significance.

The imagery of “spiral and collapse” has persisted throughout my reading of the text, and I believe it fittingly characterizes the world of Macondo and the Buendías. I imagined the plot, rather than a classic mountain, as a large corkscrew that coils forward in time but continually reifies the past’s events and tragedies. When I reached the end and read about the tornado winds that finally swept Macondo away, I thought this was a fitting symbol to complete the narrative. At the center of this spiral, trying bravely and desperately to create order within the chaos of the family, is Ursula, the relentless matriarch. She is one of the only constants in the midst of changing yet repetitive characters and events. In a sense, I imagine her being the “eye of the storm” in the center of the spiraling hurricane of this family.

In the second half of the novel in particular, we see Macondo and its founding family spiral through chaos and false progress. Capitalism and imperialism seem to overburden the once idyllic town until it explodes under the weight of its many tragedies. Conversely, we see the Buendía family collapse in on itself. This is illustrated quite vividly through their repeated turning in on themselves incestuously. Shut away, wading yet again through their enduring and collective solitude, the spiral finally seems to crash into its center upon the death of its indelible matriarch. But, like the text suggests, I think the beginning of the collapse really came upon the death of Pilar Ternera, who has always acted as a shadowy and unloved matriarch in her own right. Pilar is also one of the few founders of Macondo, present throughout the text. Despite being rejected, she births two sons of the Buendía family and comforts/”grandmothers” several others. In addition, she has a special relationship with time that seems to place her at the center of this hurricane too; able to envision events of the past and future, she seems to know the Buendías’ fate all along. When she dies, this spiral has finally lost the integrity of its center and collapses in forcefully.

This quote illustrated this imagery and Pilar’s role most for me: “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía that was impenetrable for [Pilar] because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” (396).

To bounce off of Jon’s discussion question, I think the family’s fate could have been saved by the naming of the last Buendía Rodrigo, rather than another Aureliano. The text repeatedly alludes to their destiny for greatness and I believe this greatness could have been truly preserved with the symbolic ending of the name cycle. Question for discussion: Do you think something else could have saved the Buendías from their fate?

Standard