Author Archives: avery bramadat

12/2/21

listen up!!!!

I wanted to talk about Lozada-Oliva’s spoken word/slam poems for this weeks’ blog post! I loved listening to her pieces in class, because the ways in which viewing the poem versus reading the poem changed the tone of it really stood out for me. Without her intonations, her facial expressions, and even the way she looked around the room at her audience, as well as the shape of her mouth and her particular pronunciations, the *fire* of the poem was gone (in my opinion). Reading the poem on paper gave it a more “somber” tone, and I found myself moving through it at a much slower pace than how Lozada-Oliva read it; the voice inside my head interpreted the poem to be monotone, serious, and much more “flat.” In fact, I had to read it several times in order to grasp what she was saying – in the spoken poem, her underlying “theme” was more evident, simply because of her supercharged presence.

This all made me think about how the genre of slam poetry really is a productive site for making highly charged political or emotional claims. Literature, essays, articles and presentations are effective to an extent – but imagine only READING Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, instead of hearing him SPEAK it out loud! (alternatively, imagine if professors just posted the transcriptions of all their lectures…) There’s something powerful about the way we can manipulate tone, the cadence of our voice, etc. to produce a response from an audience, and while the written word is powerful, I think the spoken word is more emotive and affective – for those willing to listen.

11/25/21

fitting a circle into a square

For this week’s blog post I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into Luiselli’s progressive, specific naming the numbers of the questions throughout the text. In our small group, we discussed how this worked to highlight the bureaucratic handling of something that does not fit neatly into the bureaucratic “mould.”

Numbers are potentially the most logical,  systematic way of ordering anything. Throughout the essay Luiselli demonstrates how the US immigration system attempts to squeeze these children’s unique and individualized stories into the confines of logical, ordered and systematic numerical lists.

By specifically referring to the numbered questions at different points throughout the essay, Luiselli reminds us as readers of the futility – ridiculousness – of trying to mould the children’s subjective stories to these highly objective criteria.

At the same time, in a more formal way, the numbers act as little “touchpoints” throughout the story to keep the reader grounded in the story. They move the narrative along, which is especially important because Luiselli jumps between different temporal spaces throughout (between her attempts to get her green card, her road trip, her job as a translator).

Interestingly, I noticed that the “Coda – Eight Brief Postscripta” is organized numerically, even though each “subject” doesn’t fit into a particular “category.” I’m not sure what to make of this, as Luiselli has critiqued the system of numbers throughout the essay, and yet organizes her ideas in this way at the end of the text. I’m not criticizing her for doing so, and perhaps it means nothing – but it just sparked a thought.

11/17/21

The “Voice In-Between”

The adolescent “narrative voice” of Yunior in “Fiesta, 1989” is what intrigued me the most this week. In “Funeral for a Bird,” we explored the literary device of the child narrator, which we determined conferred a sense of innocence on the reading. For Máximo, it was his inexperience with life that shaped his worldview, and thus, the way that we as readers perceived his world. In other texts, alternatively, was the hyperaware “adult narrator.” In Grieving, for instance, the narrative voice of Rivera-Garza has seen and heard too much to ever operate once again from the state of childlike bliss; her reading is tainted by her knowledges of political unrest, death, and reality. Falling in the middle of this “child-adult” narrative voice is Yunior’s. Like Máximo, he is not yet old enough to identify how his father’s abuse, affair, and skewed family dynamics relate to deeper questions about political and social issues, poverty and diaspora. Yet like the “adult voice,” his is mature enough to advance a bit of a critique of his situation. So, as readers we are presented with this “in-between” narrative voice that simultaneously makes us sympathetic to the parts of it that are still “childlike,” while at the same time Yunior’s awareness of his situation resonates with us as readers from the outside looking in. I wonder what a younger reader (say, 13 or 14) would make of this text – would they find Yunior’s adolescent narrative voice overly mature, or on-par with their own?

11/4/21

from constraints to control

A big theme within this unit on Gendered Violence seems to be the notion of “escapism.” We see this in Santos-Febres’ Broken Strands, where Yetsaida wants to  escape not only her looks (her curly hair, which she thinks is “ugly” and “limiting”) but also her hometown, to move to Miami. Likewise, Cleofilas in Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek wants to escape her entire life – her husband, his abuse, the town in which they settled. She does this by watching telenovelas as a form of escapism, and then by physically leaving, too. In Cinderella’s Secret Dream, Cleis also longs for an escape from her daily life under the oppression of her stepmother, as well as from the town in which she lives – her dream is to be an actor, playing the role of the “bad girl” as a way to escape the obedient, submissive role she has played in her own life thus far. In all three of these readings we encounter this longing for “something else.”

I think this reflects a longing to not only escape their circumstances, but also to exert agency over their own lives. As women, Yetsaida, Cleofilas and Cleis have been subject to the constraints placed around them by their fathers, brothers, husbands, and society at large. Yetsaida’s desire to pursue hair school in Miami, and Cleis’s pursuit of her acting career, are ways in which they can shake the yoke of suppression at the hands of their father and stepmother, respectively. For Cleofilas, fleeing her town means taking control of her situation where her father, husband and society had always exerted control. Thus, not only is this recurring theme of “escapism” reflective of a need to literally flee a situation; it represents these womens’ reclamation of agency, decision-making and control over their own lives.

10/24/21

we all feel loneliest when we live only in our minds

For this blog post I want to talk about the run-on sentences that Cisneros uses in Woman Hollering Creek. For example: 

“…from the times during her first year when still a newlywed she is invited and accompanies her husband, sits mute beside their conversation, waits and sips a beer until it grows warm, twists a paper napkin into a knot, then another into a fan, one into a rose, nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve, tugs at his elbow, and finally becomes good at predicting where the talk will lead…”  

This device is always used when representing Cleofilas’ stream of consciousness or moments in her life when she’s uncomfortable, sad, uncertain, scared. It’s eerily accurate in representing her thought processes, because none of us think with punctuation anyways. For some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, it also has the effect of implying loneliness; perhaps this is because we (the readers) are put squarely inside of Cleofilas’ mind, and we all feel loneliest when we live only in our minds, too.  

The run-on sentences remind me of a book I’m currently reading called All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, which is about a young woman (Elfrieda) who for no specific reason wants to die. She hasn’t experienced acute trauma, doesn’t have anxiety, isn’t even particularly nihilist – she simply does not want to live anymore. Her existence every day is punctuated – perhaps defined – by thoughts of death. While Cleofilas doesn’t seem to want to die, it’s clear that most of her days are not happy ones. The run-on sentences in Woman Hollering Creek convey that in the same way as they do in Toews’ AMPS. What is it about run-on sentences that makes them so suited to stories of female struggle, I wonder? Open to suggestions

10/13/21

Thursday’s Blog Post

Thursday’s Widows demonstrates how a film can be just as effective as a detective fiction short story in making a statement about economic and sociocultural issues. As “detective fiction,” I definitely found I wasn’t as engaged in “solving the mystery” as I was when reading Borges or Bermúdez, because I just knew that through no effort of my own the answer would be provided for me eventually – films naturally don’t require as much “work” as reading does. However, because of the use of prolepsis in the film I nonetheless found myself looking for clues and suspicious characters over the course of the movie, because we discovered early in the film the location, means by which, and victims of the crime. As a “literary device” in film form, prolepsis (foreshadowing?) was effective in providing intrigue from the beginning.

With respect to the genre and its broader meta-message, if we are to believe that the killers were in fact Tano, Gustavo and Martín themselves, the movie strays from typical detective fiction in that there is really no detective figure central to the story. I think the absence of a glorified state personnel, like a detective or police officer, as a main character, definitely serves as a critique of the state itself – especially when we consider that these men committed suicide largely because of the state’s actions (the collapsing economy). In this way, the film “flips the script” to demonize the state, whilst celebrating and sympathizing with the killers, much in the same way as Bermudez’s Puzzle of the Broken Watch, where a police officer ends up being the killer.

10/4/21

Detectives and Devices

This weeks’ readings were so rich with literary devices I felt almost overwhelmed! One of the first things I noticed about both readings was the use of direct imagery. While Arias’s Funeral for a Bird and even Ak’abal’s poems used imagery kind of indirectly (very open to interpretation by the reader), Borges and Bermúdes explicitly describe scenes. For example, Borges describes the second scene of the crime: “the city crumbled away; the sky expanded, and now houses held less and less importance… they came to their miserable destination; a final alleyway lined with pink-coloured walls that somehow seemed to reflect the rambunctious setting of the sun” (149-150). I think what this does is make the reader so invested in every detail in the story that they can be an active participant in decoding the crime, paying attention to nuances and how they might fit into the narrative.

Another particular literary device that stood out to me (and that I had to google) was internal dialogue, the example of which is when Lönrott thinks, the house is not so large… It seems larger because of its dimness, its symmetry, its mirrors, its age, my unfamiliarity with it, and my solitude. Internal dialogue uses italics to distinguish the character’s thoughts from speech. This is the first time it is used in the entire text, and places us right in Lönrott’s head, emphasizing the fact that he was alone in this big house with nothing but his thoughts. This, for me, created suspense and a bit of fear.

One final literary device that I wanted to point out was allusion, which Death and the Compass was especially rich in. Example/Question: Red Scharlach describes how Daniel Azevedo stabbed Yarmolinsky in the chest, and says, “the movement was almost reflexive; a half century of violence had taught him that the easiest and safest way is simply to kill…” (155) I’m not sure what he’s referring to here, perhaps someone with a better knowledge of the location/context of the story can help me out!

09/21/21

Satire, Sarcasm, Sea of Poverty

This piece by Naranjo (a short story) contained many, many literary devices that lent to its effectiveness as what is ultimately an educational short story with a huge moral tilt. I believe the “genre” (if we are using that term) would be a satire, as it makes fun of the monetary agencies such as the IMF and EEC, as well as Costa Rica’s own delusional leaders. Naranjo effectively uses sarcasm to make her points, lending to the satirical tone, as in the lines about levying a tax on air: “ten colones per breath would be a small price to pay.” (151)

Above all, the literary device that I picked up on was metaphor. It was administered in small doses, such as, “sea of poverty,” (150). But metaphor manifests itself in a much bigger way, too, from the concept of Miss Underdeveloped, to the “fat cows” representing international lending. In honesty, I had a bit of difficulty understanding what the idea of Miss Underdeveloped represented, and I’m hoping that a colleague can help me out with this!! (Perhaps in the comments).

The back-and-forth between such metaphor and reality (between the conceptual and the specific) throughout the story had the effect of making me stop and think in the middle of the text, especially because it was done so abruptly between modes (see page 152: the “lean cows” seem to come out of nowhere)! For me, this definitely broke up the flow of the reading and was a bit frustrating, but perhaps this was the intention – to make the reader stop and be an active participant in decoding the metaphor so as to understand it better. I am wondering if the inclusion of such rich metaphor so seamlessly/casually in the text makes this piece an example of magical realism, or whether it’s just metaphor?

09/13/21

Through a Child’s Eyes

For this weeks’ blog post I want to engage with Arturo Arias’s short story, Funeral for a Bird.

What initially struck me was that in the story, the children do not seem fazed about the corpses in the streets; yet all are sad – “one of the littlest boys started to cry” (Arias 52) – about a single, tiny, seemingly insignificant creature, even amidst the rubble and remnants of human life. Arias juxtaposes Máximo’s tenderness toward this bird with his impartial, even annoyed, attitude toward the corpses – for example, when he trips over a “headless body,” and in a “fit of anger, kicked the corpse” (Arias 51). I think that Arias intended to make the reader uncomfortable with this inversion; normally, one would express more empathy and concern with the death of humans than birds. I would be interested to know if Máximo’s “disrespect” toward the corpses, and simultaneous care for the bird, made anybody else feel “discomfort” when reading. Arias also may be expressing how violence and death are seen through the eyes of a child who doesn’t yet understand the world.

On this note, I noticed right away that Arias’s writing had a “childlike” quality. He used short, quick sentences that mimic a child’s way of speaking, as well as simpler language – no words are floral or complicated. I think that Arias is allowing the reader inside Máximo’s head, to perhaps understand violence as a child with little experience of the world might. This technique reminds me of the novel Room by Emma Donoghue, in which a boy named Jack acts as the narrator of the book. At first this way of writing, to me, was scattered and slightly irritating to read but in both Donoghue and Arias’s works, it has the effect of bringing the reader into the mind and experiences of a child.