Author Archives: DaisySessions

11/26/21

Immigrant’s Prayer

“Tell Me How it Ends” by Valeria Luiselli is both a moving story and a comprehensive guide to the American immigration story. As she navigates the multiple questions that small children are expected to answer, she delves deeper into the logistics and realities of life on the road. Hopeful immigrants often board La Bestia, a dangerous train that is both the promise of a new life and the risk of losing the one you already have. Luiselli includes the Immigrant’s prayer which is said by those traveling on La Bestia which says “to leave is to die a little/ to arrive is never to arrive.” I was particularly interested in this prayer partially because of its vagueness. What is the arrival and how does one arrive and yet not arrive? The first line of the prayer is fairly straightforward. Often the child migrants are faced with gang violence or death in their home countries; leaving is not just a desire but rather a move for survival. Immigrants have to leave behind their homeland, culture, and family in hopes of securing their future. While many might be relieved to make it to the United States, this relief does not negate the sadness of their journey or the way they miss home. The second portion of the prayer is harder to analyze. Initially, I took the line to mean that to arrive at the destination is to not arrive at heaven, meaning they might escape death.  Yet the inclusion of “never” seems to complicate this interpretation as even if a person makes the journey, they will still eventually die. In doing more research, the lines of prayer seem to be part of a larger prayer in which the line says “to arrive is never to arrive definitively until resting in You.” This longer line seems to confirm the sentiment that travel is temporary until passing on and reaching heaven, resting with God. I was glad that Luiselli included the prayer as it was helpful in showing what brings comfort on the road for migrants. What did you take the prayer to mean?

11/18/21

When the Parade Ends

In this week’s reading, “The Parade Ends” by Reinaldo Arenas I was particularly interested in examining the “you” that appears throughout the story. The story is fast-paced with a constant shift in location; Arenas’ inclusion of the “you” furthers this manufactured chaos that seeks to represent the state of life in Cuba. There seems to be a particular intimacy between the narrator and “you.” When planning an escape, the narrator displays how the “you” is local and familiar with the problems facing Cuban society. The “you” instructs the narrator on what materials are needed to escape, where to get them, and how to keep them. Arenas reveals the unique knowledge of survival that is gained under oppressive circumstances. The “you” and the narrator have a certain level of intimacy based on their shared secret; the desire to escape.

We touched on in class that perhaps the “you” or the lizard do not need to be specifically interpreted, which I think was helpful in challenging my own reading of the story. In reexamining the “you,” I found a transitional moment between perspectives that perhaps could bring some clarity. On page 106, the narrator states that “we finished rounding out the plan… but now that clever one has disappeared again,  she’s slipped away,” creating a sense that “she” refers to the escape plan. This would be an interesting lens through which to view the story; the narrator is chasing his plan to escape, which is escaping him in itself. The lizard, or this plan, represents a desire to survive and live. The “you” remains more ambiguous but is involved in the desire to escape nonetheless.

11/2/21

Why Cinderella?

When reading “Cinderella’s Secret Dream” by Ena Lucia Portela, I immediately wondered why the author specifically chose Cinderella to tell a story of domestic violence. Many fairy tales involve young women becoming swept up with successful men with higher social standing such as The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and The Princess and the Frog. Yet Portela picks Cinderella, leading me to do more research. Cinderella is a global folk tale; from Cambodia to Greece to China, numerous cultures have passed on stories that bear a close similarity to the Disney Cinderella. One of the most important aspects of Cinderella stories is the skewed power balance between the man and woman. The man is often royalty or very wealthy whereas the woman is lowly, a peasant, and being with the man is a privilege. Additionally, Cinderella stories often include jealous and mean step sisters who further subjugate the woman. Cinderella is also often motherless, which in the context of this story, is perhaps a commentary on the plight of womanhood.

In the context of “Cinderella’s Secret Dream,” Cinderella is the perfect fairytale to tell a story of domestic violence and gender inequality. Prince Charming is wealthy, powerful, and elite and therefore faces few reprocussions for his actions and violence against Lotta. He uses his wealth and his party as a method to lure women to his home and views Cleis as a sexual object. Prince Charming is representative of the ways in which social and economic privilage are leverage within the  justice system. Additionally, Lotta and Regan serve as examples of internalized sexism and the ways which society pits women against each other. The step sisters view Cleis as an obstacle and a bother. Finally, our modern conceptions of Cinderella depict her as the epitome of idealized eurocentric beauty. In the short story, Prince Charming wants Cleis because she is blonde and fair, showing how beauty standards are also couched in racism.

10/29/21

Broken Strands and Brand Names

This week we read Broken Strand by Maya Santos-Febres and one point of discussion that I found particularly interesting was the use of brand names within the short story. Santos-Febres peppers her short story with a number of specific brands from Breck to Clairol. In Yetsaida’s narrative, she states “she and Miss Kety had given their lives to the worship of true beauty, that which is real and appears on the screens and in the ads.” (5) This quote offers a few insights which may be helpful in better understanding the use of brands. First, Yetsaida and Miss Kety equate true beauty with what appears on screens and in the ads. The racist beauty standards that filter through the media become “true beauty” rather than idealized beauty. But this quote also suggests that the idea of beauty is a concept that is taught and imprinted onto people from afar. In the Puerto Rican context, beauty ideals from American advertisements create an impossible goal in relation to appearance.   Additionally, the use of brand names goes hand in hand with mentions of MeSalvé by creating a local specificity. Someone who has had their hair relaxed immediately understands “Easystyle Products” and the process that goes along with the product. The brand names are cultural signifiers that place the story in its proper context. Santos-Febres uses her short story to display the immense pressure black women feel to change their appearance to fit eurocentric beauty standards. She embeds this discussion within a broader analysis of domestic violence.

10/14/21

Story Telling

This week I was most interested in the story-telling similarities between the film and the short story. Both “The Crazy Woman and the Tale of the Crime” and “Thursday Night Widows” experiment with temporal shifts, blurring the perceived reality of the observer. In Piglia’s work, the story begins with the actions that occurred prior to the murder. The storytelling is ominous and Almada so unlikeable that the reader immediately senses something suspicious about the night that will unfold. Piglia then shifts the narration to the future where detectives are tasked with solving the crime, only to reveal that the introduction was Renzi’s newspaper article in the works. By distorting time Piglia is able to break a sort of fourth wall where the reader is privy to the character’s own words. In comparison, “Thursday Night Widows” also plays with time and storytelling yet there is much more jumping back and forth. Like “The Crazy Woman and the Tale of the Crime” we begin with a clearly ominous scene veiled in mystery. However, the “murders” have already occurred whereas in the short story the reader only has a premonition. The shifting back and forth of the film also has a similar effect, yet the suspense and mystery are heightened as the viewer is always on edge trying to keep pace.

Playing with time and distorting time is in a way one of Borges’ rules. He states that the author must lay everything out first meaning that any movement to examine the moments before the crime immediately alters a linear chronology. For me personally, I found that the time shifts in the film gave the final reveal a sort of magical realism feeling. As we only saw snapshot moments, it was very surprising to me that Tano was the one to bring up suicide and get the others to partake. From the moments we see him, he is calm, seemingly overconfident, a leader, and highly competitive. However, Carlos and Martin’s participation made more sense to me as they were struggling more overtly. The suicides create a surreal feel within this context.

10/6/21

Dostoyevsky and Borges: Detective Fiction

When reading Luis Borges’ “Death and the Compass” I was immediately struck by the stylistic similarities to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s detective novels. Dostoyevsky, like Poe, was an early contributor to the genre writing several murder mysteries such as “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment.” Both Borges and Dostoyevsky use a similarly mysterious and cerebral tone as well as an active narrator who occasionally inserts himself into the narrative. For the comparison of the two authors, I wanted to look more at the narrative style of metafiction. In “Death and the Compass” the narrator adds external commentary towards the end of the short story creating a feeling of an anonymous witness or observer to the crime. Dostoyevsky employs a similar technique in his novel “The Brother’s Karamazov” where the reader is unaware that they have been reading a court disposition until almost the very end. In turn, the reader occasionally stumbles across the first person in a way that feels related to Borges’ approach to metafiction.

Borges seems to have been inspired by Dostoyevsky saying ” Like the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Dostoevsky marks an important date in one’s life.” I think that the similarities between the authors lend to the similarities in their writing. Both were writing for a non-English speaker audience, who are often more widely associated with the detective fiction genre. Both men also lived under repressive governments and their literature was subject to scrutiny and in the case of Dostoyevsky, even exile. I think that maybe the detective fiction genre allowed both authors the ability to examine and comment on human nature, the state, and morality.

09/23/21

Marquez and Naranjo

Magical realism is a powerful tool within Latin American literature as it challenges our conceptions of life and culture. In Naranjo’s “And We Sold the Rain” the seemingly impossible within regular life highlights the strain of the economic crisis in the collective conscious. In our class discussion, we briefly touched on Naranjo’s use of intertextuality and reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work. While there is a direct reference with the mention of “Macondo,” there seem to be stylistic similarities between “And We Sold the Rain” and “100 Years of Solitude” (pg. 151). Marquez begins “100 years of solitude” stating “Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía” would remember the first time his father showed him ice (pg. 1). Naranjo begins her piece quite similarly, focusing on one man of power, a climactic moment, and a distorted sense of time. Naranjo’s narrator is omniscient, narrating what the treasury minister said “a few days ago” similarly to how Marquez begins his story in both the future and the past (pg. 151). Both Marquez and Naranjo play with time as a concept at the start of their stories as if to suggest that the nature of the problems that face both men are cyclical.  This technique also drops the reader immediately into the meat of the story and gives them a view of the potential conflict. Additionally, the cyclical nature of time points to a trend in magical realism that focuses on generational stories and struggles. I found the introductions of both stories to feel quite similar in style and am interested to see if others feel similarly.

09/14/21

Birds, Rings, Coups, and Children

“Maximo could walk in any direction unless the streets were blocked by corpses or fallen walls. That was called freedom.” (pg. 2) In Funeral for a Bird, Arturo Arias captures the harsh reality of the U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala that overthrew Arbenz in 1954. By speaking through the eyes of a child, Arias is able to use a slightly dissociated voice of a child who can’t comprehend the true gravity of the situation. The violent reality is communicated bluntly, from the smell of decomposing bodies to the cockroaches that live inside the corpses. For Maximo, “fallen walls” are as common as corpses, revealing the depth and extent of violence in his town. Arturo adds the phrase “That was called freedom” to seemingly critique the United States’ role in the mass death of civilians. The passive voice seems to indicate that freedom was something promised or explained to those experiencing violence.  While the coup of 1954 was often outwardly branded as a quest for freedom and rejection of communism, the true motivating factors were largely economic. Arbenz pushed for land reform and land redistribution, two policies that threatened American interests. Arias shows the reader what American brought “freedom” really looks like and it looks like death and suffering.

In Maximo’s worldview, corpses are a fact of life and so commonplace that the death of a bird holds more weight for his child self. As bombs likely killed many birds or drove them away from the area, the single dead bird represents something beautiful and foreign to the children, a reminder of the past. Arias also shows how desensitized the children are through their interaction with the bird and its funeral. Children are careful to not step on the bird, yet when Maximo trips on a corpse he kicks it. The genre and narrative voice make this piece so powerful; the reader is forced to consider the enduring impact viewing this violence would have on a child.