Author Archives: MaryLinn

11/25/21

Facts on a Page

“I crossed the border by foot. She swam across the river.”(P.62)

 

When Luiselli interviews the children, she changes from the first person to third person throughout the process of writing down their testimonies. By changing the perspectives it gives the children a more active role in their own stories, in a system that takes away the humanity of the people crossing the border this act shows to the lawyers that are going to be reading the transcripts later that real people had these experiences. By writing some of these testimonies in first person it becomes a firsthand account rather than a story that has been retold several times until it becomes just the facts, stripping it of its power. I think Luiselli uses third person at times in order to distance herself from the stories being told, she doesn’t want to become too involved in each child’s story because she knows that the odds are not in their favour. She also sees how her story is somewhat parallel to theirs and feels the guilt of knowing that she had the privilege of not having to make such a dangerous journey to the United States. By creating the distance with the third person she is able to do her job without connecting these children to her own but it is also what the system wants her to do, reduce these people and their stories to facts on a page allowing them to stay in the country or not. switching between first and third person shows Luisellis struggle of doing her job and adding humanity to a system that has very little. 

11/17/21

Anxiety in Words

 

Parade’s End is a sensory overload, it creates a sense of anxiety and dread throughout the reading by using run-on sentences and fragments of sentences to throw the reader off balance. The use of these techniques helps show the fear and chaos of both living in Cuba  under an authoritarian regime and attempting to escape it. Many ‘rules’ of writing are broken  in this story and it helps show that there are no rules when trying to escape and  trying to understand the world around you when it is also broken. The main character seems to be trapped in limbo and time has no meaning when in this state, present and past are intertwined. The style choices help promote this feeling by making it difficult to pinpoint exactly what is happening at a given moment, the main character also does not know what is happening or what is going to happen and is just hoping for the best. These fragments seem like memories, they are not coherent or make much sense but it is difficult to remember everything that occurs in a traumatic experience, especially if it is over a long period of time like this one. When there is so much happening at once only small snippets are remembered and it seems like this story is sharing those small pieces that are remembered so clearly when chaos of the event becomes background noise. By breaking norms of writing this story helps convey the anxiety of the situation to an audience that has never had to experience it.

11/4/21

Looking the Other Way

Throughout Cinderella’s secret dream women are shown as unhelpful to other women, even at the beginning Cleis’ stepmother hates her for being more beautiful than her and the descriptions of other women are unkind. This shows how women enforce beauty standards on each other. When Regan sees Cleis in the garden during the party she does not attempt to help her, she just watches as the businessman tries to grab her. It seems like she doesn’t want the violence to be redirected at her, it is accepted as long as it’s happening to someone else. This is also seen when Cleis goes to her stepmother for money to leave, the stepmother doesn’t believe her and thinks that she must have brought it upon herself somehow. The story shows how often the victim is blamed for the violence and that when it is so ingrained in society it is easier to look the other way rather than acknowledge what is happening.

10/28/21

A Brief Escape

Throughout Broken Strands there is the idea of escaping and of maps. When Yetsaida is young, she wants crayons so she can colour in a map of the world and get good enough grades to leave and go to Managua along with Miss kety but her father does not buy her crayons and instead abuses her and her mother.By visiting miss Kety’s hair salon she is escaping her home and her abuse for a short while, she gets to be treated kindly and with respect. She does not get the opportunity to get good grades and make her escape when she is young but she still dreams of going to cosmetology school and continuing her education in Miami. But as Yetsaida grows up, she falls into the same cycle that the women around her have been trapped in. Yetsaida is seen from Miss Kety’s perspective in the final sentence of the story, while she is dreaming of moving away to Miami, she has a broken nose and a black eye just like all of Miss Kety’s other customers, who probably also had dreams to escape. Miss kety’s salon is their only real escape in an environment that has been built to keep women trapped in abusive relationships that have been normalized by the broader community. By going to the salon the women get sympathy and understanding from someone who has experienced the same thing and they get a brief moment of peace at Miss Kety’s Beauty Parlour.

10/13/21

Who deserves to be heard?

The treatment of women in the story is something that jumped out at me, with Larry’s death being treated as something that was bound to happen at some point due to her profession and how poorly almost all the characters treat Anahi. They are both seen as lesser and the story shows it plainly when Anahi is forced to kiss the feet of Almada for 100 pesos. With this act we can see how this character treats both women and those he sees as lesser than him, in this case Anahi is both.She is also immediately dismissed by the police and the other journalist as not even a madwoman, just an idiot denying her any agency in her speech.She is dismissed due to her circumstances and her gender, as is Larry. We do not know anything about Larry even though the story is centred on her death, a common occurrence when women are murdered. The story is focused on her death and does not need to mention anything to do with her life, we do not even know her last name. She is not treated as a victim but as someone who deserved her fate and the time and resources that would be spent on her case would go to better use somewhere else, to someone more “worthy” of their case being solved.

09/22/21

Blame The Bank

The story criticizes the world bank and the international monetary fund for their policies on providing funding to latin american countries. A common complaint against these organizations is that the rich countries who run them use the power of funding to make countries do what is best for the countries funding the bank rather than the countries receiving the funding. The wellbeing of the country at hand is of lesser importance  than balancing the books.As seen in the story, the government employees have the means to travel and buy expensive cars, and this is a common complaint about the world bank and the IMF, that it expands the wealth of the bureaucracy but does not help the people.The policies of the World Bank would force countries to slash social funding. During the 1980s, when this story was written, many saw these policies as making the problems worse and not helping the people of the countries, as inflation was causing food prices to rise dramatically. The way the loans were given out did not take into account the culture and needs of the people in each country separately, causing the policies to be ineffectual in reaching the people who really needed the aid. These impacts are seen in “And We Sold the Rain”, when the cost of food rose steeply and the cost of luxury goods,such as caviar fell due to the measures implemented by the IMF and World Bank. 

09/16/21

Rituals for the Dead

“When you lift the board, you must give three turns to the right and four to the left. Seven in all.This is to confuse the soul so that it can’t return to this life of misery”(p.56) 

This story shows the loss of many things, innocence, freedom and traditions. The children attempt to find a way to properly bury the bird, they bring items that they believe have importance in order to give the bird a proper funeral but they do not have the knowledge to correctly lay the bird to rest. The children have not been taught the rituals of death in their country because the people who are supposed to teach them are gone, either dead or disappeared, they have lost the context  around death and do not know the proper way to mourn. This also shows the loss of other traditions that do not involve death and the loss of entire cultures, many of the people killed in Guatemala were indigenous and with that comes the loss of rituals and traditions that are hundreds of years old. The old man tells Maximo the rituals that are supposed to take place so the soul does not return to the body, the conflict has been so bad that souls must escape in order to find peace. The only one who would be able to teach the children the correct way to have a funeral is the old man and they run away from him, they have been taught to fear people, not learn from them. This story shows the destruction of cities and lives but also ways of life that are lost due to conflict, these children will not be able to teach their own children the traditions and their culture due to the war.