Author Archives: milena18

11/26/21

A Story With No End

The title of Valeria Luiselli’s book, “Tell Me How It Ends,” highlights the human tendency to yearn for cohesion and logical conclusions. Luiselli revealed that it was in fact her daughter that took an interest to the story of two girls travelling together to seek asylum in the US, where she asks “how does it end?” Luiselli herself wants to find out how the story of migrant children ends, thus the title was born through her daughter’s question and her own. However, many Americans don’t have the same sympathy for migrant children, where even publications such as the New York Times describes these children as poor and violent. Little do they know that these causes are deeply rooted in a shared hemispheric history. The irony is that the US government doesn’t attribute the trafficking of arms as a reason for why people flee, or that the US are mass consumers of trafficked drugs which proliferate gang violence, hence if there wouldn’t be demand then there wouldn’t be supply.

Luiselli notes that while Trump has exacerbated the issue, it was poor policies from the past that brought us to where we are today. For instance, under Obama, children who were seeking asylum has under a month to secure legal assistance, in addition to the violence that people seemed to ignore. Additionally, the Clinton administration had already began building the wall between Mexico and the US. The precursors to Trump had normalized the violence and scrutiny of migrant children. It’s incredibly difficult to unpack everything that lead to the situation of illegal immigrants in the states, so that’s why the story is ongoing because we all have much to learn.

11/19/21

In Sickness and in Health

Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1989,” depicts the physical manifestations of the family’s relationship to the father. Not only does the father literally starve his son before they depart anywhere in the van, he also metaphorically starves his family of love and affection. Starving is symbolic of the father’s distance from his family in addition to his abuse and extramarital affair. The irony is that he’s traditionally patriarchal and demands respect, but in turn cheats on his wife and sets a bad example for his children, which may end up contributing to generational trauma. Consequently, Yunior’s disapproval of his father’s actions are manifested into him vomiting whenever he gets into the van. The father’s van was “bought to impress” most likely his mistress (p. 27). Because the father is almost more attached to his vehicle than any of his relationships, Yunior’s vomiting is a symbol of his longing for a good father and a healthy family dynamic. Due to the power imbalance, Yunior or his brother are unable to explicitly make known their disapproval out of fear of retaliation from their father. Alternatively, Yunior may have kept quiet because he didn’t want to see his parents split up, even if it is for the best, which is often what children don’t understand. Regardless of his reasoning for keeping quiet, we know that as a child he cannot speak up, so the only way Yunior is actually able to express himself if through vomiting, particularly in his father’s precious car.

11/3/21

The Visceraless State: Physical Body and Psychological (Percepticide)

Reading Cristina Rivera Garza’s “The Visceraless State,” reminded me of the idea of percepticide related to Argentina’s Dirty War. Garza employs the metaphor of the human body, considering its complex structure, to compare it to the state of Mexico. Just like a human body, a political system can either be healthy or sick. Garza writes that “the neoliberal state has established visceraless relationships with its citizens. Relationships without hearts or bones or innards. Disemboweled relationships” (p. 22). Due to the corruption of the Mexican government, prioritizing profits over the carful protection of its citizens, it left its citizens out to dry and subject to violence by the tyrannical regime, like a body without its organs which cannot protect itself to stay alive.

This can translate into percepticide because as state violence and lack of governmental care become ubiquitous, the citizens can internalize the trauma as a normal occurrence. “It is the forgetting of the body, in both political and personal terms, that opens the door to violence. Those who are no longer human will be the ones to walk through it” (p. 25). In other words, a body without its organs is barely human, just like a loss in morality is inhumane. A careless government strips people of their humanity when violence becomes normalized, which ultimately leads to people adopting percepticide. The metaphor of body as the consequence of a corrupt government, in this case, is as much physical (death and the process of dying) as it is psychological (suffering and percepticide).

10/28/21

Establishing Empathy via Metafiction

What I found most interesting about “Woman Hollering Creek” was the way Sandra Cisneros manipulated the narrative voice throughout the story. Although the story mostly had a third person omniscient point of view, it was also malleable by transitioning into first and second person too. For instance, when Juan Pedro was scolding Cleofilas, the narrative voice shifted form third person to second person: “so why can’t you just leave me in peace, woman” (p. 223), as if we as readers took on Cleofilas’s point of view and the narrator became Juan. The narrator had also morphed into Cleofilas in the scene where she tries to convince Juan to take their their son to the doctor: “Yes. Next Tuesday at five-thirty. I’ll have Juan Pedrito dressed and ready. (…) As soon as you come home from work. We wont make you ashamed” (p. 226). It is clear that Cleofilas was addressing the reader as if they were Juan. Additionally, even when the narrator remained in third person, it wasn’t difficult to notice their bias in favour of Cleofilas, pleading to Juan: “She has to go back [to the doctor] next Tuesday Juan Pedro, please, for the new baby. For their child” (p. 226).

The reader’s constant awareness of Cleofilas’s situation and their emotional involvement can be distinguished as metafiction. Metafiction in this case serves to highlight the parallels between Cisneros’s fictitious world and the real world where generational trauma and domestic abuse is a reality for many Mexican Americans, outside of fiction. It’s one thing to learn about the issues of domestic violence via reading statistics or news reports, but it’s another to personally experience or be able to empathize with the victims of such tragedies. Cisneros utilizes pathos, in the form of metafiction, so that her readers can empathize with the characters in her story, which consequently emphasizes the gravity of the issues at stake.

10/13/21

Gates cannot keep away violence

While Claudia Piñeiro’s Thursday’s Widows, sets itself up as a mystery thriller when one of the affluent wives, Teresa, discovers the death of her husband along with his two friends floating dead in their pool, the story unfolds to be a social commentary about how even the most “untouchable” communities are strictly dependant on the economic system that brought them up in the first place. In this case, the “tragedy” the characters were subjected to was the failure of neoliberal capitalism in Argentina. There is almost a sense of apathy for the deaths of these prominent men because as Tano put it, their success or “well-being was based on the ill-being of others.” The scenes where the camera pans up to reveal a ghetto right behind the walls and where Ronnie is watching the news of protests and crowds fighting for rations, juxtaposes the opulent and nonchalant lives of the wealthy, but also foreshadows their inevitable downfall.

Although the rich do segregate themselves from the rest of society, they are not immune to violence especially when the men start losing their jobs and prominence. Consumption is a facade of their class status and signals the idealistic lifestyle that neoliberalism purports. However, the facade that it’s normal for people to have power over and exploit others can quickly turn to depression, domestic abuse, and ultimately suicide on an individual scale because it’s clearly unsustainable in terms of economic growth and improving standards of living for all. While detective fiction stories usually restore some sense of order when the crime has been solved, Argentina in the early 21st century is still far from it. Additionally, the act of the men committing suicide was also a crime because they committed insurance fraud by framing their death as an accident. It can be interpreted that justice has been restored because their death symbolizes the failure of neoliberalism, but given the aforementioned context of the purpose of their death and the prevailing conflict in Argentinian society, it is unclear whether the story ends on a hopeful note.

10/7/21

Zeno’s Paradox: Red Scharlach’s Labyrinth as a Geometric Series

We discussed in class how Jorge Luis Borges embodies philosophical theories through his literature and often converges them with mathematical motifs (i.e. symmetry, geometry, etc). In Borges’s story “Death and the Compass,” Red Scharlach’s premeditated murder of his arch-nemisis, Lonnrot, draws inspiration from Zeno’s paradox: “I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line” (pg. 156). Zeno’s paradoxes were the basis of all theories related to space, time and infinity. One of them, Achilles and the tortoise, tells the story of the Greek hero, Achilles, being challenged to a race by a tortoise who claims he can beat Achilles if he’s given a head start. When the race starts, the tortoise is ahead and Achilles begins to make up ground on the slow moving tortoise. But by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise’s starting point, the tortoise had moved forward by one meter. When he makes up ground on the new gap, the tortoise had moved again creating a new but smaller gap. At every point where Achilles reaches the tortoise’s last point, the tortoise is still ahead by incrementally smaller distances. This situation can therefore be expressed as an infinite geometric series. Just as Achilles cannot overtake the fleeing tortoise, Red Scharlach is always ahead of Lonnrot which would ultimately leads him to his demise. While Scharlach did have personal history with Lonnrot, what ultimately got him ahead was the coincidental murder of the rabbi which was published in the newspaper. Knowing Lonnrot had much knowledge in religious scriptures and text, Scharlach concocted a plot that he knew only Lonnrot would be able to solve. Lonnrot of course was too transfixed on solving the mystery that he was unsuspecting of Scharlach’s mischief. Although the “labyrinth” was technically a rhombus, Lonnrot critiques Scharlach saying his elaborate plot could’ve been better if he had mapped it out exactly like Zeno’s paradox: “So many philosophers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well” (pg. 156). Scharlach then promises the labyrinth would be a straight line in his next life before he shoots him.

09/16/21

Profit Over Progress?

A critique made in class about Dorfman and Mattelart’s essay, “How to Read Donald Duck,” is that their message doesn’t reach very far because Disney is a profit seeking corporation and they release content based on what the public wants to see. Even through paradigm shifts where society has (supposedly) become more progressive, profit still outweighs the ethical considerations of Disney’s themes and ideologies. My response is that Dorfman and Mattelart’s critiques are still warranted because Disney was essentially trying to capitalize on an entire nation’s common culture, so a critique on Disney is also a critique of the dominant ideology reflected in American society during the Cold War.

Considering anti-socialist sentiments during the Cold War, it comes as no surprise that Americans wanted to consume content that reflected their jingoistic views. Disney benefited from propagating such views even though it was socially irresponsible. However, if Disney released the Donald Duck comics in today’s political climate, that would be detrimental to their business model. If consumer behaviour/power drives the success of certain businesses, I think Disney “does care” about the opinions of their customers. Companies seeking profit and social progressivism doesn’t necessarily have to be at odds with each other.

Additionally, such paradigm shifts that made society (a little bit) less racist can be attributed to people like Dorfman and Mattelart who scrutinize the consequences of American imperialism and other aspects of capitalism, and their critiques are still relevant today. It is especially important to criticize Disney in particular because their content reaches young audiences which can shape long standing ideologies/cultures in the generations to come.