Because I bought -- AND READ -- the wrong book...

So, I bought the wrong book... mine was Object Lessons by Anna Quindlen. It's really good; I'd recommend it. Unfortunately, it is not the book we were assigned... So, because there is no way I can get a copy of the book and read it by tomorrow, I've been allowed instead to take a look at some of Eavan Boland's poetry... so here goes. I do hope you enjoy what follows.

The Pomegranate
by Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

Clearly, this poem references the myth of Persephone, who is abducted by ... I thought it was Hades, but apparently not ... Ceres and taken to the underworld to live with him FOREVER. But, Persephone's mom, Demeter (goddess of the seasons!!), is not okay with this situation. She cancels all the good seasons of the year and makes it winter all the time, insisting that she will only bring back warmth and plant life and so forth if Persephone is returned to her... I forget some details, but the upshot is that Hades says Persephone can go back, but silly Persephone eats a pomegranate while she's in the Underworld, so she is doomed to have to return for half the year, every year. Hence the seasons.

So, Boland is discussing her relationship to this myth and how it has played a role in her life at various points. First, she tells us about her own childhood, when she imagined that the city she didn't like was really the Underworld, thus making herself Persephone.
Then, Boland tells us of a time when she was afraid her daughter was missing and felt the despair that Demeter must have felt. In this instance, her role becomes more that of Demeter, although she states that she has become Ceres. This is, perhaps, because she wants to take her daughter back with her and keep her, so as not to risk losing her again... so by removing her daughter from the world she is sort of Demeter and Ceres at once.

Boland then moves on to discuss the role of the pomegranate in the myth, and how it is the key to Persephone's ultimate fate. Boland says she could warn her daughter about the pomegranate, that she should not eat it, but she understands the hunger which Persephone must have felt, and she decides that it is best to let her daughter make her own mistakes, or so it seems to me.

So, I think that both the myth and this poem, in some ways, are stories of losing innocence. Perhaps the pomegranate symbolizes this most clearly, much the same way as the apple symbolizes falling from grace in the story of Adam and Eve (which I'm sure I don't need to outline for you...). Boland gives us three examples of losing some sort of innocence or falling from grace: her own, as a child, discovering the wide city around her is really a cage, a trap, a prison for her to live out her exile; her second loss of grace when she becomes a jealous figure bent on keeping her daughter to herself; and a third instance, of her daughter's eventual, future loss of innocence when she succumbs to some sort of temptation which binds her to a mortal life (or perhaps just binds her to a "normal" life that is within the bounds of "ordinary" rather than "extraordinary").



Aaaaand, number two:

Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
by Eavan Boland

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

So, I felt drawn to this poem in part because the myth of Atlantis has stymied (really?) me for as long as I recall knowing it. I too have wondered how the heck a city could disappear without a trace.
Clearly, there is more to this poem than just a contemplation of a missing, ancient, perhaps made-up city. Boland relates Atlantis to a general sense of loss, both her own sense of losing a particular city and a less particular sense of loss in general. Boland suggests that perhaps the story of Atlantis is not based in any reality of a lost city of the ancient world, but perhaps that Atlantis just served as a symbol of loss to those who created it. Isn't that sort of what all myths are about? Not loss in particular, but aren't all myths symbols for something more?

Does anyone else notice that both of these poems revolve around ancient myths?? Tricky. Perhaps Boland is pointing to the fact that ancient myths serve a very real purpose even in the modern world; they provide answers, allegorical models, explanations, excuses, and perhaps even plots for our very own lives.

Object Lessons

"This is the way we make the past. This is the way I will make it here. Listening for hooves. Glimpsing the red hat which was never there in the first place. Giving eyesight and evidence to a woman we never knew and cannot now recover. And for all our violations, the past waits for us. The road from the train to the hosputal opens out over and over again, vacant and glittering, offering shadows and hats and hoops. Again and again I visit and reinvent it. But the woman who actually traveled it had no such license. Hers was a real journey. She did not come back. On October 10 she died in the National Maternity Hospital. She was thirty-one years of age. She was my grandmother."
page 5

Uncle Joseph

"My uncle did not look resigned and serene like most of the dead I have seen. Perhaps it was because his lips were swollen to twice their usual size. He looked as though he'd been punched. He also appeared anxious and shocked, as though he were having a horrible nightmare.

When was he last conscious? I wondered. What were his final thoughts? When did he realize he was dying? Was he afraid? Did he think it ironic that he would soon be the dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country when he was born? In essence he was entering and exiting the world under the same flag. Never really sovereign, as his father had dreamed, never really free. What would he think of being buried here? Would he forever, proverbially, turn in his grave?"
(Page 250)

This passage really stayed with me for a few reasons. America, for many people living in different countries, really is a beacon of light or hope, or a land of fortune compared with their own misfortune and underprivileged lives. As a reader and an American, I really thought that once Uncle Joseph fled Haiti and got to America he would be safe. I feel saddened by what happened to him. Not only was he treated like a number and not a person, but he never even got a chance to see his family one last time. It's also a shame that he never wanted to leave Haiti and was finally forced to, and died in the process. I think Uncle Joseph's death was the most tragic because it was so unexpected, unjust, and happened in such an undignified way.

Splicedness

The passage I want to bring up is sort of long, but it is pages 181-182 at the start of the chapter titled "Hell." Here, Danticat is sharing yet another story told by Granmè Melina about a man who finds himself in Hell. The story ends abruptly on page 182 with a quick transition from the last line of the story to where it moves on at "The next morning, Monday, at four a.m.," and so on.

This "splicing" of literature is a technique used by Danticat a lot which keeps her story interesting. It's an interesting way to see the story she was told as it interrupts the story she is telling, and that keeps her still distant and separate from her emotions towards the situations. Especially with a tale about Hell where it is defined as being "whatever you fear most" when the following line talks of Maxo and his family going somewhere reluctantly.

where is edwidge?

"Beating the Darkness"

this chapter features a narrative on the events of the october 24, 2004 when United Nations soldiers and local riot police joined forces in trying to eradicate the murderous gangs from Bel Air. the thing that struck me about this particle passage, is that edwidge is nowhere in the events that took place. and yet, her retelling of what happened is intriguingly detailed and clear.

---------

i think perhaps the most gripping line from that whole section, is on page 171. it reads: "Looking over the trashstrewn alleys that framed the building, he thought for the first time since he'd lost Tante Denise that he was glad she was dead." for me, that is so heavy. what a thought for her uncle to be having. in my opinion, a thought like that is so personal, that it can only come out of some kind of deep love, nurtured and cultivated over a great time. i feel like, to be thankful for someones absence in life, can only be created from an incredible sense of hopelessness. and this is what's going on within the mind and emotions of danticats uncle, though she's writing it.

i want to know how she knew that was what he was thinking, because of how outside of herself a moment like that is.

did he admit this extremely personal moment to edwidge? or is this part of the imagination that comes with the creative license given to all writers?

late post for jessica: writing prompt

Pick a memory and give it a voice. Talk to it as if it were a person.

APS for Jenna

Brother, I'm Dying, page # 41
"However, time was of the essence, so he had no choice but to travel without her, even though he feared that he might die and never see her again."

What did the white man say? page # 44
"The best place for me to make my announcement would have been at the family meeting the week before. This is probably what both my parents would have accepted, and preferred, rather than spitting something out adn scurrying off. But that night I couldn't look into my father's face and--though I knew it would come very natually to him and my mother both--ask taht they be happy for me."

Where's the Title?

I wanted to bring to attention the actual part in the book where the title gets its name.

"My uncle heard a crackling as my father's phone was picked up. 'Hello," my father said, his voice creaking anxiously. No good news could ever come at this hour of the night, he told himself.
My uncle pressed his lips as close as he could to the mouthpiece to whisper these three words: 'Frè, map mouri.' Brother, I'm dying.
'What's wrong?" my father asked.
'Gòj,' he replied. Throat."
-p. 41

I believe Jackie brought up the simplicity in the words, such as "Brother, I'm dying" or "My wife is dead." I believe this is really important to notice, especially here when the reaction isn't as emotional as one might expect. What fascinates me is how Danticat uses her translations as yet another barrier to separate herself from the book as we have seen throughout. I see her using the exact language first with the simple translation following as this split shows us the situation as it happened and the situation as we would understand. Unless the reader is familiar with the language, the translations are important after that brief moment of being left in the dark as we try to unfold what the Uncle was saying.

A Connection

verba volant, scripta manent -- spoken words fly away, written words remain."

“To write vulnerably is to open a Pandora’s box. Who can say what will coming flying out? When I began, nine years ago, to make my emotions part of my ethnography, I had no idea where this work would take me or whether it would be accepted within anthropology and the academy.” The Vulnerable Observoer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Ruth Behar. 1996

Ann Page this book brought tears

"I wanted very much to be in New York with my father, so I closed my eyes and imagined myself there. I am sitting on the edge of his bed and we're watching the Price is Right on television. Unsure of the answers, we guess wildly but still get all of them right anyway. This makes my father so happy that he rises out of bed and starts to dance. At first he dances like a ballerina in slow motion, but then he increases his pace until he's jumping up and down, bouncing on and off his bed." p. 207
I think this passage is especially beautiful because of the raw emotion that is expresses. Edwige so desperately wishes her father to be well again, and in this passage she images he has become well enough to dance. I think that all people who have lost someone can relate to those moments in time when you dream of them being well. Those brief and beautiful moments when all is as it was when it was perfect.

This part is because I just loved this book... The most touching line of the book..
"I think now that my father waited for me to leave. That he did not want me to hold Mira with one hand and his corpse with the other." This line also sums up the entire journey of the novel.

Logic vs. Feeling

....hmmm, pertinent? Wednesday's quote: "Better to be without logic than without feeling." Bronte. What do you think?

Ann Page

"A few weeks back [Richard] was coming home late one night when someone flagged down his car, ordered him to roll down the window and pressed a gun to his temple. He heard the slow clicking of the trigger and quickly identified himself. When he heard Richard's name, his would-be assassin begged his forgiveness saying, 'Chief, I'm sorry. I didn't realize it was you. You buried my mother a few months back.'" pg. 151

"Another hour went by with no shooting. A few church members arrived for the regular Sunday-morning service. 'I think we should cancel today,' Maxo told his father when they met again at the front gate. 'And what of the people who are here?' asked my uncle. 'How can we turn them away? If we don't open, we're showing our lack of faith. We're showing that we don't trust enough in God to protect us.'" pg. 173-74

"Besides, he was still hoping that the situation might somehow be resolved. He could talk to the dreads,...and explain. After all, before they were called dread or even chimeres, they were young men, boys, many of whom had spent their entire lives in the neighborhood. He knew their mother, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts." pg. 182