I'm not a girl, not yet a woman

The article ‘Talking Back’ from Bell Hooks was very inspiring to read. It dealt with the freedom of speech of black women. The author talks about her own experiences as a suppressed girl that wasn’t allowed to talk back. Even in her young years she was fascinated by the vivid discussions the women around her used to have. She was never free to participate in these talks unless she wanted to be punished. The article deals with the struggle between being who you want to be and being who you are. Bell Hooks tells us about her path of becoming a writer. It wasn’t easy and some of experiences strongly relate to the ‘Handmaid’s tale’.

Having an opinion was forbidden in both stories, saying what you think was a crime. The black women have similar rights as the handmaids in Handmaid’s Tale. Bell Hook’s voice had been suppressed at a young age, and Offred in Handmaid’s tale can’t even speak to the people she’s living with, without fearing that she might be caught and punished. The article says: ‘safety and sanity were to be sacrificed if I was to experience defiant speech’, showing at what point people tried to shut her mouth. When Bell Hooks did talk, it was empowering to her just like Offred feels liberated when she talks to Olfgen for the first time on their shopping tours.

There are little details in the article that reminded me a lot of the Handmaid’s tale. In ‘Talking Back’ it says that talking means disagreeing even if you’re just expressing an opinion. It was impossible for Offred to ‘talk back’. It wasn’t her right to express her opinion and feelings. Every act of rebellion would end in a painful torture sessions. She also says that if she had been a boy, she might have been allowed to talk. Even in Handmaid’s tale it was preferable to be a boy because at least you wouldn’t get raped once a month. Bell Hooks also mentioned that she used to hide her writings under her bed, in pillow stuffings among faded underwear. This doesn’t exactly happen like this in the Handmaid’s tale but even Offred hid everything she wrote since it was forbidden to women to write.

The article Sins of Silence also reminds me of the Handmaid’s tale. Mai Kao Thao talks about her childhood and her relationship with her mother. Her mother told her to be a good, obedient woman, and smile silently as she swallows the bitterness that others give her. She told her that silence is power, that she had to be wordless, humble, obedient. A perfect Hmong woman. Just as Offred she got punished with harsh reprimands and scorching displeasure whenever she talked back of offered an opinion, and so she was silent. Emotionless. On the other side, just like Offred, she was filled with anger, dissatisfaction and anxiety, and above all emptiness. Her silence had killed her Self. She also suppressed her ideas of independence, as Offred doesn’t believe that there is a way out, that there is any way to escape. Hope for women in a regime like such, isn’t evident. I hope that things change for the better for the women that are still living this hell of a silent world.

My first Blogging Portfolio!

Welcome to my first Blogging Portfolio! The first couple months of IB HL English have been hard and challenging, but I am happy to present to you the best outcomes of these tough weeks. Long nights of reading, annotating and finally blogging, have proven themselves to be successful. Here by I'm showing you in 6 different categories my thoughts, ideas and reactions to different matters. Please take a few moments to read my introductions to my posts and comments on my peer’s blogs. I hope you enjoy reading through my posts, and you have some feedback to give me afterwards.

Coverage:
 - Nobody loves me, but my mother

This blog entry relates very well to the text on the North Korean concentration camp that I read about. I made good connections between the article, my own life and the life in 1984. I believe that I expressed my opinion on the subject fairly well, and the subject really interested me and I enjoyed talking about it. Saumya commented on my blog post, and I replied to her comment on her blog, where she discusses the same subject in one of her blog entries. More information on that discussion will be posted below.


Depth:
Do you believe in magic?

This entry of mine is the best one in my opinion since I state a lot of examples and I really go deep in terms of research and personal thoughts. I reference two different books (Harry Potter and Twilight) and I also make a connection to Brecht. I focused on why do we relate/read a certain novel? What makes us read a story and enjoy it?


Interaction:


Lack of Lightening

This post on Saumya’s blog shows well my ability to react to someone else’s ideas. Saumya and I had an interesting discussion on our thoughts about Shin’s life. Anuraag also participated, and we were able to agree with each other in the end. We were able to share our thoughts and some very interesting points came up, that I hadn’t thought of. I respectfully doubted and questioned some of Saumya’s points, so that she could clarify them, and we could discuss a better and more complete conclusion.

Discussion:

Do you believe in magic?

This blog entry of mine ended in a discussion between Monique and I, where we talk about the word choice in different novels etc. At the end we focused on Shakespeare, since he had a very exquisite writing style that not everyone appreciates. We discussed his use of language and also word choice in general. This little interaction really helped me form my ideas in a distinctive way.

Xenoblogging:

Keep it simple

I was the first to comment on her post ‘Simple vs. Complicated’ and my comment started a discussion between us. Her post was very interesting but I was able to point out some aspects that needed to be clarified. I think that we were able to run an intellectual discussion, and it also helped me expanding my own ideas.

Wildcard:

If I had to talk about my greatest passion (besides eating, sleeping and partying – these are things I wouldn’t give up for the world…), it would be travelling. Not to any random place, but to France or Germany. When I visit my friends and family in Germany and France, I feel at home and that is a feeling that is irreplaceable. In Germany, when I walk through the street that I used to live in for eleven years, when I cross the little mailbox that I used to put my letters for my mailing friend in, when I see the church that I used to sing in and celebrate Christmas in, I get an amazing feeling. It’s like getting butterflies in your stomach when you see the person you like – just different.  Memories are something no one can take from you, (here I could add a little reference to 1984 – memories are the only thing the thought police can’t erase) and they make you happy. Sometimes I wish that you could put memories in marmalade glasses, and that you could open them whenever you wanted to, to relive those memories, to go back in time for a while. Paris was probably the best period of my life so far. I spent my best moments there. I had a group of friends – the four blondes- and I loved them so much. We were very much alike and those four years shaped me like no other. (Another little reference to my blog entry about First the Forests Are we human, or are we dancers? where I said that our environments shape us). This might seem like a random ‘wildcard’ post, but if there’s anything I like to talk about, it’s these two places that I will remember forever.

Nobody loves me, but my mother

The article ‘Born and Raised in a North Korean Gulag’ by Choe Sang-Hun, published in the New York Times on Monday, July 9, 2007 was a shock to me. Having read 1984, a fantasy book, I should have been prepared for this, but I had no idea this kind of world could really exist nowadays. How naïve of me to think that something this terrible couldn’t exist in our modern world. I was aware of the fact that torture, death, murder and child labor existed but that someone or a group of people could create a camp like this where people in there don’t even know that there is an outside world, seems unrealistic. The prisoner that was released was in that camp for over 20 years. In 1984 of course, people have spent their whole life there, under this regime except the elder ones that can remember that it used to be different.

When Shin Dong Hyok describes his life in the camp, it seems like he’s talking about a bad war movie, which has an ending that’s only partly happy. The day someone told him about the life outside the walls of the concentration camp, he starts to dream and wishes to be free. In 1984 Winston develops these same feelings when O’Brian hints at him that there is ‘another place’, and he starts to fight for his freedom to love and to have a life of his own. In camp n.14 as well as in 1984 Oceania, the people are ‘deprived of their ability to have the most basic human feelings, such as love, hatred and even a sense of being sad or mistreated’ (Choe Sang-Hun p.2). As terrible as it sounds, it is probably for the best, because if the people in the camp were to feel love and sadness, their lives would be a simple torture. In these camps the people aren’t treated like humans, but like machines. Each day is repetitive and equally awful. Women have to work from 5a.m. ‘til midnight, I wonder how they survive longer than two weeks. The survivor describes a scene where a girl had been beaten to death for hiding wheat grains in her pocket. What kind of person would do that, and how can someone not be terrified and shocked at that view? I don’t understand how you can be immune to those feelings of disgust and fear, while watching it happen.

In Valley no.2, where Shin Dong Hyok used to go to school, there was a slogan carved into a wooden plaque saying: “Everyone obey the regulations!” We have talked about propaganda in class, and it is common in dictatorial regimes to help the popularity of a party using catching or patriotic slogans. The best examples are the Soviet Union with Stalin and Lenin, Hitler’s rule in Germany and also 1984. In this case, the slogan was put there to remind everyone of the single thing they have to do in the camp: Do what you’re told to do. When he escapes from the camp, he admits that he misses being told what to do. He finds it much simpler than having to make your own decisions, which I can understand to some extent but it baffles me how you could miss being treated like a rat. Dong Hyok watched his mother and his brother die. He sat in the audience when his own mother was hanged, and all he felt was hate. He didn’t love her, he hated her for trying to escape, even though he doesn’t know if it’s true, and he still can’t forgive her. Living in the camp, it never occurred to him that something was unfair or that he wasn’t treated right.

It is amazing how similar life in this concentration camp and life in Oceania are. Orwell’s book was his imagination, his warning about the future, but this article actually describes something that happened. Still today there are concentration camps like this one in many countries that we don’t know of and unless someone lucky and smart enough to escape comes and tells us what’s going on, we might not find out about all of them anytime soon. The thought that there are still people living in these exact conditions, not feeling a thing, not having any emotions, scares me. It’s a good thing that this man could escape even though his friend had to die during the escape, because now the message is out there. Now the authorities can take action and hopefully they already did with success.

You can't handle the truth

The truth. How do we know something is absolutely true? Is there such a thing as truth?

In class we each presented an object or a statement that we thought to be true objectively. How can we know if there are really an infinite number of points in a circle, and how do we know if the cover of a DVD box really displays what the DVD is about? To be honest, there is no real answer. It might or might not be true, depending on how you look at it.

In 1984 the people their truth is manipulated easily because the government makes up and changes the past, the words and the truth every day. The citizens are manipulated in believing everything they’re told, but is their truth the truth? What is true to one person doesn’t have to be true for everyone. If the truth changes everyday then it can’t be an objective truth. That’s why the definitions for words in a dictionary aren’t objectively true. Definitions change and word’s meanings change every day because we give them different meanings. Laws of Physics are relatively true because we can’t prove them wrong anyhow. Then again we base our judgments on our senses, on what we see, hear or feel. And people might sense something different than the others and then the law might be proven wrong to that one person. Also if the person is blindfolded, how do we know something is happening? A good example of that is the law of conservation of momentum of a pendulum. Even if you are blindfolded, the pendulum will not hit you and you can therefore prove to yourself that even though you didn’t see the pendulum swing back and forth, that it didn’t hit you and didn’t swung back higher than before.

Believing something is true gives us security. We feel safe when we don’t have to question everything. When we can believe the cup we’re drinking our coffee out is red, then we feel safer than if we had to wonder if it was green or red. The truth is something that can be manipulated, and therefore there is probably nothing that is true all the time, everywhere and to everyone. It is hard to define truth because truth is what is true to us, but how do we know everyone sees it the same way? We don’t and therefore we can’t define something as being absolutely true. I think that there is an exception though when it comes to actions. To our personal actions. We know what we did, and how we did it. No one can manipulate our actions in the way that we believe them to be not true. Our personal truth is hard to manipulate unless we believe everything we’re said.

Sauver le monde

George Orwell’s article ‘Politics and the English Language’ relates in many ways to his book 1984. It discusses the ‘bad way’ in which the English language is. Orwell explains in many convincing arguments how and why the language we speak gets worse from day to day. He says that ‘language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes’. That’s what he thinks and so he demonstrates how it could be if it wasn’t, in 1984. There they invent the Newspeak that constantly evolves, gets simpler and simpler and forbids the citizens of Oceania to say what they want. Orwell says that our thoughts are foolish. So what if it was forbidden to think the way we do? He imagines the outcome for us in his book, where thoughtcrime exists, and where you have to use doublethink to forget about your emotions and memories.

To avoid humbug and vagueness in words he recommends to:

1.       Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2.       Never use a long words here a short one will do.

3.       If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4.       Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5.       Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.       Break any of these rules than say anything barbarous.

When you read through Orwell’s essay, you get the feeling that everything you ever said was nonsense. In his opinion, we use verbal false limbs, pretentious diction (‘scientific words’) and meaningless words. But what happens when we stop using all of these words? Wouldn’t we just turn out to speak another version of Newspeak? I personally think that his resolution is quite pleasing. I’ve always hated complicated words in all languages that I know because all they do is: they give you a hard time. In school we learn how important it is to use sophisticated words. In English class we can’t just come up with our simplest vocabulary when it comes to writing an essay. And in Biology class we have to use scientific and latinized words in order to get a good grade. On the other hand, I agree that people tend to use all these words to sound smarter. Only, the thing is that it isn’t the word that makes them smarter; it’s the fact that no one has a clue what he’s talking about that does.

Politicians often use words to sound more educated. I agree with that, I think that when you look back in our history, you notice that many politicians (especially the ones that ended up causing trouble at some point) use foreign words to sound smarter. If you present these words with a certain passion and some enthusiasm, it’s easy to fool people by making them believe that you’re saying something completely different from what you’re actually saying. And it is a little impressing when someone has la grandeur to express themselves in so many ways that die Verwirrung is massive, isn’t it?

Do you believe in Magic?

When you have to choose a book to read, how to you choose it? By its cover? Its title? Its author? Or is it the topic the story discusses that you’re fond to know more about?

‘The Psychology of the Novel – Thirteen ways of looking at the novel’ inspired these questions that I began to ask myself. The narrator says that “the basic substance of imaginative literature is not reason but emotion, which is expressed not by the denotation of words, nor the grammar of the sentences, but through the connotations and colorations of the words as employed by the author’s style.” When reading a book, it isn’t the word choice that makes me relate to it, even though the word choice is important for a better understanding of the story and the novel itself. It is the emotion that I can relate to, and that I can feel myself while reading the book. That doesn’t mean that if I’m always depressed, I’m going to read sad books because I can relate to it, no! It simply means that the words of the author help me relate to the characters in the novel because I can feel the way they do and understand what they’re going through just because the author has the ability or provoking emotions in me with words.  Fictional books like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling are hard to relate to in the sense that they’re not at all realistic, but they are easy to relate to in the way that they are written in a way that makes us want to be in the place of the main characters. Millions of people on earth love these books because they describe their personal Utopia with all the magic, the mysteries and the love.

The cover and the title of a novel/book are important to me. When I walk through a bookstore, I won’t stop at the stand with the books that possess a boring cover and an even more boring title. What is even more important though, is the author. When we like a certain author that has qualities of the voice that we appreciate, we are more likely to take his new novel than a novel written by someone that we know writes in a very arrogant or self-obsessed tone, that lets us feel indifferent and does not move us in any way. “The reader perceives and reacts to these qualities instantly, without thinking”.

Some authors of playwrights for example, like Brecht, are trying to do the exact opposite. Brecht, in this case, doesn’t want his audience to relate to the characters and therefore not connect with the emotions the characters are presenting. He was constantly trying to break ‘the forth wall’ by pulling the audience out of their comfort zone. The spectators were supposed to leave the theater thinking and arguing about what they just saw. He wanted them to be mad and shocked about what they had seen. The theater was supposed to go on, even though the play was over. This can also occur in books. Books aren’t supposed to give you the ‘aww-that-was-a-cute-story’ – feeling. Authors are trying to pass a message, to make their readers think about a topic they care about, or something like that. In the “Psychology of the novel” it says also that the point of view of the author or the narrator is like the perspective in a realistic painting – it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters etc. A novel must have action and point of view, as well as suspense and reflection, because that is the way life is.

Are we human, or are we dancers?

First the Forests




The article ‘First the Forests’ relates in many ways to Zamyantin’s novel We. It talks about the fact that civilization is ‘attacked’ by the forests, just like the One State is attacked by nature. He uses symbols of nature to illustrate his ideas, like the idea that the forest was hiding the sky. This idea ‘explains’ our urge to look at the sky, to go up to heaven once we die and the thought that God might be in the sky waiting for us with all his love. The forest was hiding the sky which immediately puts the forest in a bad position. I thought that this thought related to the fog in the novel We. Once the fog appears, D-503 is sad, destabilized and his world is crumbling down. Also the Integral might have been built because the numbers were curious about what hides in the sky, they could have been curious about the secrets the sky is hiding from them. It is repeatedly said that the forest was there first, that in the beginning there was only dense forest. That links to the ‘ancient’ times in We, where the world is described as being dirty, uncivilized – nature. A thought brought up in our class discussion was that the forest might be due to the big flood, when Noah and the animals were the only ones that survived. Of course this is what is said in the bible, and therefore we cannot rely on that fact scientifically.


The main question that we discussed in our class discussion was: What does it mean to be human? Where is the difference between animals and machines? Some very interesting ideas came up, about the ideas that ‘First the Forests’ contains. The numbers living in the One State are like machines, they don’t have a free will, they do whatever they are told to do by the Benefactor, they don’t rebel themselves and they don’t have free time to do what they want. In ‘First the Forests’ humans are described as animalist creatures, that live in the forest just like every animal would do. They are covered with hair; they even look like animals before they come out of the forest. Also the ‘other humans’ that live outside the One State wall are hairy. In our discussion we thought that the idea of always coming back to where we started is very important in both We and ‘First the Forests’. Life is a cycle. When we’re not born yet, we’re all covered in hair which is like a funny fact because when we grow older and we approach our sixties or seventies, we get hairier. I did not know that and I find it amusing how this thought in ‘First the Forests’ is actually something that can be scientifically proven. Going back to the question “What is human?” we noticed that there is a fine line between being human and being a machine. This comes back to the two articles we previously read in class, about Individuality. It is important for us to keep some kind of individuality in our large society. I thought that the giants mentioned in the article could be like a mix of animal and human, just like I-330 in We. Talking about I-330, she is someone that seems to fit into her society but that really doesn’t. She understands what’s going on, she sees how everyone is turned into machines from the very beginning of their existence and she tries to save the people in the One State. She is also the one that opens D-503’s eyes, just like the Vulcan in ‘First the Forests’ is the one that opens everyone’s eyes and a Vulcan is something very natural.


In conclusion I would agree with the article in some points. I also believe that during our lives we sort of come back to who we used to be, before we were shaped by our environment. Not only physically we shrink after years of growing but we’re also brought back to the same questions we had as we were a child. A quote from a song that I know says ‘and any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all’. That seems like a harsh statement but I think that it is true in many ways. We can learn all about physics, geography or mathematics but do we really know anything at all?