We Hate Macon

Being one of two black girls in an English class that's reading a book about race and appropriation is an experience that I wouldn't say is particularly enjoyable. It's all too commonplace here at Uni though- being one of few or the only black person in a class. What makes it even less fun is that because I am mixed, white people often choose to forget that I am not any less of a black woman for that. Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach discusses the gray lines of white ally-ship, which can be a difficult conversation.

A lot of people want validation that they are indeed Not Racist and are "good white people" or such. Mansbach challenges this idea in saying that white people should be criticizing their whiteness openly as opposed to looking for ways to deny it. But often when discussing the book, I see white people in the class pushing whiteness off of themselves before they criticize whiteness. And this is essentially what made the class dislike Macon.

Macon talked about being “blacker” than the students at the BSU and more radical than John Brown and he had a lot of rhetoric that was intended to separate himself from white people. Being “down for the cause” doesn't take away your white privilege. It doesn't make you no longer a part of the power structure that constantly minimizes and oppresses people of color.

It felt almost as if the non-black majority of the class was reading the book and looking down on Macon for all the wrong reasons. People see him as an extreme (which obviously he is) and criticize based upon that but I think part of Mansbach’s intent was to show that Macon-esque thoughts are not at all uncommon. Few people go around robbing people in cabs and organizing Days of Apology, but it's not uncommon for people to speak about having or wanting to have an “honorary black card” or permission to say the n word because they're somehow different from other non black people and the rest of the white supremacist power structure.

We have a class full of Not Racist, rap listening, liberal non black people. And while there's nothing wrong with being any or all of those things, at times it can feel like an army of less extreme Macons and then the two black girls in the class.

Looking Back through the door

Looking back on Emma Donoghuge's Room is a sad-happy place to be. You see all that Ma and Jack have overcome, all they've accomplished. I thought that there would be no satisfying way to end this book. And yet, Donoghuge pulls through. 

We get to see so much character development from both Ma and Jack all in the final scene where they return to Room. We see how much they've really grown. One definite sign of growth is that Jack finally notices the smell in Room. In the beginning, he was so defensive of Room when Ma said it was stinky. Of course he would never notice a smell if he's lived his whole life surrounded in it.

Similarly, when they go back, Jack is confused because the shed looks too small to be Room. Jack's world grew significantly in his time outside as did he himself. Not only does Room seem physically smaller in comparison to the rest of the world but it seems much smaller in the sense that it would be much more confining. He is finally able to see it as the prison that it was and that Ma always saw it as. 

 And the most striking difference of all is definitely the last words of the book: “the door.” One of the first things you notice when you start reading the book is the anthropomorphization of certain objects and places in Room. It shows that he thinks they are the only ones and that they’re somehow special when actuality there are millions of other beds and rugs and walls. So when he finally calls Door “the door,” it shows massive personal growth. He’s learned about the world and his views expanded and he’s learned to accept that Room isn’t the limits of the universe. And they were finally able to move on.

Nick

In Room Old Nick is an awful but very smart character. All of his actions are thought out and like a true villain, everything he does adds to the gaslighting and abuse rained down on Ma. We see how smart he is with his construction of Room, making everything perfect so there is no way that his prisoner could escape. But what I would say is his greatest victory and most cruel thing he did in a sense was give Ma Jack.

Although Jack would eventually grow to save Ma's life, he also kept her trapped in that room for 5 years, forced her to keep up a facade with Jack to make sure he never found out the truth of the outside world. And possibly worse than that was that she was forced to pretend that she was okay with being in Room and being with Old Nick in order to protect her son.

The emotional burden of having to play into the games of your captor and abuser seems unimaginable and the way Ma deals with it is truly heroic, and in contrast that is what makes Old Nick so horrible.

Jefferson

In my opinion, Jefferson from A Lesson Before Dying is an extremely likable character. Despite the attitude he gives Ms Emma and Reverend Ambrose and his occasional shittiness to Grant, I think you can’t hold it against him. The kid is in an awful situation and through the entire book you can’t help but sympathize with him. But I think the main reason it’s so easy to sympathize with Jefferson is that he represents all of us (black America).

From the beginning we know that Jefferson’s trial isn’t fair and we feel helpless as the only defense they can give for the child is “he’s too stupid to be guilty.” When you try to dehumanize the innocent (or at least who we assume is innocent) that says something about the regard you hold for them. Also, the trial, because he was a black boy, was not ‘innocent until proven guilty’ but ‘guilty unless proven innocent.’ And we see this replicated today, with around 43% of people in jail being black, despite black people making up only approximately 12% of the American population. It shows that race based judicial injustice didn’t end with Jefferson.

Also, Grant talks a lot about how Jefferson represents all of his students. His conversations with Antoine about how being a teacher doesn’t really matter, trying to help the kids doesn’t really matter because they’ll grow up to “be the niggers they were born to be.” They talk about a cycle and how Jefferson and Grant and everyone else in their town just fits into the cycle and you can't break it. Jefferson represents the average kid in their town pretty closely.

And symbolically he represents black people as well. The talking about Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson reference how these distant people stand somehow for the people in their town. So if Jefferson too can be a hero then doesn't he stand for the people even more because they know him? If the boy cried out for Joe, will Jefferson cry out  for Jackie, will some other black boy someday cry out for Jefferson?

Cooked and Et

To me, as I was reading As I Lay Dying the most emotionally poignant scene in the book was the scene where Vardaman reacts to his mother’s death. All of the family members are dealing with their grief in their own ways and I can appreciate all of the different ways, but the raw sadness displayed in Vardaman’s chapter really gets to me.

He begins with a sense of loss almost. He stands on the edge of the porch and cries and narrates “I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls. Then it wasn't so.” In my head I interpret this scene as a boy being so lost and so confused and so angry that all he can do to make sense of it all is to compare his mother to a dead fish.

He then is so obsessed with the life he can feel in himself and other beings. “The life in him runs under the skin, under my hand, running through the splotches, smelling up into my nose where the sickness is beginning to cry, vomiting the crying, and then I can breathe, vomiting it. It makes a lot of noise. I can smell the life running up from under my hands, up my arms, and then I cart leave the stall.” I read this as the boy is so sad that the fact that he is alive—the fact that the horse is alive—while his fish and his mother aren’t is sickening to him.

He sets loose the horses in a frenzy. So much emotion and anger built up that he was so frantic to pay this doctor back for what he did.

“I am not crying now. I am not anything. Dewey Dell comes to the hill and calls me. Vardaman. I am not anything. I am quiet. You, Vardaman. I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears,” Vardaman narrates after Cash and Dewey Dell come to him. He says he’s not anything; he feels empty. These couple sentences affected me the most probably. What’s left inside of Vardaman now that his mother is gone and his fury is gone?

His final lines of “Cooked and et. Cooked and et.” refer back to his fish analogy. It’s like he grows to understand over the course of this chapter what his mother’s death means.

I loved Vardaman so much because I felt a sense of emotional urgency in him that most of the others lacked. I felt that I got more emotional development over this one chapter of Vardaman’s than in Anse’s or Darl’s entire story.

Which is Better the Movie or the Book?

I really liked O Brother, Where Art Thou? and most of my friends that had seen it shared the opinion. It was an enjoyable movie and the songs and action were fun and the characters were likable.

When watching O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I saw it as more enjoyable when I viewed it as a stand-alone film as opposed to an adaptation of The Odyssey. The appeal of hero stories to me is definitely the characters and I think that the characters in O Brother, Where Art Thou? are more likable when they aren’t compared to the Odyssean characters. I want to watch the movie because I care about the story because of Everett or Tommy or whoever, not because I'm interested in the retelling of a heroic narrative that I've heard so many times before. The Odyssey wasn’t particularly likable in my opinion because neither Odysseus nor Telemachus were especially likable characters. So when I think of Everett as a version of Odysseus, I care less about his story.

However, I think that if you don't watch the movie as an adaptation of The Odyssey, the plot takes a hit. The movie seems to just be a jumble of events that don't seem to really have any strong connection. However, when you look at them in the context of The Odyssey, you begin to see the parallels and the story seems to come together a bit more. When watching the movie, the sirens, the lotus eaters, the cyclops, etc, all seem so random until you see them as their Odyssean counterparts.

So if possible, I believe that this movie is best seen as a combination of a stand-alone film and as a film adaptation. However, I think this is hard to do. I think either way you watch it, either the plot or the characters take a hit.

Crying

Throughout the entirety of The Odyssey, Odysseus cries all the time. In today’s modern society, masculinity seems to be a very fragile thing. Male friends in a modern context are often called gay or feminizing terms if they are physically affectionate with their male friends or if they show weakness of any sort.

Emotions like sadness and fear are seen as feminine and unacceptable for men to experience or display, but in The Odyssey, these emotions are supposed to be humanizing. When Odysseus cries it’s meant to endear him to us readers and show that he really is sad and he really is affected by being kept away from his life and family for so long.

Another instance of Odysseus showing “unmasculine” emotion is when he fears for his life when faced with fighting the horde of suitors. As we discussed in class, this could be a tactic to show the audience that the suitors were a reasonable foe for Odysseus and their slaughter was something to be admired, but still, a male hero being afraid isn’t something we’re too used to in modern contexts. It could be argued that this fear only enhances his masculinity because it makes him brave, in that he was afraid but he conquered his enemies anyways. Also, is it a trial if there is no fear? If he is confident all the time, what kind of hero would he be? There wouldn’t be any triumph; it’d just be an “I told you so” kind of ending.

However, all of these “weak” emotions are balanced out by a stereotypically male penchant for affairs with women and a thirst for blood. But either way, perhaps the gender roles in ancient Greece were different than those we are familiar with today.