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Upcoming events

It was good seeing Marjorie at Prof. Franklin's talk. I hope she'll post something on the blog...here are some upcoming events to consider attending. One of THE best things about being in college, or teaching in college, is the opportunity to attend talks and theater and movies and concerts:


In the coming two weeks, you might attend one of the following:

--Thurs., Feb. 2 at 3 p.m. in Kuykendall 410, Anne Kennedy and Susan Schultz will be reading from their creative work.

--Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Art Auditorium, Patricia Grace, an important Maori/Pacific writer, will be reading.

--Thursday, Feb. 9 at 3 in the Kuykendall Auditorium, Patricia Grace and others on "Indigenizing the Novel in Aotearoa: The Role of Culture and Identity." Grace is one of those writers you really should see.

aloha, Susan

Your next essay

Please read this carefully! Sorry I didn't have it earlier. Just so you know, I'm going to assign grades to this essay and those that follow. So remember the following words: detail, specificity, precision and, of course, semi-colon!

English 100
January 25, 2006
Susan M. Schultz


Essay (Anzualdua / Kanae / You)


Write three pages on one of the following topics. Your essay will be due next Wednesday. Send to me via email, so that we can do a class workshop on Thursday. Ignore the bad scheduling for next week on the regular syllabus.



1. Under “Assignments for Writing” on page 87 of Ways of Reading, do number 1, which asks you to write your own “mixed text” about your life. Read the assignment carefully before starting to write.


2. Using Sista Tongue as your model, write about an incident in your own life as a speaker and writer. Use design elements to accentuate your meaning.


3. Write a dialogue between Lisa Kanae and Paolo Freire, in which they discuss the implications of multiple language use and education.

"Sista Tongue" review

To me, the layout of the book acted as a puzzle that kept the reader occupied and interested. It kept me continuously reading because it was just sort of eye-catching. It kind of helped to make the assignment part of it disappear and seem like something I was just doing for fun. We had said in class that the size of the font affected how the material was read. For me I noticed that it didn’t really have an impact on how I read the memoir parts; I just read according to how I would speak it out loud to someone. It did, however, affect the way I viewed the academic portion. As I read it, it seemed to me that the bigger the font was the more important that portion was; I took it as the main topic of the sentence. I think the spaces act as an aid in the way a reader reads the material. I think the spaces are there to let the reader think between lines about what’s going on in the story.

Kanae’s argument is that Pidgin is not a speech impediment but rather a type of cultural identity. Pidgin speakers in Hawaii are looked down upon because “they no can speak good English”, but for them it’s just like a different language. It is treated as a disability, but in actuality it shouldn’t.

Personally, I do speak Pidgin. I don’t speak it in public to others, though, because I know a lot of people who don’t speak Pidgin disapprove of it. It’s not my “first language” and I don’t speak it just because I grew up in Hawaii; my friends and I speak Pidgin because it’s a fun way to just “chillax” and not worry about perfect grammar. I think if people don’t speak Pidgin they should try it sometime or watch a program with Pidgin in it; expand your horizons. :)

As for the purple cover, I’m not sure of the significance. In the memoir portion of the book there was reference to the book “Harold and the Purple Crayon”. Beside that, I don’t know the significance of the color purple…I heard it was a good movie though. (LoL, just playing around.)

"How to Tame a Wild Tongue" review

I personally have never taken a course in Spanish so I had some trouble understanding what was trying to be said. I was able, though, to get the gist of what was being said in Spanish because the English portion was written so that I as a reader could understand. Because Anzualdua did not translate most of the Spanish, it gave her piece “flare”, something that wouldn’t have been there if she had just written entirely in one language. If one was not familiar with the Spanish language, her writing in Spanish also kept the reader thinking “I wonder what that said,” which hopefully would hold the person’s interest and make them continue reading.

Anzualdua started off her piece with the headnote “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” (Ray Gwyn Smith). It gets a person thinking about what she’s trying to accomplish by quoting such a statement. I think that the point she’s trying to make is that war and taking away people’s identity, in this case their language, are both ways that hurt people. Taking away one’s language may not be bloody like war usually is, but it still causes unhappiness and distress.

Anzualdua’s main argument can be seen right off the bat in the headnote. Basically what she is trying to say is that there are many different people and languages and that no one should be told that their own way is wrong. (I hate to bring it up but) Language, in its own way, is like religion; everyone has their own way of doing it. Some people may think certain things are right and other things wrong. But who’s to say that it’s wrong? Everyone has his/her own beliefs which, hypothetically speaking, should not be question by anyone but one's self. Only the beholder should be able to question whether his/her own ways are correct (which can be based upon what is observed). No one else should be able to say that “this is the correct/wrong way.”

for Christine, especially

but looks interesting all around:



Writer and educator Jackie J. Kim will speak on "Finding Treasures:
Recording the Lives of First Generation Korean Women in Japan" on Thursday,
January 26, from 12:00 noon to 1:15 p.m., at the Center for Biographical
Research, Henke 325, 1800 East-West Road, on the UH Manoa
Campus. Admission is free.

After graduating from UH-Mänoa with a B.A. in journalism, Jackie J. Kim
joined the JET program, spending three years in Niigata, in northern Japan,
where she also became immersed in the local Korean community. Over the next
several years, while earning an M.A. from Sophia University and working as
a researcher at the University of Tokyo and in Yanji, China, her interest,
involvement, and work in that community deepened. A resulting collection of
ten extensive interviews, _Hidden Treasures: Lives of First-Generation
Korean Women in Japan,_ was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2005.

Writer and educator Jackie J. Kim¹s current work, _Songs of Redemption,_
traces the history of the women in her family from the coming of Christian
missionaries to Korea in the late nineteenth century, through the Japanese
colonial experience, the Korean War, and subsequent immigration to the
United States.

This presentation is part of the Brownbag Biography Seminar Series. For
more information about parking, or other Center events, contact the Center
for Biographical Research at 956-3774 or biograph@hawaii.edu. The Center
for Biographical Research Brown Bag Biography
The Center for Biographical Research Brown Bag Biography

Questions about SISTA TONGUE

hicomp

Here are some questions to consider as you read Lisa Linn Kanae's _Sista Tongue_ this week. I hope you enjoy this reading.

--What do you make of the layout of the book? Take a couple of pages and carefully consider how the layout affects your reading of them. What are the relationships between space and meaning (oh architects to be!).

--Kanae writes in several modes, including memoir (the stories about her little brother), academic essay (the Pidgin history), and extended quotation. Why? What does each kind of writing do for her, as the writer, and for you, as the reader?

--What is Kanae's argument about the status of Pidgin speakers in Hawai`i? What does it have to do with the story about her brother being sent to a special school? Where do you find this argument in the book?

--(for fun): Why do you think the designer chose purple for the book cover?

aloha, sms

hicomp

hicomp
When to Blog

I see I wasn't clear about when I'd like you to blog. I'd like to have your entries by class-time on Thursdays, so that I know what you're thinking before class (and please do not send them to me 5 minutes before class, rather before noon). Remember that writing once a week to the blog is a course requirement. Don't feel self-conscious, just write!

aloha, Susan S.

hicomp

hicomp

Extra credit for anyone who writes a letter to the editor to the Washington Post on the following article. (Read it, in any case, and weep.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011801429_5.html

aloha, sms

Event you might want to attend

Remember the requirement to attend events in the community?
This guy is amazing--I saw him on CSPAN one day. He wrote one of the very first histories of African Americans, among many other important books. He's 90 years old, but you wouldn't know it to see and hear him.


>> A Conversation with JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN
>> Led by James O. Horton
>>
>> Tuesday, January 24, 2006
>> Korean Studies Center Auditiorium
>> 3:30-4:30 p.m. Public lecture and conversation
>> 4:40-5:00 p.m. Booksigning
>>
>> http://www.hawaii.edu/amst/images/flyer_franklin.pdf
>>
>> Sponsored by:
>> The Office of Student Equity Excellence & Diversity
>> Department of American Studies
>> http://www.hawaii.edu/amst/news_amst.htm
>>
>

hidden reactions

I found these two reactions in the comments section of my Anzualdua post. Please post long comments to the blog itself. Here goes, by Jennifer and Christine:

1. Since I do not read Spanish, my first thought was to have my sister, who reads and speaks Spanish, explain the words to me. Anzaldua does not translate many of these words because these words represent who she is as a Chicana.

2. Anzaldua speaks many of these languages in order to properly represent her various ethnic backgrounds. Robbing people of their language is effectively annihilating part of a culture. Essentially, this act is as violent as war, because it is the forceful changing of a way of life that is unwarranted and completely uncalled for.

3. Anzaldua uses a Chicana style of writing, a “TexMex” style of writing, and a standard “Mexican Spanish” style of writing, among others. She employs all of these styles to not only represent her various backgrounds, but to also show the difficulty of being from all of these backgrounds. “With Mexicans I’ll try to speak either Standard Mexican Spanish or the North Mexican dialect… I picked up Chicano Texas Spanish… With Chicanas from Nuevo Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Spanish a little, but often they don’t understand what I’m saying” (Anzaldua 79). She also makes another good point: “Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure… if a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me. Often with mexicanas y latinas we’ll speak English as a neutral language. Even among Chicanas we tend to speak English… Yet, at the same time, we’re afraid the other will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish… There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience” (Anzaldua 81).

4. I believe Anzaldua’s greatest point is “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity -- I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself… I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue -- my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence” (Anzaldua 82). No one should be ashamed of their ethnic identity, even if it may not be popular. As soon as other people in your ethnic group see that you are proud to be who you are, then they too may feel empowered to be proud of their ethnic identity.

12:16 AM

Christine Lim said...

I wasn't sure if we were supposed to put up a new blog or leave the responses as a comment. I'm sorry if I'm wasn't supposed to do it like this.


Response to "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"

1. I only studied Spanish in high school, so I barely understood what was written here. However I did recognize some words from class and those that are similar to English, so I was able to read some of the phrases. Anzualdua doesn’t translate Spanish in order to keep her identity. Also, the intonation and what the author truly means to write tend to get lost when sentences are translated from one language to another.

2. The languages are significant because although they share the same root, Standard English or Spanish, and yet it is almost like a different tongue. Unless one is familiar with the region or group that speaks it they cannot understand it, giving a strong sense of character.
Through the phrase Anzualdua reflects her experiences with what she spoke. Because the school taught in English she was forbidden to speak Spanish in any way. By this, an important part of her was taken away. This is also true for the quote Anzualdua chose for her head note. When a language is taken away from the people, a vital part of their culture has also been stolen. Without a culture, what can the people say they are? For that reason, no one say that robbing a language is less violent than war.

3. Anzualdua uses Standard English, Chicano Spanish, and Tex-Mex, although I’m not exactly sure of the types of Spanish she uses. She applies the different ways to present her background and experiences that allowed her to pick up certain tongues. Anzualdua writes that she uses different dialects towards different audiences. It is possible she wrote in different ways so an audience who has gone through what she has can relate to her. For readers who do not understand, she illustrates the complexity to handle all these languages.

4. Throughout this whole essay she stresses the value of tongue to any ethnicity. Therefore, language is crucial when describing one’s ethnic identity. She asserts this best, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language… my tongue will be illegitimate.” (Anzualdua 81)

2:00 AM

hicomp

hicomp

Tinfish show

Please stop by the Art Department's Commons Gallery and take a look at the exhibit of Tinfish covers. I'm the editor of Tinfish Press, so I have my reasons! This would count as one of your "what you usually don't do" items, unless of course you haunt the Commons Gallery on a regular basis.

aloha, sms

hicomp

hicomp

"How to Tame a Wild Tongue," by Gloria Anzualdua

There are study questions at the end of the Gloria Anzualdua essay, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," which I'm asking you to read for Thursday. Here they are in a shorter form, along with some of mine. Think about them as you read.

1. If you do not read Spanish, how do you read this essay? Why does Anzualdua not translate most of the Spanish, do you think? If you do read Spanish, what are some of the obstacles she presents? How do you deal with them?

2. What are some of the significances of the languages Anzualdua speaks? Why does she use as her headnote: "Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?" (Ray Gwyn Smith)

3. What are some of the styles of writing that Anzualdua uses in her essay? Why does she write in so many different ways?

4. What is Anzualdua's argument? Where does she state it best?

hicomp

Happy MLK Day


For a transcript and recording of Dr. King's famous "I have a dream" speech, go to http://americablog.blogspot.com for January 16. It's worth listening to the speech. See if you can tell where Dr. King stops _reading_ and starts _improvising_ .

aloha, Susan

Welcome to hicomp

Aloha. This will be your place to write reactions to the reading, to class discussions, to events in the community; please post your reactions at least once a week, the other items as you wish. Here's hoping for a wonderful semester.

aloha, Susan S.