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Goodbye

I figured that since I'll probably never open this Tumblr again and write another blog on here, it's only fair that my last blog pay homage to my very first blog on here about what I want from my education. I have a long way to go when it comes to my educational "career" but I'm happy to report that I found a lot of what I wanted in both Lang and Lit. It's going to be weird not entering to see you Mr.Kreinbring or sitting down with Natalie next to me grunting and exponentially increasing my stress from her own stress. It's been a good run and I hope that future kids don't take Lit and Lang for granted because no matter how much people lament about the class and say they can't wait to graduate, it's hard to say goodbye. So we come full circle and all of us seniors will soon become mere freshman again and enter another English class and become members of other tribes. Maybe this post will become lost in the void and never seen, but I just want everyone to remember me as the baddest hijabi Muslim you'll ever know. In the wise, actually understandable, words of Shakespeare, "parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow". Goodbye Mr.kreinbring and goodbye class of 2018. The best is yet to come.

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“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

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I F*ck with this

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Confused (at first)

So when I first my criticisms I was really nervous and confused because to me it didn't seem as though my articles criticism. Everyone was so confident in their sources and steaming on ahead and I was struggling with annotating. I even talked about my articles about Emily (who's doing the same book as me) and was even more stressed because she was confident with her sources as well. However, later on I realized my problem. See, I was taking the word criticisms very literally. I was thinking that the sources should actually criticize my author and bash on her and her writing style. Later on i figured out that that wasn't the case. It was talking more about the critical lens we learned earlier and about an analysis of our book, not actual criticisms per se. After my epiphany it was smooth sailing from then on.

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“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.”

— Bill Bullard (via fy-perspectives)

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World War 2

So when I was reading The Bluest Eye and looking out for influences, I was very surprised that World War 2 wasn’t mentioned at all. I was confused because the book was set in 1940-41 which would be in the middle of the war, but the characters acted like it was no big deal. It wasn’t even mentioned!

However, I was reading a piece of critism by Debra T. Werein, a composition professor at Heorge Mason University, and she talked about how the war wasn’t mentioned. She said that during war, history books make it seem that families supported the war, and lived peacefully. Domestic issues were hidden by the international parts. So as a way to shed light on the domestic tensions, Morrison wrote the book with a narrator and protagonist that no longer have innocence because of these problems. By not mentioning war, she is containing the focus toward the at home problems.

When I read this part of the critism I was shocked and very interested. I think she is right, history books have one paragraph about the Home life during a war, which almost makes it sound like it was a grand time, but it was far from it as seen by the girls in the Blues Eye. I don’t know if an influence could be avoiding talking about the war, but history books definitly played a role in what she included in her story.

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So even though our experience at the library with the copying machine was frustrating and annoying, I'm really happy with my experience. For one, I found a lot more sources available at OU than I had discovered on Google scholar and I low-key had anxiety that I wouldn't find any criticisms at the library, but I did! There was a whole section dedicated to Toni Morrison and Afro-American Literature criticisms!

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Influence- Pop Culture

Pop culture during this time period (1940-1941) were big influences in this book. Shirley Temple is brought up a lot in this book. She is thought of as beautiful by society because she is white and has blue ruse. However Chlaudia hates her because the world loves her since she is white. However Pecola and Frieda love Shirley, because that is the what the world wants them to do, and since she is like a dream to them, what they want to be.

Chlaudia shares her opinion when she says, “I couldn’t join them because I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, who ought to have been soft-showing it and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those white girls” (19). Pecola loves Shirley because she idols her, same as Frieda, but Claudia rejects these beauty standards, and sees the unfairness.

It is prominent that Shirley Temple is a big role because she helps create these beauty standards and influences others to believe them. She is what makes the world think the main characters are ugly.

Pop culture is brought up again when Maureen, a kind of friend, brings up the movie Imitation of Life. This movie is about a mixed girl, who loves her father because he is white, but hates her mother because she is Africa’s American and ugly. However she does cry when her mother dies. This reinforces the idea that society is making the world thing that you need to believe black people are ugly, even if that’s not what you actually believe.

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The beginning of the end

I finished my book and let me just say a few tears came out. Claudia and Frieda wanting to give their marigolds and money to Pecola made me cry because it reminds me of the kindness and innocence of children and how even in a bleak situation they can make things better. I also was angry and sad when Pecolas mom beat her half to death because she found out her husband got her pregnant. Also, Pecola gave birth to a stillborn 😭😭😭 I can't imagine the pain Pecola must have gone through and her imaginary friend was her way of coping. The only way Pecola received blue eyes when she lost her mind and instead of letting her see they seem to blind her from society and what is really going on around her. Pecola was a scapegoat for the community to push all of their hatred and hurt onto. Claudia says that the community became more beautiful because Pecola was ugly. Even with this sad ending Morrison somehow managed to create a hopeful tone. I think she was trying to make the audience understand that there is hope and redemption in telling stories and remembering them. Maybe in a strange way Pecola got everything she wanted and maybe in the future she finds happiness and joy. That's all I want for her.

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What the...

With a name like Soaphead Church you’d think that the soap would make him a clean-cut kind of guy and that Church would make him religious. Well, you thought wrong. Soaphead Church does not worship God, he worships Gods’ creations in the form of whiteness and young girls. He has a superiority complex because he is of mixed race and believes that he has a direct connection with God. He’s described as a “ a very clean old man” because he has a fetish for purity and that’s why he likes young, innocent girls. It makes me sad that Pecola comes to him to ask him to give her blue eyes. This whole character basically seems like a joke but I’m not laughing at all. I want to explore why Morrison portrays most of the main in this book as abusers, more specifically, as sexual abusers. It’s scary how powerful the idea of “whiteness” in his family is and how they go out of their way to marry the lightest skin people or resort to marrying within the family. This is exactly like some south asian families!! A lot of families, usually Pakistani, are known for marrying their cousins because they want to keep their bloodline pure and do not want to marry their children (more so daughters) to “complete strangers”. This purity thing causes the children of these wed locks to be born with many genetic disabilities and diseases. I was actually watching a documentary for fun a couple of weeks ago >>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkxuKe2wOMs. It was really sad and made me angry because even my extended family warn me not to marry a “negro” because our children will be dark and our family should only consist of bengalis. This is a horrendous mindset and in Islam is forbidden (to be racist and discriminate potential spouses based on skin color/race). I intend to break the cycle within my own family one day and let my kids know that there is not such thing as being more “pure” or even “better” than someone else. I’m not trying to bash my parents or family, but I think that we all learn from our parents on how we will raise our own family one day (whether it’s values to teach/not teach).

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Excuses, excuses

Woah, chapter 7 and 8 took us down memory lane for Cholly and their wife and what events happened in their live to make them the way they are now. I’m not sure whether this was Morrison’s intention, but it felt as though she described their pasts in order to make the audience almost sympathetic/empathetic towards Cholly and Pauline and we should excuse them for their behavior now. This kind of sympathy is TOXIC. It reminds me exactly of Nicolas Cruz. Thousands of people are saying that he was bullied in school and that people should not have been mean to him as though his personal struggle with bullying gives him an excuse to murder others in cold blood. Who you are as a person stems from who you choose to be. Who we are is a choice, our identity is not solely the manifestation and processing of what has happened to us in our past. Also when Cholly raped his daughter Pecola, that was f*cked up, and it reminded me of when the farmer in Invisible Man had sex with his daughter . Except, it was at least consensual in Invisible Man and the dad didn’t really go into bed with the intention of having sex with his daughter. The rape/incest was in Cholly’s POV which made me feel upset strange because it’s almost as though we were supposed to understand why he did it and there’s no excuse. Its weird to see such a contrast between Frieda and her father vs. Pecola with her father. Frieda’s father is protective of his daughter and beats up Hector who sexually abused Frieda while Cholly was the one who committed the unthinkable act towards his daughter. The only relationship a father can seem to have with his daughter seems to be an overprotective one or one in which he demeans his kin. Even though it was...different to see Cholly’s past and how it shaped him and his action, it wouldn’t matter whether or not it was in the novel. He did what he did and his past, no matter how traumatic, is no excuse. Also, when he blamed the white girl when he was caught having sex with her. He reminded me of those ignorant, unintelligent people who say that girls are asking for it when they get raped and blame women for everything bad that happens to them. Get out of here with that Bullsh*t.

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“Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?”

— Charles Lindbergh

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Disgusting

I read chapter 6 and I'm disgusted. Frieda was crying in her room because the man that lived with them sexually abused her and touched her inappropriately. She is still a child and instead of growing into her sexuality and sexual awareness as most people do and should, it was thrust in her face by a man who believed that he had some sort of right over her body. It really fired me up. I'm happy her father beat him up. I feel like as women, perhaps minority women more so (?), We have this long history of suffering sexual abuse. Almost as though it is written into our blood. In South Asian culture and women culture there's also this generational fear and cautioness of men, no matter how close they might be. If a male relative who my mom is wary of is staying with us my mom will constantly remind me to lock my door when I go to sleep at night. Maybe this type of thinking is not right, but when I think of what happened to Frieda and what other abuse girls go through by males it reinforces my wariness of men and makes me question their real motives. I'm not going to ignore the other side because men also suffer through sexual abuse and their pain and struggle is just as real as a woman's. However, maybe I'm just ignorant, but I don't think that men who suffer abuse from women are necessarily wary of the opposite gender. Maybe women are more wary because, let's be honest, men are naturally stronger than women and we have this awareness that men have the upper hand in strength and dominance (most of the time anyway).

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Internalized Racism

We meet a new “class of black” in chapter five. Geraldine is an upper-class black woman who has a son, junior, but her only real affection is for her cats. It was interesting to see her/junior’s attitude towards Pecola, someone of their race, but someone they still discriminate against. I think there is internal racism within every ethnic group, including caucasian. People like to believe that they are superior to others in their own race. Obviously, since I am not black, I cannot speak for their race, but in my perspective, I feel like society usually separates blacks into two different categories. Rich blacks vs. middle class/poor  blacks. The novel seems to highlight this through the use of respectable “colored” people vs. “niggers”. Kind of playing on colorism, even in south asian culture, we treat our own people with darker skin worse than those who are light skin. In an article I read written by Toni Morrison (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-color-fetish), she talks about how if you aren’t the “purest” in your race your own people exclude you and how the theme of color fetish in “The Bluest Eye” showcases its massively destructive force.