Walled Women

Dear 360'ers--
Barb, Jody and I would like to invite you to have dinner with us, to celebrate the conclusion of our
shared work together this semester (not to mention plotting some on-going connections and elaborations….?).

We're proposing that we do this @ 5 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 17, @ my place in center city.

We're going to order in, so please tell us what you'd like to (or cannot/will not) eat.

Getting yourself there would involve taking the R5 to Market East, then walking south
four blocks to 903 Clinton, 2R (it's just above 9th Street, between Pine and Spruce).

Let us know if you'd like to--and can!--make it?
 
Hopefully, and happily,
Anne (for us 3)

As one unique representative of Asian cultures, Chinese culture has more traditions than many other countries. Among all these traditions, women remain in a disadvantageous for over 2000 years. The history doesn’t include the appropriate proportion of women until recent century. It’s impossible to understand Maxing Hong Kinston’s The Women Warrior without a broader background of Chinese culture as well as the environment where Chinese American live. Author made her way through to find a voice for herself under the Chinese culture castle.

Girls are told to be quite and silence is considered as a means of self-protection. The term “ghost” is used extensively throughout the article. Such a term was generally used by Chinese people to call foreigners. The phrasing ghost and ghost country clearly impose negative indications considering the unpleasant history every time when westerners showed up in the Chinese territory. The hostility and resistance towards these foreigners, whose appearance and cultures are distinctive in general, never disappeared. Such fear in addition of uncertainties in a new country made silence a default choice for a large group of Chinese Americans from the beginning.

Reading Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man, it was clear to me that Eva was oppressed, silenced. I saw her as a victim, and felt really bad for her and sad to think how many other women have had similar experiences. Through our class discussion, however, I began to consider that maybe it wasn’t as simple as that. It was couldntthinkofanoriginalname who first brought this to our collective attention in her post, Reflections on Eva’s Man: “all characters… are apart of a cycle of abuse…there is a larger conversation to be had about this book. One that touches upon male's oppression… and internalized sexism…” It was so easy for me at first to write off the men in Eva’s Man as oppressors, representations of the patriarchy at work. I then realized that everyone in this book, just like everyone in the world, is a victim of the patriarchy, and as such is silenced. Throughout the book, Eva chooses silence, as do some many other characters, and I began to wonder how much agency they actually had, if those silences were only chosen due to the way in which society represses and restricts. Thinking about Adrienne Rich’s analysis of silence as lying what role did Eva’s silences play in her abuse and mistreatment and is this something that she or anyone else ever has control over?

While reading Eva’s Man, initially, I did not find her silence troublesome.  She sounded like another sexual assault victim who was too traumatized by the abuse and the act of killing to verbalize the effects of them. It was not until I read Freedom’s Silences by Wendy Brown did I begin to realize the complexities of Eva’s silence—as if the fragmented narratives in the book did not hint at them already. I now realize that Eva’s silence, in both being quiet and omitting vital information about her past and the murder, throughout the book  is not as simple as her choosing to be quiet and choosing when to speak just for the hell of it. Better yet, I find that her silence, or lack thereof, speaks to the dangers, mentioned in Brown’s essay, of codifying someone’s experience when one chooses to break silence….or remain in it. Thus, I wish to explore the consequences of Eva breaking or maintaining silence, in regards to her sexuality, through the lens of Brown in hopes of relating her story to a larger, much more pressing issue in the African-American/Black community.

As someone who has grown up in a household of artists, I’ve always had a special reverence for people’s creations. Though my mother was highly critical of her own work, there was a general sense that destroying it was in some way not acceptable. I took that to heart. My sisters’ drawings have all been kept. Old storybooks I made have just resurfaced from basement boxes. Our childhood voices are kept alive through this reverence for creation and imagination. It was for this reason that I struggled to understand an experience Maxine Hong Kingston wrote about in her memoir Woman Warrior (1975).  For three years as a child, she painted over all of her artwork in black and covered up anything she wrote on the blackboard so that it couldn’t be read or seen. I struggled to understand her motives and also her complacency for what I read as a huge loss. Then I began to think of this action as a form of silence. Tillie Olsen touches on the different types of silences that exist in her essay “Silences” (1962) and these silences can be read into Hong Kingston’s blacking out.

Close the Gaps

Eva’s Man by Gayl Jones chronicles the hectic, fractured life of Eva Medina Canada, whose existence has been tormented by sexual and emotional violence since girlhood. In a haunting, tangible parallel to the chaos of Eva’s experience, the novel’s narrative becomes increasingly more broken as the story progresses – eventually unraveling into a continuous narrative stream with little distinction between memory and reality. Jones’ masterful mirroring of content with form serves to draw readers in and engage them in a psychological state of chaos and confusion, not dissimilar from that of Eva’s emotional turmoil. By creating this twin experience, Jones effectively closes the social gap between readers and the story’s protagonist thus sustaining the ability for a deeper, more generative connection with the novel and its presentation of the female experience.

As a connoisseur of crime-based reality television shows like Dateline and 20/20, it was not difficult to understand what drew me to Eva’s Man. Beyond just the enticing content, however, the novel’s structure allows for readers to truly feel as though they are within the story. My loss of direction and feeling of confusion were productive in that they served to parallel the downward spiral of Eva’s emotional state as witnessed through her hectic story-telling and grim outcome of incarceration. In this way, the act of reading Eva’s Man provided an experience that allowed me to engage more deeply with the content.

I spent my memo thinking a lot about niches and privacy and how the two were connected. One of the things that really inspired that was considering my own niche. Here's the representation I did of it on Friday! (see also my response to Anne's question about interim spaces as niches for an explanation of this particular aspect of my niche).