“Funny All Her Life”:

Race, Place, and the Coming-Out Narrative in Getting Mother’s Body

P1: Introduction

A. Introduce character of Dill

B. Dill’s identity is not explicitly named, though implied throughout the book—no “coming out” moment

C. Trans theorists of Color call the uselessness of (and privilege imbedded in) the coming out narrative

D. Thesis: “Coming out” in the traditional sense would be useless and damaging to Dill—rather, by living openly but without claiming a community or label, they can protect their life and home.

P2: Dill’s “Secret”

“He told her, ‘Of course you will deliver abroad,’ and asked which she preferred, America or England... Aunty Uju chose America, because her baby could still have automatic citizenship there.” (Adichie 102)

The Book of Salt, as the title would suggest, takes many approaches to salt. Binh continually comes back to it to enrich his storytelling; like adding salt to food, adding salt enhances the themes, narrative, and messages of the story. The immediate association between Binh and his story and salt is for cooking, as he’s a cook. Salt is many things in Truong’s novel: it adds to metaphors and recipes, creates stories by words and by senses.

This course has been an academic experience unlike any other that I’ve had.  Never before have I found myself in a class setting that is simultaneously open and engaging.  In other classes with a similar relaxed setting, I’m rarely able to give my undivided attention to the topic of discussion.  However, this class was easy for me to participate in.  The group discussions were always interesting and valuable.

Only a few things are assigned at the moment of birth. Even name can be held off from reporting: height, weight, parental identification and nationality are really the only identifiers an infant has immediately. From then on, it affects most things about that person’s life, including what rights and resources they should have access to and how they move in and out of countries and communities. Taiye Selasi’s TEDtalk “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m local” calls to shift from nationality to locality when determining how geography affects identity. She offers a defining framework of “3 R’s: rituals, relationships, restrictions.”  This uses cultural practices, important people, and identity-shaping privilege to allow people to choose for themselves regional identity markers.

In her novel “All Over Creation” Ruth Ozeki uses the characters to explore different family dynamics and the way they affect the individual.  The difference between the way Yumi raises her children and the way she was raised by her parents is striking.  While her parents (especially her father, Lloyd) took an authoritarian, heavy-handed approach to raising her, Yumi instead takes an authoritative and lax approach to raising her own children.  Although it is clear that her parents truly loved her, as a teenager Yumi felt suffocated by their judgements of her.  In her first letter to her parents, she explains that she was sure that their shame “was going to fill every crack in the house, seep into every second of the day, and suck the air right out of me.” (Ozeki 37).

the posts i thought about but did not write

missing class #1: black at bryn mawr

The image I choose is of a US soldier breaking down a door bringing freedom to all. Actually it is more a critique of the society we, Americans, live in and the pretenses as a first world country that we only do good for developing or "backward" countries like Iraq. The connection to my post is that all my responses dealt with and in someways question our roles and our idenities and hopeful pushed for a more cohesive attempt at freedom and equality.

here are the poems that were meant to go with my paper (they're inserted into different sections of the final). 

(edit: i'm including the final as well... it's attached below.)

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(1)   when i was a child i did not like bananas
they tasted foreign and uncomfortable in my mouth,
yellow peel giving way to grainy softness giving way to sweet grit on my tongue and the aftertaste -- white
i spat them out onto the table and shook my head at my mother
don’t feed me that

much later, i would learn that banana is a term for an (east) Asian who is
“yellow on the outside and white on the inside”
it made me want to spit the word out of my mouth
wipe the taste from my tongue

my paper actually has several pieces to it, so i'm attaching the final project as it's meant to look here.

i'll upload the poems separately in their own post.

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