Creative Writing Exercises (direct someone in the voice that you know)

Put the kettle on and put the coffee in the pressé. Don’t put too much. Pour the water in the pressé. (“How much?”) Until about there. Squidge it a few times (demonstrates) and then pour it into the cup. Get a clean cup (gets cup for me) and don’t let there be any floaty things in there.

DON’T TALK TO ANYBODY. DON’T LOOK AT ANYBODY. KICK. SCREAM. (“All the usual stuff….”) But do that. Be safe. Look around you. Be aware of your surroundings. Don’t talk to anybody and you won’t be in that situation. No one would be able to dupe you. (“They wouldn’t even get close enough, let’s be real.”) Yes. (Laughs) I fear for the person who tries to do that to you. You’re so hard! You’re like Auntie Ester! We always joke about how she keeps Uncle Glen in line.

Poetry Project Journal

1. I think that my readings of the poem were the most successful in my presentation. I really made sure I knew what the poem was talking about so that I could give the most accurate and emotional reading of the poem and make sure that the meaning came through. I think that my articulation of my analysis could have been a lot better than it was. I knew what I wanted to say but completely disregarded my notes and I think that I ended up not being as clear as I could have been. I liked that a reading of a poem was required as a part of the project because I think that poetry can really only be experienced well out loud. However, I think that the parameters of the project were too vague. A list of easily recognizable poets from the anthology might have been better to choose from, instead of the whole anthology, because I found that with my poet there wasn't that much information to be found on him and his poems were all very similar in terms of motif and theme. It also wasn't immediately clear what we were supposed to be talking about, which made the project a lot harder to execute.

2. In my presentation, I focused mainly on the motifs of Tchicaya U Tam'si's poetry. A blanket term for them would be dichotomies, because he seems to pair ideas that are two sides of the same coin; fire and water, earth/metal and flesh/blood, and death and resurrection. Almost all of his poems have to do with death/rebirth and the single motif of flesh/blood. In"Brush Fire", this is shown in the line, "the feet the hands" (line 3); in the first of Four poems from Épitomé, this is shown in line four, "in your black blood". This idea is subtly addressed in "The Scorner" as it deals with a relationship with Jesus, who's last supper came the idea of communion; the partaking in the body and blood of Christ. Nature is in almost all of his poems as well, with words such as "water", "salt", "fire", "river", "sand", "flames", and "bronze". I think that he deals with the connection of flesh/blood and nature because he was very influenced by the Négritude movement, which came about as a way to restore black self-worth in the waste of French post-colonialism. The colonies in Africa have a long history with slavery, and by using the ideas that constitute slavery (the passage of flesh over bodies of water), he is helping to reconcile their past and build their future, economically (possibly through sea trade) and culturally.

3. Similarities can be drawn between my poet, Tchicaya U Tam'si from Congo-Brazzaville) and Matt Bentley's poet, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo from Madagascar. On the surface, both were from former French colonies, and both were influenced by Surrealism and wrote their pieces in French, and in some cases used similar structure. Textually however, the similarities continue. To me, Rabéarivelo's poem "18" is very similar to U Tam'si's poem "A Mat to Weave". Both tell the plight of a man who is not just a man and who people are trying to muzzle and suppress. The poems have similar word choices, as shown in the lines, "why crystals in his blood/why globules in his laughter" ("A Mat to Weave" lines 3-4) and "A thousand particles of glass/fall from his hands" ("18" lines 9-10). They both concern hard and luminescent things that are formed at great pressure ("crystals" "glass") being in close contact and/or stemming from delicate parts of the body ("hands" "blood"). This idea can be extrapolated to post-colonial Africa in that the people have been hardened from being colonized but that this hardness comes from the pressure that has grown inside them from the French assimilation tactics and the degradation of their race through colonization. Rabéarivelo's poem "14" is also similar in content to U Tam'si's poem "Brush Fire". Both concern the ocean and natural bodies of water, and the idea of the people being tied to the water. The line "my race/it flows here and there a river" ("Brush Fire" lines 7-8) and "and we shall only see/her hair spread by the wind" ("14" lines 12-13) both convey the idea that the African people have been spread and pushed and pulled by the currents and tides of nature, but that this diaspora has been forced and universal.

Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard

He writes of the ocean like someone who grew up with it. I should know. That was the main overarching thing that I found in his writing. Living beside the ocean for 12 years, it leaves a major impact on your life. It is a powerful, living, organ that pulsates and thrives. It takes and it gives away. I think that Tati-Loutard used the ocean as a sort of subtle metaphor. All of his poems had this kind of fatalistic tone which reminds me of the ocean. Especially in the poem, End of Flight. That poem is about a bird being shot by a man and being tossed and turned by the ocean. The way it was written suggests that the birds death is inevitable and that the man's part in it was inevitable too. Turning it into a metaphor, the bird is freedom and the man is humanity and I think that is symbolizes the idea that we always want freedom but will not hesitate to sacrifice it. The ocean however, takes it, and rolls with it, humans not affecting the tide. The ocean is something that takes and gives away and there is nothing that you can do about that. His poems also concerned oppression and the oppressed which ties in with the idea that the ocean is essentially neither of these things, although by taking away life (tsunamis, drowning etc) it is the oppressor and is oppressed by humans (pollution, mining, etc). Overall, the ocean is a prevalent idea in his writings although I am unsure as to what role it fills. It is, however, an important part of the author's life as he references it in every poem. He is, as said in the poem Letter to Edouard Maunick, "Ready to offer the ocean my nautilic soul".

Poetry Vocab

• stanza
• sonnet
• Petrarchan
• Shakespearean
• Iambic pentameter
• Iambic hexameter
• Meter
• quatrain
• haiku
• simile
• metaphor
• line
• epigram
• villanelle
• diction
• epic
• sestina
• personification
• alliteration
• consonance
• assonance
• ultimate/penultimate
• oxymoron
• paradox
• allusion
• allegory
• tone/voice
• trajectory/development
• volta
• narrative
• repetition
• rhyme
• rhyme scheme
• slant
• sprung rhyme
• emphasis
• double entendre
• denotation/connotation
• hyperbole
• poet/speaker
• syntax
• grammar/punctuation
• POV
• voice
• tone
• mood
• form (how)/content (what)

Free Write

Wishes

I wish you wouldn't say things like that to me, because I know that they're probably true.


"She was like, 'You are such a weird child. I don't think you're mine.'"


I know you meant it as a joke, but I know how she treats you. I know all of it. I wish that she loved you like my mother loves me. Sure, it's a bit stifling, but at least I know that there are arms holding me up when I fall and when I am so lonely I want to break. You don't have that and it shows and I know it. I don't know what to do for you.

I wish I didn't think about you last night. All night. From the second I got home, talking to my parents, taking my trance nap, trance-dreaming about you, and then waking up and trying to do homework and thinking about you some more and then falling asleep and dreaming about you and then eating breakfast the next day, your face the only clear thing in my dream deprived haze. I wish I didn't think about you at all. Because it hurts me so much more than you will ever know, but it wouldn't be fair of me to make this your problem.


I'm sorry. I've said too much.


I wish that things were different for us. I wish we weren't so far away from each other. I wish that I could be the friend you want me to be and that we will never grow apart. But I have a feeling we might. I would rather die than branch off from you. I hope you know that. You are the last thing back home that I actually care about.


I wish I loved you more. I wish that I could go back to you and be a little kid again. Hike through your canyons and stay out on your suburban streets later than a child should. But I can't. Home is only home because of the people in it. I'm not too fond of the people right now. They push and pull and push and pull and think money always matters to me when it rarely ever matters to me at all. I don't want to come back to you because I don't want to deal with their drama, and their heartache, and the way they've internalized things that they really shouldn't; the way they don't know how to live without something negative in their lives. I don't want that, so I don't want you.


I wish you were the only thing that I loved. I wish that I wanted to be good at you and I wish that I could make a living in your art form. But I can't. That's too unstable for me and I don't know how to handle it. I'm not ruthless. I don't want to be so good at what you are that I can't sleep at night for thoughts of pas de chat and frappes. For quadruple pirouettes and ron de jambe en l'air. I can't do that. I want to have a life too, not just you.

African Short Stories: Commentary on Style

All of the stories seem to be written in a very similar voice. It is a refined and clear voice, one that is very concise. They are very straightforwardly written, but have meaning woven into them. This worked quite well in Minutes of Glory, which is probably one of my favorite pieces in anthology. I liked how it causally and clearly brought up the conflicts that surround the 'Anglicizing' of women in beauty (i.e. lightening their skin, straightening their hair, etc) and men's reaction to it. I like how it explored the women who are often marginalized in society and their quest to reach noteriety. I also liked how she managed to become someone confident and in control through material things and then be arrested.

Another story I liked stylistically was Bossy. Apparently we weren't supposed to read it, but I did anyways. I liked how it was written in a series of letters that are sent to only one person. I think that is a very interesting device to use because the characters can be more vulnerable in a letter and writing a letter is more about them and their thoughts. It also lends itself to a little mystery, as you never know who is supposed to be receiving the letter and you don't know a lot of the backstory because it would not make sense for friends to provide information about their backstory to each other. It allows the reader to become fully immersed in the story quite quickly.

I felt that a lot of stories in the Northern Africa section were focused on seemingly innocuous situations but that really led to important revelations about the culture and the society. I liked reading them because they allowed for some thinking but they weren't overly dense.

Certain Winds from the South was also an interesting read as the story was very focused on the mother, even though the story was not happen to her. I liked how the daughter's words were omitted. It made reading a little difficult (this is experienced with the anecdotal story of Memunat) but it added a certain depth to the character of the daughter, while allowing the story to focus on the mother. It would be hard to write a portion of a story with only one person speaking, but I think that it is an effective way to establish who the character is and adds certain characteristics to the character that would be otherwise hard to place on them conventionally.

Male and Female Roles

The role of women in this book is very interesting. There are three couples in the story. There is one old couple, Anowa and her husband Kofi, and Anowa's parents. Anowa is constantly referenced as being strange. She even thinks herself to be abnormal. But I don't think she is the only one. She and Kofi seem to be the inverse of their traditional gender roles. Kofi seems to actually love Anowa, as he is content with her being his only wife and wants her to be the one that he spends the rest of his life and has his children with. Anowa, however, wants to live her own life and wander. Children are not her first priority and she would rather stay home and work. I think that they are interesting characters because they don't ascribe to traditional gender roles, yet they are the main characters. It makes reading the play a different experience than the one we have had so far, simply because the characters are completely different to any characters we had encountered up to this point.

I think that all of the male characters in the play are different than the ones in the books we have read so far. They are usually quite laid back and they enjoy working but seem to mostly be sitting around and they stay stationery. They seem to defer to the women more than any of their previous counterparts. They definitely appreciate their wives and know that their lives wouldn't be able to function without them. It's quite interesting to read, because the story is set in the 1800's and yet there seems to be more equality among the genders than we've seen in history at the time and the stories we've read.

The women are quite opinionated and feisty. They know what they want to do and often inform their husbands as a sort of afterthought. They are aware of the position that their society has placed them in, but it seems that they have adopted their posts so completely that ideas of their social standing seem to come straight from the women.