Today’s lesson closes the circle on my Zoom-thwarted images lesson. After that, we’ll do a little practice with linking out, another blog post “basic” we could do some work with.
We’ll practice by linking out to each other’s work. These don’t need full citations for the moment. Hopefully by the end of class we’ll have moved on to open-internet sources or library sources from outside out class community. All that is positioning us for next week’s work getting ready for Essay 3.
It’s not clear why this came up in a search under “teaching fails” but I assure you, when it comes to marbles, I haven’t totally lost mine. Image credit: “Marble collector” by smkybear, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Here’s the basic timetable for the rest of the month (this is basically the same as the syllabus but a little more detailed):
T, Nov 16: “Work Day”: Come ready to produce an outline for Essay 3 in Google Docs. The prompts are basically the same as the ones in the post for Class 16. I’ve also updated the Assignment Sheet page for Essay 3 You’ll mainly work in groups with others who have read the same book. For this week, the blog post (your last one!) is due on Thursday (though you can get it done early).
H, Nov 18: Blog posts due; portfolio work in class; sourcework assignment
T, Nov 23: Peer Editing Day, Essay 3
H, Nov 25: THANKSGIVING
T, Nov 30: Essay 3 due to Google Forms. You’ll publish it to your portfolio once I return it with comments.
In part three of Heavy, we come to find that these times are vital to Laymon’s personal growth and future. In part three as Kiese begins college and his mother goes away for work he develops a freedom that causes him to make choices that affect his life tremendously. We see how he tries to find himself through his struggles and his reaction to them. As Laymon tries to create this image of being fantastic/perfect he leads himself into a difficult position of trying to fit in with the white folks or be even better. Laymon tries to fight his problems with food, specifically cakes. He faces obstacles that are out of his control such as being accused of plagiarism and being in Laymon’s position trying to prove his worth, understanding how life and society can only get worse makes him feel frustrated and hopeless which is why he turns to certain addictions liking eating we see these when he says “Cakes never fought back.”(Laymon 123). In this expression that he gives we see that he finds a sense of comfort, privacy and safety, this is important for Laymon because it explains how he gets attached to foods and and his perception of them because the he feels like the world is against him and that the odds to be successful or pursue a healthy lifetstyle seem impossible. As the section continues we see Laymon trying to break boundaries and discover who he is and this leads him to be authentic in a newspaper speaking out on the racism that occurs at Millsaps College. This spirals into other problems which only make Laymons situation more difficult as he is threatened and told by his own mother not to write those things even though she knows what he is experiencing or writing true which puts Laymon in a state of conflict with his decisions. We see true growth from Laymon as he decides to start exercising to get in better shape. This along with his writing are two major factors that help him on his journey to understanding who he is and who he wants to become. Kiese takes a lot of initiative in this section as he becomes older and more independent and we see how this cause of events shape him to become the man he is.
‘and I am going to keep telling this if it kills me’ – Audre Lorde, “For the Record”
In this section we go along with Jaquira Diaz through several dark moments. It first begins with her suicidal thoughts and the first attempts she made on her life. This part of the section is hard to read because she starts off when she was eleven years old and attempted to kill herself. Her mother was abusing her and Diaz truly did not feel her life had any importance. She wanted to test how her mother truly felt so she swallowed all her pills and waited in the living room for her. The second time was after her mother threatened Diaz with a steak knife, claiming that Diaz was not her daughter. She finally stopped the attack after telling her own daughter to her face “You are so small I could squash you. You are nobody. You are nothing.” (Diaz, pg 158) After that Diaz swallowed all of her mother’s pills and locked herself in her room.
The chapter ‘Secrets’ which is located at the end of the section, was the hardest for me to read. She thinks back to after she left the navy and came back to Miami beach, when she got sexually assaulted, presumably raped in an alley. This brings back a secret she had kept all these years for one of her friends in the fourth grade. A girl named ‘Yvonne’ (Diaz swore never to tell her secret so she changed her name) explained to Diaz and their other friend Beba how her stepfather would sneak into her room and sexually assault her, also forcing her to touch him back. Throughout Diaz’s life story she has told us about the multiple times someone had groped, harassed, assaulted, or raped her but how she never told anyone. What Diaz is doing here is explaining through her real-life story how normalized it is for women to get sexually assaulted and for them to also have sexual trauma because they bottled it up, and kept it a secret. Due to how our society is, women who have experienced something horrible are more compelled to keep it to themselves because justice usually is never served in their favor. Before Diaz could even tell the detective what happened, the detective gave her this whole talk about how her “words could put an innocent person behind bars, how [she] could ruin someone’s life.” (Diaz, pg 243)
Citations
Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
I got up a few hours later and took my mother’s pills, all of them – antipsychotics, sleeping pills, anxiety pills. I washed them down with half a bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid. I’d heard the stories about toddlers who’d gotten poisoned with Drano, or detergent, or bleach, but all we had was Dawn. If we’d had any Drano or bleach, I would’ve downed that, too. I was determined to die.
Jaquira Diaz, reflecting on her suicide attempt at just 11 years old, page 178.
Ordinary Girls has been escalating rapidly since Diaz began to grow up – almost a reflection of her childlike innocence being torn into pieces. We are taken on a ride, the ride of her life, the ride of all of her traumas, and it is becoming harder and harder to read. For Diaz to be beaten and abused on a regular basis, for her to fall into drugs and associate with dangerous people, for her to do literally anything to escape the depression and anger she feels about her family makes me so upset to read. The fact that she began to idolize the woman who commit suicide in her father’s apartment complex and see her as at least having had a plan and wondering if she tried to kill herself too at eleven years old is so incredibly painful and eye opening to read.
I am so glad Diaz was able to recover from this state of mind. I can only imagine the pace at which her mind is running and the pain she’s enduring. For her to have lived long enough to find stable, healthy love, and to reach a point in her life where not only is life worth living but that she’s recovered from her traumas enough to share them with us is truly inspiring. To me, it’s inspirational that she was able to recover from the depths of depression, suicidiality, and anxiety.
Fifth Street Bridge in Miami, where people had repeatedly drove their cars through the fence in attempt to kill themselves.
Kahn, Margot. “Jaquira Díaz on ‘Ordinary Girls,” Home, and Telling Her Story: Bust Interview.” BUST, https://bust.com/books/196745-jaquira-diaz-interview-ordinary-girls.html.
Good morning, all. I’ll apologize at the outset for being a little tired this morning.
I’m going to have us spend some time looking at blog posts, and some time thinking about the structure of those posts, probably in pairs. Then I’ll put you in big groups before we come back to the main and turn toward a little task I’ll ask you to do between this week and next: an outline of the kind of essay you might be writing for Nov 22/29.
First, a little talk on the “basics” of blog posts. Last week we looked at titles, and this week’s are much better! So I’m going to walk you through (on the Chalkboard) some aspects of images: their purpose for readers; resources for writers; and conventions around their use.
After that, we’ll pair up to look at posts. That’ll kind of be an audible, for better or worse, so buckle up.
Then, on to big book groups for the balance of class.
As always, we’ll start with reactions: What big questions are emerging from this section of the book? What small details, phrases, and sentences help you dig into them?
* From an earlier section of the book
** Posted mostly on time but after I made the chalkboard list of blog posts last week.
“Ms. Gold was known in most cliques as the counselor for the losers, druggies, troublemakers, kids who got suspended, kids who fought or brought knives to school, kids who flunked so much they were already too old for Nautilus, kids whose parents were drunks or junkies, or whose parents beat them, homeless kids, bullied kids, kids with eating disorders, or brain disorders, or anger problems. So naturally, when I showed up at her door, she knew exactly who I was.”
During this part of “Ordinary Girls”, Jaquira discusses her teenage life, how she always got in trouble and became a child delinquent. She was going through a hard time because her parents didn’t pay attention to her and what she did. Jaquira while growing up never really got the attention she needed or wanted, she had turned to someone else that she didn’t know to talk about her problems.
Like Jaquira, while growing up I didn’t get the attention that I needed or wanted. Most of the attention was to my brother and this caused me to act out in school. Even though I did all my work and finished everything on time, I wouldn’t listen to the teachers and would talk back. But once my teachers threatened to tell my mother about my behavior, that’s when I would stop acting out for a bit because I was terrified of my mother. If she had found out about me acting out in school, I would get screamed at and slapped. In my school, there was a counselor like Ms. Gold. I hated her because I knew she was the counselor for people that got in trouble or did bad things. It was a constant reminder that I had to go to her because my parents didn’t pay attention to me or at that time I thought they didn’t care about me. As Jaquira talks more into her teenage years, I couldn’t help but feel bad because she had to go through all this by herself, and even though she did have a few friends with her, she still had to go through these things personally.
A now 18 year old college freshman Kiese Laymon navigates the world of mental health, race, sexuality, and the complicated, blurred relationships he has with his body and other people around him in the third section of his memoir. He talks about what it’s like being a black boy in a predominantly white college institution and how that impacts his connections with literature and writing, as he struggles to find a balance between staying true to his “Mississippi black boy” identity while also manufacturing a version of himself that is designed to keep white people comfortable. Contrary to his previous relationship, he finds himself in a relationship with a young black girl, with whom he develops a real connection with. However, Laymon spends most of his first year of college depressed, causing him to turn to eating in order to cope. Over the summer, he then physically exhausts his body as he feels his small body is more appealing, and less threatening, and he will receive the love from those he desires to be loved by.
In this section of the memoir, Laymon seems more self destructive than ever. Not only is he aware of it, but he wants to remain ignorant to it as he wants to tell himself a lie like he stated before. He carries so much internalized trauma in so many areas of his life that he destroys himself mentally, emotionally and physically. For example, when a friend of Laymon tells him he might be suffering from depression, instead of acknowledging it, he stigma of mental health and the narrative that it is solely a “white people problem” He doesn’t even realize the emotional eating he does is a coping mechanism and how much he is destroys his body by eating until he nearly vomits, for him to over exert himself, by not eating and doing strenuous exercise to quickly drop the weight a few months later. How does one go from cycling between hating and loving themself so quickly and frequently and where do we draw the thin line between the two? The reading just made me disappointed more than anything to see yet another black man have so little value for himself. It’s sad to see the destruction of your own people when there are so many productive things we could be doing to save ourselves.
“I wasn’t sure who I really was, but I understood where I was”. (Page 126)
Kiese now attending college begins to struggle with finding his own identity in a school thats filled with people who do not want to see him succeed. Having freedom away from his mother since she left for school he has to become his own man. In the beginning Kiese uses this freedom to eat an abnormal amount of food and gains a ton of weight. After reading this I felt as if Kiese was lost, and was eating his way out of his problems. It’s only until he is almost 300 pounds his friend Ray Gunn asked if he was depressed. This is a topic Kiese never thought about growing up however, it is something the reader can see. In school Kiese began bringing in multiple books that have nothing to do with the lesson to show his white classmates and his teacher he reads more than them. This goes back to the quote I chose where he said he did not know who he was but where he was. Kiese knew his teachers and classmates wanted to see him fail so he wanted to show them that he is not some dumb kid from Jackson. A major turning point I found in the text was in page 139 when Kiese grabs the belt his mother was beating him with and threw it down. This was the first time Kiese stood up for himself and did not just let his mother beat him. I believe this action begins to give Kiese his identity. He begins working out and losing a lot of weight, he even writes an essay about the racism at Millsaps college for a newspaper. Kiese begins to find himself as someone fighting back for the things he believes in.
In this section, we continue to see Diaz experience hardship on unthinkable levels, but we also begin to see Diaz make positive choices with her future in mind. She describes (almost) healthy relationships, reliable, honest friendships, and hints at a true support system outside of her family. Her family dynamics continue to be a mess, with her brother taunting her over going to jail, her father’s general absence, and her mother’s progressing mental illness. Her friends, however, like Boogie, China, and some parts of her relationships with Kilo and Cheito, would get her through these difficult years.
Diaz weaves suicidal ideation throughout this section. On page 143, she says “We wanted to be throttled, mangled, thrown. We wanted the violence. We wanted something we could never come back from.” A woman threw herself off of the building where her father lived and worked, and Diaz tells what she knows about the story throughout this section. Diaz goes on to describe another suicide attempt, when she tried to overdose on her mother’s pills. She survived, but after coming to, decided to leave her mother for good and got a ride to her father’s apartment.
Meeting Cheito, though she was (in my opinion) way too young to get married, was a good thing for Diaz. Cheito’s family is loving and caring towards each other, and this is foreign to Diaz. It is nice to hear her describing the love she feels between her and Cheito, and the hope for a better life that she feels when they are together. They get their own place (albeit for a short amount of time) and though their relationship doesn’t work out, he inspires her to join the military, which she credits to saving her life. Her time in the military also didn’t work out, but she overcame serious mental blocks by jumping off the tower, something she had thought about as a means for suicide so many times before.
At the end of this section, Diaz writes about a sexual assault she experienced after she returned from the Navy. She was raped in an alley in South Beach, and details the trauma of going through the process of dealing with police and medical personnel after an assault. She recalls a man attempting to assault her when she was a child in a park, taking her to the men’s bathroom, but she and her friends fought him off. She remembers her friend Yvonne telling her about an assault when they were just kids. This chapter is called Secrets, and this represents the shame and urge to keep quiet in instances of sexual assault. You can see the agony of recounting the event over and over when Diaz is at the hospital and talking to the police officer, and it is clear why so many sexual assaults go unreported. The pattern of secrecy seemingly protects them, but it also protects their assaulters from consequence.
Ocean Drive Art Deco District on Miami Beach. Al Diaz Herald staff
Kiese Laymon begins opening about his early college experience at Millsaps College. Initially like most first year college students the change of environment can be very overwhelming to adapt to. Laymon was feeling the overwhelming stress of early adulthood while simultaneously enjoying the benefits/freedom that comes with it. Laymon was part of a work-study program, enjoyed writing parts of essays, and eating pastries. Despite having the capability to be an intellect, Laymon was constantly reminded to prove his worth. For instance in his English class he was falsely accused of plagiarism for using the word “ambivalent”(Page-122). Laymons responded by bringing several unrelated books to all of his classes. In hopes of letting his white peers know that he “read more than they would” (Page-123). I believe the concept of proving your worth that Laymon brought up can be applied to all aspects of life. The unfortunate reality of perceiving yourself as a person who hasn’t done enough can motivate some to become better versions of themselves but it normally leads down a destructive path. This is portrayed when looking at Laymon’s fear of participating in his classrooms, results in him coping with cakes. I understand getting/asking for help isn’t easy but I really wished someone could have reached out to Laymon.
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