Bad Boys

I gave my mother a poem
She sent me to a shrink

I laughed hard when my eyes came across the third stanza. In a poem which initially looks like a darkened tunnel without an end in sight, these two lines are still dark, but the humor is intrinsic to the poem - at least as much as sadness is, which is true of Ensler's heartbreaking realism but tongue-in-cheek tone. Most pieces from The Vagina Monologues follow this style, especially "The Flood," which conjures up ridiculous images of Burt Reynolds and the Rat Pack swimming in a casino full of female ejaculation alongside the cruel reality of a woman never feeling comfortable with her sexuality - her skin - nor ever finding true love because a negative experience she had as a teenager discouraged her completely from doing so. On a purely content-based level, the narrators of both "The Flood" and "Bad Boys" experienced traumatic events which have influenced their interactions with the opposite sex, albeit in entirely different ways. For the Jewish woman in "The Flood," her experience with Andy totally turned her off of pursuing sex and love with men for the rest of her life. For the unnamed girl in "Bad Boys," her relationship with her father is presumably either strained or distant due to his "high expectations" which she "fails a lot," and while she is able to pursue a romantic relationship with a boy, it's pretty obvious from the way she talks about him that it is nowhere near the standard teenage girl-teenage boy relationship. How many teenage girls would date someone who "is not the most handsome boy," nor a boy who is "very angry" or who "spray painted a bomb on his bedroom wall?" Their relationship, and by extension both the girl narrator and presumably her boyfriend, are deeper than whatever appearances might say about them. What I find particularly interesting, however, is that Ensler seems to have created a male character - the boyfriend - who isn't a rapist, a slovenly pig, or a dreadful bore (but more or less "decent" guy) like Bob in "Because He Liked To Look At Them." He's deeper than these classifications which the vast majority of Ensler's male characters tend to fall into, even if we only know a little bit about him from the poem. Is Ensler saying the rare boy can be "emotional creatures" like girls can? It's all up to interpretation. In all of these respects, I Am An Emotional Creature is an extension of The Vagina Monologues, even if more subtle aspects, such as the near-perfect poetic style in the latter, suggest it's a deviation rather than a continuation. Ensler's duality continues.

Two lines can say so much. The narrator in "Bad Boys" probably thought she was writing the poem to her mother as a gift, or as a not-so-subtle way of getting her mom to pay positive attention to her. Anything other than her mom constantly desiring her daughter to be "super-thin," "getting straight A's," or "being intelligent and happy." Hell, isn't writing beautiful poetry, which the narrator most likely does considering her "connection to Sylvia Plath," considered a sign of intelligence and creativity? It is by "emotional creatures", but not for the mother, apparently, who appears to be so confined to rigid thinking that she sends the daughter to therapy. Is Ensler saying her mother can not understand her daughter's poetry because the mother herself is not an "emotional creature"? Taking into one further, maybe Ensler is even accusing the vast majority of women of not being in touch with their 'girl' side, their "emotional creature," which would also be a criticism of men, as well, since the mother is married to a man. Has the mother let herself be domesticated by society's rigidness, by her husband, and perhaps even by the burden of having a daughter? The mother does want her daughter to be a model, and the poem suggests pressure from jealousy - because the mother's sister was a model - is at least partially responsible for her wishes.

We're both troubled
I'm better at hiding it
I cut myself

This is an all too true, if somewhat subtle and off-hand, comment about American culture. If a person appears to be okay, they surely must be okay, right? In addition to mocking the perceived shallowness of American sociopolitics, I feel like Ensler writes open-endedly to show people that nothing should ever be taken at face value, and examples of this practice can be seen in both The Vagina Monlogues and I Am An Emotional Creature. The narrator in "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" visibly says her rape offered her redemption and the opportunity to feel comfortable within her own skin for the first time ever, but what happened to her between her later teenage years and the moment when she fell in love at the women's shelter? Did she secretly struggle with what happened to her when she was thirteen? She doesn't let on anything (I will say that her somewhat rueful tone of voice at the end of the monlogue in the filmed version suggests there was some conflict here, though), and we have absolutely no way of knowing without being presumptuous, but I feel like speculating is absolutely integral to understanding the monologue's complications. These gaps in time allow for a little creativity and a little bit of guess work on our part. Ensler is encouraging us, challenging us, to look beyond what is written on the page in order to grasp fully at the ideas she presents, in the same way that she is challenging the narrator's friends, family, and especially her mother to look beyond the Sylvia Plath-like poetry and the scars and the "chopped up bangs" to fully understand what is on the girl's mind. Dismissing the girl's poetry outright, and in fact 'rewarding' her with a trip to the psychology, is Ensler's way of critisizing people for attempting to either avoid problems completely or to take the easy way out. In this case, it's throwing a wad of cash at a therapist to take on the responsibility neither parent seems willing to even attempt to take on. It's one thing to send your child to counseling when they are having conflicts, but it's an entirely different and irresponsible matter when the child is thrown to another without looking into the issues yourself first.

He is not the most handsome boy
But he's troubled
Like me

Ensler's had to dodge criticism left and right for nearly everything she's ever put to paper and the stage. Not here. The closing lines of "Bad Boys" are the purest and most heartwrenching words I've seen from Eve so far. Unlike some of her other work, which (often meaningfully and not without deliberately constructed purpose) indulges sexual and social taboos, "Bad Boys" does not, but in a way it does - love as it is described in the poem is as much a taboo as being a debauched sex-crazed slut. Although it is often said that depressive personalities don't experience sexual desire as much as other people do, the narrator has affections for her boyfriend on a purely emotional level, and I feel like this would be considered incredibly odd or deviant in an image-based society like ours. Ensler, in a move as vulnerable as the narrator sharing her poetry with the mother, proves she isn't as shallow as works like "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" (where much of the speaker's attentions are dedicated to describing how 'gorgeous' the rapist is) may suggest. Love has many dimensions, and it's nice to know Ensler can capture all of them in her writing.

We Are All Emotional Creatures

I don’t usually get along with militant feminists.

By this, I mean the kind of Angry Young Women who thought the SCUM Manifesto was meant to be taken at face value. By extension I should probably be repulsed by Eve Ensler, but I’m not. In fact, I actually find her endearing. She’s a charming, humorous, and skillfully tongue-in-cheek (unfortunately, it looks like her tone of voice is lost on a lot of her detractors) writer who knows when to be vulnerable, when to be tough, when to be emotional, when to be stoic, and when to just be her own persona.

Take, for example, the title poem “I Am An Emotional Creature.” The poem represents the many faces of Eve, as well as the many faces women as well as (yes, Ensler would probably disagree with me) men have but rarely recognize: her masculine side, her feminine side, her androgynous side, her own I-don’t-belong-to-anything-side. Likewise, Ensler’s tone of voice is brilliant and bombastic, with a winking, accusatory rasp Maya Angelou should be proud of. “Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-shaped ideas," boasts Ensler with eviscerating pointedness. "They pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears.” These lines are a musical statement, cut more from the discordant jazz cloth than the classical tradition, and an indictment against the cold, logical detachment people (specifically men) Ensler is rallying against throughout the entire poem. The logic vs. emotion conflict appears to be a frequent theme in Ensler's writing, as even The Vagina Monologues intersperses 'vagina facts' between the comparitively ambiguous monologues. Even "I Am An Emotional Creature," which is a mostly straight-forward poem, has numerous interpretations.

For instance, there is one point in the poem which confuses me. It's difficult to interpret what Ensler's intentions are here, or if her intentions are really meant to be known - "don’t you dare say all negative that it’s a teenage thing, or because I’m a girl." This line is potentially hypocritical. Was she not previously attributing numerous emotional advantages, such as “knowing when your girlfriend is pissed off,” to womanhood? However, I feel like Ensler wrote the line knowing full well what she was doing. It's all part of the duality of being an emotional creature. Logic juxtaposed against the openness of the soul. As brazenly emotive as she is, or wants to appear to be, Ensler’s a smart writer exercising a lot of precision over the words she puts on the page. She's jazz music - presenting a facade of corrosive dynamics, threatening to fall apart, comatose at any moment in front of the audience, while in reality she's as controlled as an orchestrated baroque piece. Her voice drips calculation dressed in the wildness of the Atlantic Ocean. Though at face value Ensler revels in being an iconoclastic, feel-everything woman, she's a dichtonomy. Her dynamics are dualities, and they only serve the purpose of making Ensler's poetry even more vulnerable and realistic. "I Am An Emotional Creature" is a celebration of dualities. We aren't Vulcans, but all of us have hearts connected to being an "emotional, devotional, incandotional creature." Just look at the word incandotional here. Incandotional isn't even listed listed in the dictionary - it's apparently a word of her own construction, which appeals to Ensler's emotional rawness and uorthodoxy , but at the same time, Ensler attaches a deliberate meaning to the word. She didn't just pull the word out of thin air. There's a personal meaning, whatever it might be, that Ensler lovingly grafts onto the word, and it didn't come from osmosis. Raw emotionality and pre-meditated, LOGICAL deliberation can co-exist despite Ensler mostly ignoring to consciously awknowledge the latter.

Similarly, how many people are wholly objective? Even scientists are guided by some kind of moral obligation that isn't entirely steeped in tangibility. The connection of the brain to the heart and to the soul just increases the intensity of emotion because we feel tugging on all aspects, logic and emotion, of our being. "Everything is intense to me," says Ensler, but it should be everything is intense to us.

Vagina Facts of Life

Last class' vagina fact provoked a pretty intense emotional response. Between the clitoris being the "only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure" as well as having "twice the nerves as those contained within the penis," I'd have to agree that the clitoris is an amazing part of the body. However, don't get too excited yet. This fact is only steeped in science. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised the same author who wrote "I Am An Emotional Creature" would include a purely scientific fact in her book. What ever became of the angry vagina - the "pissed off" vagina who wanted people to "stop shoving things into me" like "dry fucking wads of cotton?" I mean, "I Am An Emotional Creature's" title poem is all but lambasting men because "thoughts do not come to me (not men) as hard-shaped ideas or scientific theories." Well, in that case...why did she include this particular vagina fact if she seems to have such an aversion to science? The simplest answer is that Ensler is a writer of dualities, much like Danticat, who appeals to both the mind and the heart - science and raw emotionality - logos and pathos. She knows her audience isn't going to just be militant feminists who blindly agree with everything she says. She wants people from every categorization to read what she has to say. Not just feminists; in fact, I get the impression Ensler wants people to challenge her ideas, as the best "shock writers" often want. Transgendered people, androgynes, tired housewives, chauvinistic businessmen, and ambivalent people who don't care much for women's issues all have a place in Ensler's audience. This is all a testament to Ensler's skill as an effective writer. She knows that in order to reach the largest audience, to change the world's preconceptions (as well as create ideas where nothing else may have existed previously), you need to write something which can be relevant to anyone and everyone.

However, as an aside, I want to add an unscientific dimension to Ensler's vagina fact. It's a dimension Ensler surprisingly looks over, especially when her track record for relying mostly on her own experiences, the experiences of others, and her vulnerable writing style is brought into question. Let's take a look at the protaganist in Danticat's "Night Women." It's obvious the mother hates her profession, and is wholly unsatisfied. Why is that? If this fact showed the entire truth, she'd be the happiest, most fulfilled woman in New York City. All prostitutes would. There's more to feeling pleasure than nerves, science, and "hard-shaped ideas." Pleasure and sensuality is an art form which appeals as much to the brain as it does to the eye, the heart, and virtually every other sense unseen. I don't think the clitoris is the "only organ in the body designed for pleasure," and it is just as capable of feeling pain as any other organ of the body is. Furthermore, the 'pleasure' felt by the clitoris seems awfully one-sided and shallow. The clitoris does not have the raw passion of the heart, the aesthetics of the eye, nor depth of the brain. Sexual organs themselves do not have depth of emotions like the other senses do.

However, when the clitoris and all the other organs are able to join together on the same plane...that's when you've got a machine gun.

Voyeur

For those who see Ensler's Vagina Monologues as unrefined at best or tittilating and stereotypically (sometimes militantly) feminist at worst, the "I Was There In The Room" poem-monologue is a challenge to whatever criticisms have been levelled at Eve or her works. The opening line, "I was there when her vagina opened," would sound ridiculous in the hands of anyone else. Silly or sophmoric, even. Honestly, using the word 'vagina' provokes laughing or horniness more often than "deep worship" (sorry, Eve), and when 'vagina' is thrown towards us bluntly and immediately and with such unabashed frequency in a poem the author introduces as a serious tribute to her granddaughter and mother-in-law, the chances of a typical college audience taking the poem seriously - or in 'good taste' - might be pretty low. However, between Ensler's totally straight intent and the artful language she uses, it'd be difficult to read "I Was There In The Room" as anything less than a honest, brazenly realistic tribute to birth and the orifice most of us come from.

Stark comparisons could be drawn between Ensler and Danticat here. Although Danticat only refers to sexuality in veiled ways, their styles are similar: the juxtapositioning of the beautiful against the ugly, humanity against inhumanity. I usually feel like great writing should be full of dualities, and Danticat and Ensler have mastered this art. I've never smiled, nor laughed, nor groaned, nor felt reactions get as painfully stuck in my throat as when I've read through Krik! Krak? and The Vagina Monologues. Shouldn't the best artwork provoke conflict as well as appeal to our sense of what is attractive? The fourth stanza, in particular, is full of these beautifully awkward moments. "I saw the colors of her vagina," begins Ensler, her tone brusque and stripped entirely of her usual humor. "Saw the bruised broken blue, the blistering tomato red, the gray pink, the dark; saw the blood like perspiration along the edges, saw the yellow, white liquid, the shit, the clots pushing out all the holes, pushing harder and harder." Like Allen Ginsberg years before her, these lines - Ensler's entire poem - beg to be howled aloud. Ensler was there when "her vagina changed from a shy sexual hole to an archaeological tunnel, a sacred vessel, a Venetian canal, a deep well with a tiny child stuck inside," and we are there, too. The linear structure is easily digestible; each stanza begans with the phrase "I", with last replacing "I" with "so can a vagina," repetition which involves the audience more and more as the poem is read further, whether the audience is a willing participant or a disgusted and reluctant voyeur - or perhaps more likely, both. What's more, the lines themselves leave little to interpretation, nor uses much in the way of obtuse words, and as a result it cuts itself into our brains and hearts and souls the moment they escape Ensler's mouth. There are no barriers between the poet and audience here. The poem is as immediate and as vulnerable as the act of giving birth itself.

Cruel awakening.

Is it wrong to feel both horror and satisfaction with the way the narrator's memory as a thirteen year old played out?

Let's talk about the "gorgeous twenty four year old woman" with the "hooked up" apartment. She's a predator. The narrator calls the woman a "savior" who transformed her "sorry ass coochi snorcher and raised it up into some kind of heaven." She isn't a savior - not by intent. She turned something innocuous into a Giger-esque perversion. Sexual, sensual, romantic awakening is beautiful, to feel affirmation in all aspects of one's self. For an African-American girl who has grown up in relatively limited means, has not seen her father since she was ten, and was raped by her father's best friend as well as being subjected to her father shooting and paralyzing the man attacking her, the narrator needs affirmation in herself more than anyone else would. Children, especially girls (pardon whatever sexism saying this might entail), feel a unique kind of pressure by their peers to feel attractive, intelligent, wanted, and loved - this is something many of us can empathically connect with. However, the monologue shows a destructive and negative way to go about it. The time of awakening should not be decided upon by some third party, as the woman did, and if the awakening is done with another person there should be more to it than shallow urging. The narrator is also only thirteen. She isn't mature enough to distinguish between making love, love, sex, or fucking. For instance, the narrator says she's "so in love" with the woman at the end of the monologue. Everyone's perception of love is entirely different, but could anyone reasonably say there is any love between the girl and her rapist? There's no depth to their relationship. The narrator even says she never saw the woman again after she was raped. "Hit it and quit it," right? Once the woman has experienced the joys of awakening a young girl, the thrill of being the first to touch them sexually and ensure no male hands will touch them afterwards must run its course. The woman obviously isn't concerned about the narrator beyond fulfilling her own selfishness. Her libido, her fetishes - there's "a picture over her bed of a naked black woman with a huge afro." The narrator is, of course, black. We don't know if the woman is white, but the narrator's mom does consider her "successful," which could infer her ethnicity as white if context is taken into consideration. Does the woman prey exclusively on black girls due to some kind of fetish? We don't know but the fetishistic potential certainly paints the monologue in a nightmarish fairytale light, which is why I decided to use one of John Wayne Gacy's paintings in this blog posting. I'm just glad the V-Day edition of the text takes out the "it was a good rape" portion of the monologue or else I would've had to rant even more over the next paragraph.

Although according to Ensler's introduction to the monologue her inspiration for the story found genuine love with another woman later on in life, and while this is wonderful, the event that happened to the narrator as a thirteen year old could have been (and it might even have been, as Ensler doesn't describe what happened to the woman who was raped when she reached her mid teens, late teens, twenties...) incredibly traumatic. While the fact that the predator seems like she helped the narrator feel comfortable in her own skin, there are numerous mistakes, morally or otherwise, in which the rapist approached the 'awakening'.

Long, beautiful hair.

That woman's husband sounds like a real prick. And it isn't just the actual thing, "his spiky sharpness sticking into me (her), my (her) naked puffy vagina” - that makes him come across as a jerk, if we’re assuming the narrator is a reliable source. He’s an adulterer (and continues to be an adulterer even after the German therapist, between her faux-understanding passive-aggressive posturing, suggested the wife do a pretty one-sided ‘compromise’ by letting her husband shave the vagina for her - is it really a compromise if the woman still has to see “a little blood in the bath tub” or feel “screaming red bumps” or deal with crass male hands clipping something even the narrator’s empathic hands have difficulty cutting?), self-centered, and doesn’t seem to care much for the emotional or spiritual side of marriage if he has no guilt “screwing around.” While the physical nor sexual component of marriage shouldn’t be ignored, marriage is as much mired in emotions as it is in the sheets. Comparisons can even be made to Marie & the Dominican's relationship from “Between the Pool and the Gardenias.” The narrator does use the words “make love” to describe sex between her and her husband, suggesting emotional attachment to him, regardless of whether the husband considers it lovemaking, sex, or fucking. Judging by the fact that he tells the psychologist his wife doesn’t “please him sexually”, he most likely doesn’t see their physical relationship as lovemaking, but rather just sex. They’re both seemingly on entirely different emotional planes. However, with all of this pushed aside, we don’t really know whether the narrator is all that interested in (she does seem to be a little ennui-crippled but I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here) the emotional or spiritual aspects of marriage, either, and it’s equally likely she’s just as shallow as him, so it is possible the husband isn’t the only target worthy of criticism.

As you can probably tell, stories like this one make me feel quite irritated, especially because of how truthful they from my experiences. I’ve known guys just like her husband, who are absolutely repulsed by the sight of any hair on a woman’s body; it isn’t limited to just genitalia, either. Even just a little peach fuzz on the arms turned them off. It’s not something an idealistic, naive kid like me really understands: love should bypass any barriers of hirsuteness, correct? However, what I find most interesting about the first monologue is the narrator’s observation in the first paragraph. The juxtaposition of the narrator “feeling puffy and exposed and like a little girl” after shaving her vagina while the husband is “excited” whenever he got to make love to her bald genitals. The narrator is making a pretty stark comparison to pedophilia here, in that her husband likes a vagina to look unrealistically bald and naked and pure (he even describes the narrator’s unshaven vagina as “dirty” looking) like a child’s, and I can see where she’s coming from here. We do live in a society which tends to oversexualize young girls to the point where even twelve year olds are getting routine bikini waxes. Although no real research has been done on the connection between men, pedophilia, and pubic hair (or lack thereof) preference, a Salon article on waxing makes a pretty pointed observation about how most pornographic actresses now are getting bikini waxes due to the fact that it makes them look younger, more youthful, and in some cases, even underage. Since the mainstream pornography industry is a reflection of the times, and it projects the majority preference, it’s an interesting connection to be made, and one that I feel should be looked into more. At the very least, waxing - especially amongst the young, like in this MSNBC article which describes a mother arranging a waxing appointment for her eight year old daughter and the reluctance of the cosmetician - adds a whole extra dimension to the pressures with body image many pre-teens and teens feel.

Fiery red ants.

Departed folk musician Vic Chestnutt once said while some people may prefer writing about "the bling and the booty," he preferred to write about "the pus and the gnats" because to him the latter was beautiful. Danticat evidently follows Chestnutt's philosophy: she finds beauty in situations most people would consider absolutely dismal and hopeless throughout Krik? Krak!'s nine stories. There's a 'doomed romantic' vibe coursing throughout, but in no story is this ying-yang complex more apparent than the first in the collection, "Children of the Sea." The male narrator's first letter is particularly striking:

"I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there. I see you crying like a crushed snail, the way you cried when I helped you pull out your first loose tooth. Yes, I did love you then. Somehow when I looked at you, I thought of fiery red ants. I wanted you to dig your finger nails into my skin and drain out all the blood."

How many times does the color red appear in "Children of the Sea," let alone in just the male narrator's first entry, and what does red usually represent? Passion. Love. Lust. Even menstrual blood, at a more literal and obtuse level. "White sheets with bright red spots float as our sail" are even guiding the escapees to a hopeful freedom. These "bright red spots" are keeping the male and female narrator's love alive, and in a more linear sense, are bringing the male narrator to a land where he is able to show love towards his soulmate without any forms of oppression, such as the father, the soldiers, or government officials - at least in theory. Essentially, the male found freedom through love. What I absolutely adore about Danticat's writing style is how she can take words or phrases which are not normally seen as such and turn them into an expression of sensuality, like comparing his loved one to "fiery red ants" and the line below:

"When I got on board I thought I could still smell the semen and the innocence lost to those sheets."

Few authors could write a line like this without sounding needlessly crass. Danticat sounds the exact opposite here. She's painting a picture, and while the thought of sheets smelling like semen and lost innocence aren't classy subjects, she infuses them with a bizarre, pus-like poignacy that few authors are able to achieve. However, few of Danticat's male characters possess the same poignancy as the male narrator in "Children of the Sea."

The male characters in Danticat's collection have little complexity to them (I'm still debating Guy). Considering Danticat is writing nearly exlusively about the experiences of Haitian women, however, this isn't surprising. What is surprising, though, is how the male lover in "Children of the Sea" stands as a anamoly in Danticat's literary microcosm. He isn't a breadwinner, he isn't a parental figure, he isn't authority, he isn't a background character; he's a doomed romantic, and in many respects can even be seen as a gender queer amongst his more machismo-addled peers in Haitain society. Yes, while he obviously has a libido ("I think of you and all those times you resisted...sometimes I felt like you wanted to, but I knew you wanted me to respect you."), he isn't rapacious. He thinks the world of his partner, as does she, and it feels like he would do nearly anything to please her in a nearly subservient fashion. I suppose if the "dig your finger nails into my skin and drain out all the blood" is interpreted in a purely sadomasochistic sense, their relationship could be seen in a symbiotic light. While the male might make some of the sexual propositions, the woman still retains control - and in some ways, may even have more control than the male - whenever they make love. In Danticat's other stories, men don't love beyond purely shallow means, which is different from how the male narrator in the introductory story is. But aside from occasional flirtation, as in the soldier who tries to impress himself upon the grandmother's rebellious daughter in a latter story, men are portrayed as oddly asexual beings in Krik? Krak!. Passionless, really, if shallowly horny and bound by duty to their wives and children. They don't know to love, or make love. They only know how to work, fight, protect, have sex; all things which may invoke some form of passion from the male but are absolutely nothing compared to the art of loving or making love. Considering the sexually-aligned language Danticat uses in the diary entries of the male, he's a positive deviant, and is representative of a level of a male-dominated society which is rarely talked about publicly in Haiti, and even the United States.

Deviancy.

For a society where survival virtually eclipses the importance of everything else - especially individualism; diverging off the beaten path tends to complicate life, as well as throwing extra pressures from the world around (in this case Haitian society) - Marie from "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" is a remarkable example of a woman who follows her own path despite (or perhaps because of?) the constant troubles she faces, whether it's people completely ignoring her like the Dominican does, or taking extreme advantage of like her cheating husband did.

It'd be pretty easy to breeze through "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" and label Marie as mentally disturbed. When the world of the living mixes with the world of the dead in an uncomfortably intimate fashion, as is the relationship between Marie and the deceased Rose, extreme discomfort tends to flare. I don't think Marie is disturbed at all. In fact, I think she's one of the most human - and one of the most passionate - women portrayed throughout any of the nine stories in Danticat's collection. However, beyond my own intuition, the evidence for why I feel this is clearly seen Danticat's story. Specifically, the following quote from Marie:

"It’s so easy to love somebody, I tell you, when there’s nothing else around."

Her husband's cheated on her multiple times. Her family has all died. Marie even says there is a "distance of death" between her and anyone else who loves her truthfully. Additionally, she has had several miscarriages. It is only through heartbreak that we truly learn to love - that is, without any superficial, flighty underpinnings - and heartbreak is something Marie has had in spades. It's true that she's desperate for love, but at least her love for others is genuine. The clothes Marie had sewn for her miscarried children are lovingly given to Rose, and Marie takes particular notice of the "butterfly collar" . What is more beautiful and hopeful than a butterfly, especially for someone who has probably only had the chance to 'see' them in the Krik-Krak stories her family once told her? Marie dotes upon her 'daughter'. Marie's idea of love isn't grounded in crass obligations, nor in the potentially attractive appearances of a lover; Rose doesn't even have to do anything for Marie to love her unconditionally. It's grounded in her heart and soul.

Evidence for Marie's passion shows up a little in her description of her brief affair with the Dominican: "The Dominican and I made love on the grass once, but he never spoke to me again." Marie's use of the phrase 'made love' struck me as incredibly indicative of how human she really is. Why 'made love' and not just 'had sex' or, in even brazen terms, 'fucked'? Marie carefully chose her words here, and was vulnerably expressing her feelings, and rather obvious hurt, at the Dominican choosing to ignore her afterwards. The Dominican, should he have described their affair, certainly wouldn't have used the term 'make love'. The Dominican does not know how to love beyond his libido, which is not Marie's idea of love, nor what the concept of love should even be.

Skeletal lamping.

There's some incredibly intelligent, emotive lines to be read in 19 Varieties of Gazelle ("They know there are countries where men and women kiss in the streets, where a man's hand on a woman's knee does not mean an earthquake" from "Goint to the Spring" is absolutely brilliant), but Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry isn't really my style. She's immensely talented, and I'm not knocking her for writing about what she loves to write, although the caveat here is that I just don't really empathize with Nye's stories. It isn't that I don't enjoy slice-of-life poetry - in fact, a frequently thumbed through collection of Mark Doty's poetry sits right in between the Kurt Cobain poster and an unused bottle of hairspray (should I ever feel like fauxhawking it up, I guess) in my dorm room, and Doty's essentially made a living out of writing concise prose about daily lives - but that the poetry in 19 Varieties of Gazelle all, for the most part, has a distinctive bent that I don't particularly relate with, because my heart and emotions and soul are different than the characters Nye portrays in her collection. With that said, as an Italian-American with great respect to his roots and to his family ties, I totally understand and get Nye's relatively universalized anecdotes (the middle eastern trappings could easily be replaced with American or Italian shadings without changing the meaning of her poetry all that much), although family, geneaology, roots - all of those - are not nearly as important to me as they are to Nye. I think I also have a slight problem with how the entire collection, aside from the introductory poem "Flinn, on the Bus," is explicitly about Nye's middle eastern ties. Would it be a terrible thing for me to say, although it would've been counter-intuitive to Nye's point, that I think I would've enjoyed the collection more if she varied the themes of her poetry to the point where it wasn't even a themed collection anymore? Although I get the feeling Nye is an incredibly versatile poet, given the different styles she writes with in 19 Varieties of Gazelle (just look at the structure of each poem - she plays with form quite often, and I have to compliment meant her on how well her language seems to complement the words being said throughout) the divergences in styles aren't enough to spark my interest too much because the poem's themes are all relatively similar to one another. However, because I generally prefer lyrics and surrealistic poetry to the type of poetry Nye specializes in, my opinion should certainly be taken with an enormous grain of salt.

Black lung got you down tonight.

When our class discussed how the portrayal of middle easterners is incredibly unbalanced in the media, the most immediate thought I had was, of course, music-related, because music is normally always on my mind. Specifically, one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands - "Suha," by Xiu Xiu. The lyrics, which appear on the bottom of my post, describe a middle-eastern woman who lives a miserable life being abused by her husband, her children, and nearly everyone around her. To describe her as nihilistic and suicidal would be be giving her too little credit; it's essentially the exact opposite of what Shihab Nye describes in all of her poems. As for Xiu Xiu themselves, it'd be a stretch to even refer to Xiu Xiu as a "rock" band, as they incorporate the more avant-garde elements of electronica, classical, traditional Japanese music, and folk, among others, into their sound, but Stewart's beautifully written and occasionally surreal prone is always at the forefront. He has a knack for getting into the head of the characters he rights about, and there are many, whether they be a gay jock-hating teen who secretly harbors lustful thoughts towards his high school's star quarterback or the androgynous young girl looked at with contempt by all her peers, with "Suha" only being one of these characters he portrays expertly. This Suha character is not at all like any of the characters Shihab Nye writes about: Suha has no time to indulge nostalgia (does she even have any positive memories to relive?) like her father does, no sense of pride like her grandmother, and absolutely none of the creative trappings Shihab Nye has, herself. I feel like Shihab Nye's vision of the middle east and its people, while true, is no more true than the depressive and ennui-crippled state of the Suha character in Xiu Xiu's song. They are both showing two sides to the middle eastern paradigm - both sides which need to be addressed by virtually everyone should a lucid picture of the middle east's going-ons be seen without trouble.

Some people might say, that with lyrics as blunt as "I hate my body, I hate the desert" and "I'm going to go hump a cop" that the song is portraying middle eastern women as weak, or stupid, or even lustful. But it's not like Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu's frontman and main songwriter, would be considered ignorant of "women's issues" (writing this phrase out left a bad taste in my mouth so I had to put quotes around it to prevent myself from falling into a coma), either. For example, He's open about his bisexuality in nearly every interview he's been in, spent his early twenties as a preschool teacher (a domain oft-thought to be under exclusive reign of women), and has even commented to the music press about how he strongly considered getting a sex change prior to forming the band (he wrote the song "Dr. Troll" about how he's felt like a girl since kindergarten). Stewart's unique position in life simply grants him a greater ability to empathisize with all sorts of personas.

Xiu Xiu - "Suha"
Lyrics written by Jamie Stewart
Link to song on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GacvwgKA810

Black lung got you down tonight
Saving it all for work
Suha pins her arms to her side
Watching her twin want to die

I hate my body, I hate the desert
Please let me escape
When will I be going home?
I hate my husband, I hate my children
I'm going to hang myself
When will I be going home?

Black hair got you down tonight
Black love, black cuts from your work
Weep like the busted girl you are
Wash down your hope in that car

I hate my body, I hate the desert
Please let me escape
When will I be going home?
I hate my husband, I hate my children
I'm going to hang myself
When will I be going home?

My name is Suha, I'm 25 years old
I'm going to hump a cop
When will I be going home?