Flashback

The idea of courtship is a central theme in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Bayardo, through lavish gifts, worries more about proving his social power than his fiancé, Angela Vicario. For example, Angela describes her future house as “the farmhouse belonging to the widower Xius.” Bayardo, intent on satisfying her, doesn’t take no for an answer when he offers to buy the house “along with everything inside.” Bayardo demonstrates just how much money he is willing to spend on her. He also buys a music box for her, carefully wrapped. Although not keen on the engagement at first, Angela was told that love could be learned.

The Columbian social structure set up in Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not unlike old knight tales. Courtship, gifts, strong sexism, and an even stronger gender gap. Angela is “returned,” as if talking about something bought, to her house after Bayardo discovers her not a virgin. Angela is viciously beaten by her mom and returned by her husband, perpetuating a brutal social structure. Although it is perfectly acceptable, presumably, for a male to engage in premarital sex. Sometimes, while reading, I imagine a time period much earlier, only to be rudely awakened by the introduction of cars or other modern technology. But then again, maybe this just reminds me how glad I am to live far away from Bayardo.

Karma

Both TFA and CDF share similarities in portraying individuals who go against instinct and in doing so suffer a bad fate. A sense of predestination also seems to play a big role in both works. Both cultures believe that a sense of duty acts through members of their society. Members get 'chosen' to carry out specific tasks. For instance, Clotilde Armenta says, "It's to spare those poor boys from the horrible duty that's fallen on them" which the narrator says occurs "Because she'd sensed it. She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them" (57). This suggests that is it not their fault if they were willed to carry out a duty. It is ironic because often they go about getting vengeance in a violent way and this makes them no different than the perpetrator. This leads to a proactive approach where they believe it is there duty to seek justice in this way instead of letting that individual receive their own destiny separate from their vengeful behavior (Michael Kohlhaas!).

At times it seems like the gods or fate's choice is sometimes against their own interest (even though at the time they think they are doing the right thing)and this puts the spirit world at odds with the human world. Does this suggest that the gods are misleading them?In both texts individuals are warned about a potential death (that eventually occurs) and given a warning to interfere and stop, or at least to play no part. In both texts there is a lot of foreshadowing for what is to come. For instance, Ezeudu says, "A cold shiver ran down Okonkwo's back as he remembered the last time the old man had visited him. That boy calls you father," he had said. "Bear no hand in his death"(121). But the narrator in CDF says, "A death for which we all could have been to blame." This is very interesting because the narrator chooses to place blame on themselves for their actions instead of blaming the sole perpetrator. In TFA we have the exact opposite response. Okonkwo is blamed for the deaths that he cause and the culture and community are not held directly responsible. In both cases though there is little or no remorse for killing other people based on their own nonviolent behavior.

Another interesting comparison between these two texts is that they both share similiarites in basing judgements on an individual's reputation. In CDF it says "Their reputation as good people was so well founded that no one paid any attention to them (52)." Reputation plays a big role in both texts. But reputation seems to undermine both the fate of Santiago and the success of Okonkwo. Since everyone thought the twins had a good reputation they didn't believe they would do something bad, so they overlooked that he was going to be murdered. In Okonkwo's case, he spent his whole life trying to clear a new trail away from his father's footsteps and he ended up like his father in a way- by meeting despair by being kicked out of his community.

A Fractured Society

In “Things Fall Apart” I was intrigued by how it distributed the blame of the Ibo colonization by the Europeans. Instead of presenting the colonists as the oppressor and the villagers as the victims, Achebe’s world is much more nuanced. “Things Fall Apart” breaks the mold by introducing white men who epitomize ignorance, greed and injustice as well as sympathetic and peaceful missionaries who spread Christian principles while still respecting the Ibo culture. Nor are the Ibo innocent victims; indeed, Ibo social values lead directly to the alienation of tribe members who were the first to convert to Christianity. The tribe is wrought with physical and verbal violence, especially towards the weak and defenseless – women, children and those deemed “not man enough.” The poster-child for this brutality is Okonkwo, a character who routinely beats his family members because he is too terrified of being seen as weak. It is therefore significant that the biggest opponent of the colonists, Okonkwo, is also the novel’s least admirable character due in part to his role as a bully.
It would be disingenuous to go so far as to say that the Ibo “had it coming.” But it would also be wrong to overlook the consequences of creating a society that alienated so many. In this case the welcoming, accepting, not to mention largely peaceful attitude of the missionaries was an irresistible attraction to the outcasts of the Ibo tribes. These converts provided the colonists with a foothold to create an entire government seemingly overnight. The summary on the back of my book promises the “destruction of Okonkwo’s world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries,” but ultimately both sides had significant roles to play in its destruction.

Death Foretold, Memento, and Name Interpretations

Ok, so I'm going to post another blog since I've been kind of blog-lazy recently.

So, I just finished my first Garcia Marquez book, Chronicle of Death Foretold, which is kind of embarassing being that I am half Colombian. But anyway, I am kind of unsure about how I feel about the book. As a whole, I can say I liked it, but when critiquing it page by page, it does seem kind of like a person's rambles. There were parts that just dragged on and seemed somewhat irrelevant to the plot, but then again, this was my first time reading it and I probably missed some of the the novel's motifs.

What I did like about, though, is how Garcia Marquez took one event (the murder of Santiago Nasar), which lasted only a few hours, and stretched it out to 120 pages. When I read the very first line in the book about how Santiago Nasar was to die, I naturally assumed that his death would come either a) eventually as the climax of the novel, or b) quickly in the introduction with the remainder of the story being void of death. But no, what Garcia Marquez accomplished is something I'm used to seeing in very well directed and though-out movies. He took a single event, and stretched into a whole story by showing it from multiple perspectives. He showed it from Santiago's, Bayardo's, Divina's, Pablo's/Pedro's, Cristo's, and Angela's viewpoints. All the meanwhile, Garcia Marquez utilizes an unnammed narrator to weave all the stories together.

In a way, this somewhat reminded me of the movie Memento, in which a man with no short term memory tries to puzzle his life together and in order to do so, he tattoos facts about his life on himself so that he doesn't forget. The movie moves non-chronologically through a single event - one full day. The beginning of the movie starts off with a death and the rest of the movie takes the reader through a series of pieced together events in order to understand the murder.

On a last, irrelevant note, I would like to point out the significance of certain names in Garcia Marquez's novel. Divina Flor, Cristo Bedoya, and Pedro and Pablo Vicario all have very interpretable names. Divina Flor, literally meaning Divine Flower in Spanish, could represent the innocence of the young women who were married off to older, promiscuous men in those times. Cristo, a shortened version of Cristobal, means Christ in Spanish. He is Santiago's true friend in the story and does everything in his power to stop the murder. The Vicario family's surname could be derived from the word vicarious, which means experiencing something through others. This makes sense because the twins had to defend their sister's honor and go to jail for her.

A Common Thread....

While I have read each book for this course one thing in particular keeps standing out to me. Maybe it is because it is so true in our daily lives and cultures that it is such a constant theme in literature. The idea that keeps presenting itself to me is this-if someone is different, an individual does not act, dress, or think the way the rest of society, the collective does, they are either cast out, frowned upon or locked up, or...some combination of those three. The collective seemingly cannot comprehend the individual. In the Overcoat, Akaky is viewed as an outcast because he is perfectly content to do his work, not advance, and live a mundane repetitive life. Michael Kohlhaas takes it upon himself to find justice in his story by Kleist. Nora, in A Doll's House makes her husband furious and risks punishment by society by stepping outside the accepted norms for women and what is considered to be womanly behavior. Kafka's ill fated protagonist is shunned and attacked even by his own family, when Gregor becomes a cockroach. He is seen as a disgusting monster, they cannot see the fact that he is inside still human because he is so very different from them. In The Stranger Mersault is locked up not because he killed the Arab but because he was an emotionless and odd individual. And the Arabs in the same book are viewed as less than human or less than the French colonists because they are different-they look different, they have different beliefs, different customs. In Things Fall Apart, and indeed with colonialism in general, missionaries come in claiming to know the path to salvation and writing off centuries old traditions because they are unfamiliar to them. Even as I write this, the adjectives I use to convey the way that these "outcasts" are viewed, come to me because society teaches the lessons of these works of literature. What if they author's themselves are simply outcasts trying to point out the wrongs that society commits every day? What if they are simply looking for someone to understand them, through their main characters, because they have been misunderstood their whole lives?

Separating Religion from Views

Before writing this blog, I have to be honest and preface that for the past few years, I have been slowly “losing my religion.” I was raised Catholic-Christian, but not very strictly. As a child, my parents took to Mass and Protestant services every week or so. For them, it wasn’t so much that they took me to a Catholic church or a Protestant church, but rather just to any type of church in general. I never understood at the time, but I now think that they did this because they didn’t want to shove religion down my throat and make me blindly believe in something without actually putting any thought behind it.

Coming from a very cultural Latin American family, I have always felt almost obligated to be Catholic, cause that’s just what “we do.” Now that I’ve grown older, I believe that the reason that religion on Earth varies as much as it does is because nobody truly knows what happens after we die and people fear that. And from fear arises opinion and from opinion arises faith.

Just like in the case of Okonkwo and his clansmen of Umuofia, religion is so deeply rooted in a society that people can’t separate it from reality or even comprehend what life would be like without it. Unfortunately, all societies in this world are like this; they can’t separate things that they grown up with from their beliefs and look at new situations objectively.

When I was reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, I subconsciously scoffed at the idea of there being Earth gods, rain gods, yam gods, etc. And even though I’m in the midst of questioning Christianity as a whole, I still saw this from a Christian monotheistic perspective. And why wouldn’t I? I have been exposed to it my whole life and everyone around me believes in it. In reality, the concept of multiple gods that control nature is quite logical. And if you don’t think so, then ask yourself if it is logical for men to arise from the dead, part oceans, or spawn a woman from a rib bone.

One of my favorite parts of Achebe’s novel and perfect example of this in the Ibo culture appears on page 146. A convert asks the missionary how he can protect himself from the neglected gods once he begins worshipping Jesus. It clearly shows two things: the blind faith that people will have in things due to fear, and the inability to separate their lives from long-held customs.

So in conclusion, I don’t want to bash on any religion or put anyone’s religion down. I just want to say that I believe that everyone has the right to believe whatever they want because nobody truly knows why we are here, who or what created us, and where, or, if we are going somewhere after we die.

When Two Cultures Collide

This may seem a bit random, but there is currently a great controversy going on in the Korean Pop world. It was recently announced that Jaebeom Park, the leader of popular boy band 2PM, has been permanently removed from the group for unspecified personal reasons. Jaebeom is an American-born Korean, who has spent the last five years of his life in Korea as a celebrity. Due to his American upbringing, he has faced some difficulty in adjusting to Korean culture and language. This difficulty has caused him serious problems: leading to his flying home to Seattle after a conversation—in which he called Korea “gay”— held with an American friend via MySpace in 2005, sparked anger in many Koreans. Such an offense is hardly noteworthy in American culture, and Jaebeom, who was just a frustrated teenager at the time, would not have thought to think that such a statement would later cause him so much trouble. It was rather used as a way to release the tension he felt mounting upon him as he struggled to learn a new language, eat new food, and understand new social norms.

When two cultures collide both amazing and terrible things can happen. While reading Things Fall Apart, I felt like I was supposed to see evil in everything that happened once the Europeans come. From a historical perspective I know that it is unlikely that things turn out well for any of the Igbo people. However, one of Chinua Achebe’s goals in this novel was to show that some failing in the Igbo aided in the destruction of their own society. Under the guise of religion the Europeans come to Africa to civilize the savage. What the “white man” encounters is a culture with a set of beliefs foreign to it’s own, yet no less complex. In Igbo culture violence is a part of everyday life, a way to punish everyday grievances, get retribution, and adhere to spiritual beliefs. On a smaller scale, in American culture, doing such a thing as calling someone gay or committing some “serious personal problem” (this problem must have been legal, or not too illegal, as no authorities were called in) would not be enough to make the entertainment company feel like they must terminate his contract. In fact, it is more likely that the whole situation would be used as a publicity ploy. When Jaebeom releases his anger, or just does what he feels, like in the mysterious situation that led to his termination, he is just doing what is natural in his culture. This is the same for the Igbo’s ruining of the church to appease the spirits; it is what is natural in their culture.

Unfortunately for the Igbo and Jaebeom, it seems they cannot win. The Igbo lose believers one-by-one and their very presence in the village seems to drain their violent nature, at least that is how Okonkwo perceives it. In Jaebeom’s case he is thrown to the wayside as rumors spread about what he could have possibly done to cause his contract to be cancelled. The other members of the group seem eager to continue on without their leader, just as Okonkwo’s opinion has come to matter much less than it did before his banishment and the arrival of the Christians. Jaebeom’s story has yet to unfold completely, however a favorable solution seems incredibly unlikely, perhaps even impossible, as doubts are now being raised about the characters’ of the remaining members who seem so willing to do without the one who led them to fame. Umuofia’s story, as told by history, is destined for further entrenchment with the Europeans, that they remain unable to escape until 1960.

These two cases of brotherhood’s that are unable to withstand the various trials and tribulations that come with existence seem to show that when two cultures collide, someone’s got to lose.