Poetry - Love your Enemy by Yusef Iman

http://www.glogster.com/aruzacnun08/poetry-love-your-enemy/g-6l781uallc0jljgakcosha0

Love your Enemy

Yusef Iman

brought here in slave ships and pitched overboard.
Love your enemy
language taken away, culture taken away
Love your enemy
work from sun up to sun down
Love your enemy
Last hired first fired
Love your enemy
Rape your mother
Love your enemy
Lynch your father
Love your enemy
Bomb your churches
Love your enemy
Kill your children
Love your enemy
Forced to fight his Wars
Love your enemy
Pay the highest rent
Love your enemy
Sell you rotten food
Love your enemy
Forced to live in slums
Love your enemy
Dilapidated schools
Love your enemy
Puts you in jail
Love your enemy
Bitten by dogs
Love your enemy
Water hose you down
Love your enemy
Love,
Love,
Love,
Love,
Love, for everybody else,
but when will we love ourselves???????
From: Something Black, Copyright 1966 by Yusef Iman

After reading all the poems from the selection provided, I decided to concentrate on this one, which is a 38-line poem written in the third person and with a statement/ answer format. As it uses accessible language, this poem is easily as well as quickly read. 

The lines stating activities that are far from human followed by a strong imperative statement - love your enemy - made me experience a weird feeling at first because I was not able to understand the message behind. Then, I felt pity for the oppressed since it seems to me that he is trying to bear his real life without forgetting what the Bible says.

A slave and the Bible were the two images this poem evoked. While I imagined the former coping with the unavoidable situation of being under his master's will, I could clearly see the Bible open with the statement "love your enemy" written in it. Both images together reflect  the contradiction between what the Bible teaches and what happened to slaves before slavery was abolished. 

The tune this poem suggests is similar to the Responsorial Psalm done after the First Reading in mass.

The final message of this poem is that we are taught to love others either friends or enemies so much that we forget about how self- love feels.

I think this poem is thematically related to "The Lagoon" and to "Wide Sargasso Sea" since both Arsat and Antoinette are the oppressed.         

At the top of this post I included the link so that you can have access to the Glog I have prepared and below there is a brief comment justifying my choinces.

While the pictures that surround the central image represent some of the dehumanising activities mentioned by the poem, the moving arrows departing from these pictures point to the centre where I placed the imperative statement taken from the Bible - "Love your Enemy", which emphasises the several times the oppressed repeats such a powerful claim. Regarding the wall chosen, it is not of a definite colour, which symbolises the weird feeling this poem made me experience when I first read it. The audio is a love hymn and I decided to include it because it cam up while I was searching for further information about this poem. 

At the bottom of the Glog is the final message with the same rhetorical question used by Yusef Iman, which invites the reader to think about self-love.

I hope you can enjoy the interpretation of this poem as I did.

Postmodern Culture

The videos I have selected to try to identify postmodern features are "War Games" and "Educational Uses of Second Life". 

In the first video chosen there is a computer simulation of nuclear war which threatens to start a real nuclear war. The computer user, who is a young man very much acquainted with computer games, can hardly distinguish whether he is playing a video game or it is real life. Such difficulty to differentiate virtual from real life is distinctive feature of the postmodern culture. 

Regarding the second video selected, "Educational Uses of Second Life",it  presents a new way of learning through virtual reality in which learners are highly involved in their own learning process and in which an instance of functional knowledge is presented. Students not only learn to know, but they also learn to use that knowledge, which turns it into memorable as well as relevant knowledge.

I have chosen these two videos because they have in common the collapse between image and reality characteristic of postmodernism. both videos refer to Baudrillard's idea of simulacrum since while in the former the young man finds it difficult to differentiate reality from game-playing, in the latter the learners are immersed in a virtual real world.

After Reading TTL

The character of Mrs Ramsay makes me think of my grandmothers, both of whom are still alive. They are not also devoted to their husbands and families, but also ready to help when necessary and without waiting anything as a reward. Giving, giving and giving seem to be the only action they think about. I am absolutely convinced that when they will no longer be physically present, I will be able to understand Lily Briscoe's mourning feelings towards Mrs Ramsay' death.  

Christine Brooke-Rose

Christine Brooke-Rose is a structuralist critic who attempted to understand the “The Turn of the Screw” through a detailed study of the ambiguity embedded in the linguistic structures, which for her is the essence of this text.

Christine distinguishes between “STORY” – the events as they occurred- and “DISCOURSE” – how the events are presented. This concepts are equivalents to the Russian Formalists’ distinction between fabula (histoire) and Sjuzvet (discours) (Lodge, Modern Literary Theory, Ch 9). Brooke-Rose states that there is ambiguity since within the story or sjuzvet , there are two “fabulas”, one taking the apparitionist and the other taking the non-apparirionist interpretation.

Christine distinguishes between BARE (basic structure)and MIRROR (reflections of the basic structure) STRUCTURES. The two fabulas belong to the bare structure, which is the basic structure of the text. The mirror structure refers to “a set of reflecting dichotomies suggestive of reflections in a mirror”. What we see in a mirror depends on our emotional and physical state. This leads us to think that ghosts are portrayed depending on the governess’ emotional states. Brooke-Rose also calls it mirror because mirrors have a four- sided frame and the story can be particularly analysed taking into account six groups of four elements:

·         4 main living characters at Bly: the governess, Mrs. Grose, Miles, Flora.

·         4 ex-guardians: the uncle, Mrs Grose, Peter Quint, Miss Jessel

·         4 presently concerned with the children: the governess, Mrs Grose, Peter Quint, Miss Jessel.

·         4 in a supposed evil relationship: Peter Quint, Miss Jessel, Miles, Flora

·         4 narrators: Griffin, Douglas, the I-narrator, the governess

·         4 readers or receptors: Douglas, the I-narrator, the listeners at Douglas’s country home, the readers of the novella

 Brooke-Rose based her studies, mainly, on the language used by the Governess.

She claims that the governess’ language is “contagious”. This means that she is constantly trying to convince the reader to perceive what she herself perceives, which is also achieved by the governess’ exteriorization of her feelings. The story confronts the reader with a whole special world, which at first he/she is an external spectator but to which he/she later becomes internal through perception.

The use of verbs like “give, offer, take, have” together with the frequent use of the possessive pronoun “my” and the occasional use of “we” or “our” suggests that the governess speaks as if she was the owner and possessor of information. Examples of the use of pronouns and verbs are:  “my children”; “my document”; “my boy”.

This critic’s weakness is to assume that there are only two fabulas in the sjuzvet.

To sum up, I must admit that although it was not easy for me to easily understand Brooke-Rose’s point of view at first, after giving her interpretation various readings, I agree with her because if we pay attention to the governess’ language we can easily be persuaded or, at least, influenced by her way of seeing things, especially the ghosts. She is very successful at making us – readers- perceive what she herself perceives. 

Pattern Poem - Biopoem

Ariana

Independent, persistent, responsible and reserved.

Daughter of present and hard-working parents.

Lover of friends, family and justice.

Who feels happy when helping others,

relaxed when she's at home

and irritated when on Monday mornings to Rosario she has to travel.

Who needs freedom, peace and love.

Who fears being alone, failing to achieve her goals 

and getting old.

Who gives trivial matters too much importance.

Who would like to see her parents together again,

her cousin as healthy as before

and herself getting her degree.

Resident of Godeken, Santa Fe

Zacnún

I have chosen the Biopoem for two main reasons. Firstly, because since I have never written a poem, I find its guided structure quite easy to follow. Secondly, I have chosen it because it is autobiographical and I want both my classmates and Mariel can get to know a little more about me. I hope you enjoy my Biopoem.