“In Sri Lanka, they torture people physically but here they do it mentally… They have to realize we are human beings who need dignity and respect.”

These sentences unveil the harsh reality of many people who are trapped inside immigration detention centers. Many immigrants risk their lives trying to escape the violence, poverty, and social instability that exists within their country. However, the idea that they will finally start a new beginning, find safety, and contribute to their family’s desperate needs back home is crushed when they are locked up in the detention centers. In these detention centers, they confront injustices, and daily deprivations, and have little to no companionship. As a result, their mental health, as well as their sense of optimism, is destroyed. The only things they have left are lingering questions about their freedom, and how they will support their families back home?

This idea is also reflected in one of the refugees’ statements about their actual situation: “In this night of solitude, there are thousands of dreams, but there are more pains in my heart-thousands of sorrows.”

After reading the short story, “In the old days,” by Edwidge Danticat, I had a hard time empathizing with both, Nadia’s mother and her father. Take Nadia’s father, for example, it was revealed that he used to say, “Take care of one child or a few hundred, which would you choose? (Danticat 9)” every time his wife mentioned having children. It implies that Maurice did not want to have children with his wife because he had the opportunity to help many children, especially in a country that had gotten rid of a thirty-year dictatorship. He probably had the same idea in mind when he was together with Nadia’s mother. Otherwise, had he known earlier that he was going to be a father, he would have chosen to stay and solely focus on his daughter. However, later in the story, it is revealed that he found out the truth, that he had a daughter, fifteen years later. Why didn’t he keep in touch with her?
Does this make him guilty or not?
The same question can be asked about Nadia’s mother. She did a great job raising Nadia, but she kept her a secret from Maurice and claimed that he abandoned them. Does this make her guilty?
This makes it really hard for me to feel a type of way about either of them, Nadia’s mother and her father.

“You will be surprised, then, to see that most likely the person driving this brand-new car filled with the wrong gas lives in a house that, in comparison, is far beneath the status of the car; and if you were to ask why you would be told that the banks are encouraged by the government to make loans available for cars, but loans for houses not so easily available; and if you ask again why, you will be told that the two main car dealer- ships in Antigua are owned in part or outright by ministers in government” (Kincaid, 7).

I found this part of the reading to be very powerful because although Kincaid focuses more on the long-lasting impact of colonization, especially by the British, she also highlights the corruption and the lack of compassion that leaders feel towards their people in many undeveloped countries. She mentions how the Antiguan government supported the availability of bank loans only for cars, and not for a comfortable place to live in. This was only because the same cars, filled with leaded gasoline, a detrimental substance that has devastating health impacts, came directly from dealerships owned by ministers in the government. This goes to show how little abusive government leaders care about their people sometimes and how much they care about themselves. They name the airport after themselves, they give special privileges to the people who are close to them (like Evita, for example, who was the girlfriend of a government official), they go to New York “to see a real doctor” whenever they are sick, and ultimately leave the remaining part of the population to fend for themselves in horrible living conditions. In a way, it is almost as if colonialism never left the island, and Antiguans are still taken advantage of by their own.

I found chapter 17 very interesting because Julius no longer shows that sense of isolation as he did before. On the contrary, he feels a bigger sense of belonging in an “Open City.” We, as readers, understand how Julius’ mind works, and how he tends to make connections with almost everything that passes through it. And in a way, this unpredictable flow of thought is reflected in Julius’ interactions with his friends in central park. For example, Julius states, “These last few decades, I said to my friends, in which wars flare up in patches instead of being all-consuming, and agriculture no longer evokes elemental fear, and the seasonal variations in weather are not harbingers of starvation, is an anomaly in human history. We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live in a secure world” (181). This affirmation is something we would only see through Julius’ thoughts. However, the sense of familiarity that Julius feels around his friends slowly makes him want to share his ideas and his observations. Another example of Julius’ sense of familiarity with his friends is when he talks about some of his patients’ stories. Especially those stories about “the alien visitations and government surveillance” (182).  This shows how confident and open to show solidarity Julius is compared to the beginning of the story. 

“It was the seventh day of the rain, which had been nagging, trickling, falling without biblical grandeur. But its longevity reminded me of the only other rain I could recall that had lasted for days… I was nine at the time, so it was the year before I was sent away to boarding school” (Cole 117-118).

These quote from the book lingers with me because it encapsulates the peculiar way in which Julius makes connections. At the beginning of chapter ten, Julius wakes up from a disconcerting dream and fails to recognize the time, the country, and the place he is in. Little by little, he remembers that he is staying in a rented apartment in Brussels, Belgium. Then, after a dreamless sleep, he mentions that there has been a ceaseless rain for the last seven days. In connection to the never-ending rain, he recalls a particular day during his childhood when he, succumbed to temptation, drank a bottle of Coke without the permission of his parents. This made me ponder about Julius’ intention when he scrutinizes specific components of his surroundings, like the rain. In other words, what is the importance of rain? What does it symbolize?

Another one of Julius’ distinctive connections is seen in chapter 2 when he alludes to Obatala, the Yoruba God responsible for the formation of humans from clay, after his encounter with the cripple and the two blind men on the 1 train station. I noticed that these connections made by Julius, in a way, are a great way for Cole to further describe certain characters that have yet to appear in the story and to insert similar ideas into the story.

I really enjoyed reading these chapters from Teju Cole’s “Open City” especially because it submerges us into Julius’ experiences and thoughts as he wanders aimlessly through New York City during the final year of his psychiatry fellowship. Cole achieves this effect by using sensory details as well placing us in Julius’ perspective. A central theme emphasized in these chapters is isolation and how people can become oblivious to the events happening around them. A particular quote that exemplifies this idea is, “Walking through busy parts of town meant I laid eyes on more people, hundreds more, thousands even, than I was accustomed to seeing in the course of a day, but the impress of these countless faces did nothing to assuage my feelings of isolation; if anything, it intensified them” (Cole 5). This quote shows that although Julius found himself in a vibrant environment as he went on his usual walks, he could not find the antidote to his loneliness. And although it may not seem like it, this is a mutual feeling among many New Yorkers. How many of us see each other for a few seconds and then suddenly disappear? Do we really sense a feeling of companionship?

One thing that fascinated me about this particular reading is its use of literary techniques. Throughout the text, Wicomb incorporates various similes and uses vivid imagery not only to describe important things in the story, but to pinpoint the reader’s attention on them. For example, at the beginning of the story, Wicomb states, “Silk, she supposes, and in shimmering blues and greens that flow into each other, exactly the colour of the sea on Boxing Day…” (24). At this point, I wondered why the author would provide such a meticulous description of a scarf and thought to myself that maybe it would play an important role later on in the story. To my surprise, I was right. After Grace assumes that she knows Fiona’s true intention in not letting her iron her clothes, so she wouldn’t have to leave a tip, she decides to steal that same scarf that came up early in the story. Additionally, I really liked that Wicomb decided to conclude the story with, “Grace feels her head shaking, back and forth, feels the shame rising from her scalp as if each hair is being uprooted, one by one, leaving her bald as a baby” (36). Here, he brings back a point made earlier about Grace’s naturally good hair and portrays the shame as “uprooting” it from her scalp. Ultimately to show how “disgraced” Grace was after seeing that Fiona left a tip and recognizing how wrong she was about her.

“Next time you’ll know better than to come budging in here, turning up a lot of stones! (He laughs scornfully) I wanted to re-live the past. There are usually scorpions under rocks.”

I found these lines to be powerful because not only do they convey why it was so difficult for Dr. Kerry to reveal the truth to Gloria, but because they represent the unexpected turn of events that happened. At first, it felt as though Gloria was the one questioning and studying Dr. Kerry in his own consulting room instead of being the other way around. She continuously requested Henry to recount his past, and she tried to find answers regarding their previous relationship. By doing so, she obtained answers, but not the ones she wanted to hear. She was struck with the crude reality that Dr. Henry was her half-sibling. Discovering that her father sexually abused a black woman, especially during a time of constant discrimination towards blacks in South Africa, was so unexpected that she refused to accept it. Therefore, when Dr. Kerry uses the expression, “There are usually scorpions under rocks,” he suggests that dismantling the past can often sting us. At the same time, he refers to some of the harsh realities that black people endured under a system dominated by empowered white people and numerous segregation laws.

The way that the poem “1947: Spell to Reverse A Line” by Bhanu Kapil was written was unusual for me because nearly each short line ends with a period. This way of writing prevented me from rushing through the text and allowed me to examine each line more attentively. While reading the poem, a segment that lingered with me was:

“I lived in a family of people who survived a massacre or witnessed its aftermath.

They spent seven nights on a railway platform ‘with dead bodies all around.’

My mother wept, telling this story” (3-4). 

Through these lines, Kapil shows her own perspective, how although it was her mother who went through unimaginable experiences during the 1947 British India partition, she also lives with the same trauma. Seeing her mother shed tears while telling the story might be one way in which this trauma is passed on. Additionally, these lines show the perspective of families who, after generations, have been burdened with generational trauma, whether it is from war in their homelands, displacement, or other tragic events. A perspective that those of us fortunate enough to be born free from traumatic memories/images do not get to see. One where many children have to witness the constant suffering expressed by their parents or grandparents.

Hi Zachary! I really like how you took a phrase from “The Return” and connected it to similar experiences that the Jewish refugees and African Americans endured at different times in history. Although I focused more on analyzing the short poem, I also felt discontent with the phrase “Total confusion prevailed, with people looking for lost sons, mothers, wives,” from the passage “The return” because it made me think about the long-term consequences of war, riots, and oppressive forces and how they often destroy communities and torn apart different families. It is truly a nightmare to be separated from the ones you love most and live in fear of never finding them again. I also concur with your interpretation of the words “Total confusion” that refugees were disoriented and perhaps were uncertain about their next steps without family members by their side. Great job!

-Adrian Garcia

The poem “Sorry” by Saadat Hasan Manto not only surprised me but also made me ponder about the true intentions of the person holding the knife. Straight away, the opening line of the poem surprised me because it paints a gruesome image of a man carefully cutting open another person’s stomach. At first, phrases like “The knife plunged into the stomach” and “Moved down the midriff” led me to believe that the person holding the knife lacked compassion and was nothing more than a soulless human being. However, it was the phrase “Oh no, no! … that was a mishtake!” that made me question whether this person genuinely felt sorry for what he had done, or he simply used the word “mishtake” to mock or show contempt. Other questions that I had were: Did he say “mishtake” because he felt emotional after realizing that he was blinded by his rage? Did he show regret because he was not clear about the gender of the person? 

In the end, after considering the context of the poem and learning more about the partition of British India, I realized that the man with the knife in hand was either Muslim or Hindu. Once he checked if the victim was or was not circumcised, he probably realized that he had killed someone that he wasn’t supposed to.