Reading these panels, I came to sympathize with the lady on the telephone. At first, I couldn’t understand why the lady chose such an apathetic and insensitive response to Ali’s excitement. After all, immigration is a long and arduous process. It’s extremely taxing on the applicant and on the administrative end. Because the medium is cartoonish, it’s hard to imagine an actual person on the phone saying something like this. But she did, and for completely understandable reasons. After I finish taking an exam for a difficult class, I feel only a brief moment of relief. The sense of success I feel is quickly overwhelmed by the realization that I will have another set of midterms to study for and assignments to complete in only one to two weeks. Being in a STEM major, it’s also difficult to see how most of the things I learn will apply to my specific concentration (I don’t really see how electrical engineering and circuitry applies to genetics and biochemistry). In the same way, the lady on the phone doesn’t see the end of her work. After completing the paperwork for an application, she only sees another application behind it. It’s also quite likely that her job doesn’t really give her the opportunity to see the immigrants that she helps. In the same way that I don’t see the applications of most of the things I learn in college, she most likely doesn’t see the people whose applications she completes. To her, the immigrant’s application is literally a number, and everything about the way that she perceives immigrants is manufactured to represent that. Having understood this, I realized that we should not dislike the woman on the other side of the phone. It’s not her fault that she feels indifferent about applicants. Rather, the current existing systems of borders, immigration, and administration are the root issue here. These are the causes of the dehumanization seen throughout Villawood.

“If you ever have a child of your own,” my father’s wife said, “at least you can tell your child that you saw your father, even like this.” 

How would I describe this to my own child if I ever had one? How would I tell it to my mother, who thought that nothing having to do with my father was in the present, that everything involving him was in the past, in the old days?

• Danticat p. 15

I find Danticat’s use of time as a means of connection and severance particularly interesting. In some instances, time connects the past with the present. Nadia’s father returns to Haiti to help rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, while her mother decides to stay in the United States. Nadia’s arrival in Miami was just a bit too late for her to reach her father in time, preventing her from reconnecting with her Haitian heritage. Her student criticizes Camus’ disregard for lifespan. Her father feels it was “too late” to reach out to Nadia by the time he learned of her existence (by which time she was a teenager). And most notably, Nadia reconnects with her Haitian heritage (the old days) when participating in a funeral ceremony. 

While the atmosphere throughout the story is quite gloomy, Danticat’s use of time seems to impart a hopeful and celebratory theme. Even though we never speak with Nadia’s father, and even though his existence can only be verified by those who have met him, there’s a sense of immortalization from passing down Haitian traditions. Nadia doesn’t need to describe her father to her future child, but needs only pass down the Haitian heritage he worked so hard to preserve. Tradition is something that seems to transcend time and distance, connecting people around the world and across eras. It is in this manner that the deaths of people before us become forever immortalized in our hearts and minds, which quite frankly, is best symbolized by the final two paragraphs of the story: Nina Simone’s sorrow-filled voice slowly transitioning to a joyous and upbeat rhythm–carrying the nobility of a king and the strength of an entire village.

“For the language of the criminal can only contain the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me.” (Kincaid 32)

Kincaid uses juxtaposition several times across the first half of his novel to illustrate the duality of Western imperialism. This is seen in his descriptions of snobbish and elitist Europeans who judge Caribbean natives for their differences. This is seen in the ugliness of Western cities in comparison to the natural features of Antigua. This is also seen in the quality of food, water, sanitation, and healthcare provided to Westerners and non-Westerners. 

One of the most interesting points Kincaid brings up is the “cleverness” of the Western colonizer. Unlike the bountiful lands of the Caribbean, mainland European countries and large North American states suffer from drought and resource scarcity. Native Americans and Caribbeans have found a way to coexist with nature (through twine-weaved clothes and unconventional waste management). Until Kincaid brought it up, I didn’t even realize that I thought twine-woven clothes and taking a dump in a hole in the Earth were ugly. Objectively speaking, however, such practices are much more natural and closer in harmony to nature itself. This difference in values has effectively led the Western colonizer to consume more than it can produce, creating resource scarcity. Thus, through cleverness and deception, Western narratives of colonization for the improvement of lesser nations were developed–all for the sake of capturing more resources for our consumption.

-Chris

“Nietzsche became angry when his schoolmates would not believe the story. And so, the fifteen-year-old Nietzsche plucked a hot coal from the grate and held it. Of course, it burned him. He carried the resulting scar with him for the rest of his life” (Cole 223)

In his younger days, Nietzsche once told a story of how the Roman hero Gaius set his hand on fire to prove his determination to the Etruscan king, Porsenna. However, none of his schoolmates believed him. To prove his point, Nietzsche pulled a lump of hot coal from a boiler and held it within his fist, leaving him with a permanent scar. The physical trauma endured by Nietzsche mirrors the trauma experienced by Julius and Moji. The negligence of Julius’ parents left him with a distant persona, and Moji’s sexual trauma has permanently scarred her. In each of their cases, they don’t feel empowered to share their experiences with other people for fear of rejection or repercussions. 

I find it interesting that the novel is surrounded by an aura of skepticism. Julius is established as an unreliable narrator early in the novel. Our access to the setting is solely through the lens of Julius himself. Furthermore, the setting is mostly metropolitan. Many of the characters don’t have names or are abbreviated (such as the marathon jogger, or Ms. V). Urban environments obfuscate the identity of individual peoples. It’s hard to remember the faces of everyone you see in a single day, let alone their behavior. There’s always a sense of isolation in the city. In a way, it almost feels like the perspective that can be most trusted is your own, since the people around you are nameless and faceless. The sense of isolation that one feels feeds into the sentiment that you cannot share your experiences with other people (which leads to Moji and Julius’ repressive tendencies). This creates a feedback loop where not being able to connect with others only reinforces this sense of isolation. Furthermore, the unreliability of a single point of view reinforces the aura of skepticism, creating another feedback loop that interrelates with the isolation loop. “Open City” presents an interesting contradiction wherein the places with the most people are some of the most isolated environments, and despite the multitude of names and faces in a crowd, the only one that is recognizable is your own.

One of the things I really like about the first few chapters is how Cole plays with the idea of connection and solitude. Over the first few chapters, Cole reveals how Julius experiences the world around him, and the connections he makes with others. Despite living adjacent to his next-door neighbor, Seth, for years, he doesn’t learn about Seth’s wife’s death until years after the fact. At the same time, though, he manages to maintain a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Nadege. Through this juxtaposition, Cole demonstrates that distance is an illusion. Connection with others depends on something much more complex than distance. 

I think connection means sharing an understanding with someone else. To be able to understand even a bit about someone else means to be connected to them. Julius is able to connect with his oma while waiting for his parents to finish their mountain tour. Even though they don’t exchange a single word, they connect through their shared silence. Julius doesn’t connect with his neighbor because neither of them has been able to share something with each other. That said, even if you try to understand someone else, sometimes the connection just doesn’t click. Julius can’t understand the depression that V endures despite their therapy session. He fails to be impressed by jazz music, which his friend claims will change his worldview. 

There seems to be an unpredictable formula at work: an indescribable universal equation that determines whether someone is able to form a connection with someone else. It’s not as simple as talking with someone else. Connections can be formed in silence, and can fail to form even in conversation. There seems to be something extremely personal about connection, which is why Julius’ friend is able to enjoy jazz much more than Julius is able to. Cole doesn’t give us a direct answer but leaves us to ponder what it means to connect with someone else. On a personal level, we are left to think about what our connections to our friends and family are based on, and whether they’re strong or weak.

“Her (Grace’s) fingers catch on a pile of pink jersey – lovely stuff, soft as a baby – which in turn yanks to the surface the swirling blues and greens of a scrap of silk. Then the world grows miraculously still. As if mesmerized, she tugs at the fabric, watches it snake through the tangle of garments as she lifts it out of the bag. Grace rises, holds the scarf in both hands, runs it through her fingers, and in the glorious silence hears the swish of silk, the rush of water, of the tide foaming over shiny wet boulders. Her fingers work deftly; they fold the fabric into a small square and slip it into her pocket” (p. 7)

I found Grace to be a particularly fascinating character. I like how Wicomb leverages the actions and mannerisms of both Grace and Fiona to highlight what grace and authenticity are. Our titular character, Grace, is unaccustomed to modern-day courtesy and mannerisms. As such, she can see past the artificiality of common courtesy. The story begins with a short exchange between Fiona and Grace, during which Fiona asks Grace how she keeps her skin young and fair. Grace realizes that Fiona probably doesn’t actually care about her technique, but still reveals her secret. Logically speaking, asking someone a question without caring about the answer is strange and illogical. Small talk and euphemisms are tools used to avoid truth. Nonetheless, common courtesy seems to lean towards semi-truths and ambiguity. At the story’s start, Grace is effectively the embodiment of authenticity and graciousness, while Fiona acts as a foil, behaving superficially and speaking carelessly during her stay in South Africa. Over the course of the story, however, Wicomb demonstrates Grace’s gradual descent into disgrace. 

Grace’s descent into disgrace is observed as she analyzes and thinks about her interactions with Fiona and Miss Haskins. In one instance, she recalled how Fiona would become offended when being mistaken as English instead of Scottish. Grace doesn’t understand why Fiona got upset, thinking that all white people came from the same place anyway. In this instance, Grace begins to exhibit ungraciousness. Rather than seeking truth and politeness, she chooses ignorance and convenience. Grace also describes a time in her youth when she would toss her hair in front of a mirror and mouth “Miss Grace” to herself. She would imagine herself as graceful and elegant, but this scene paints graciousness as something vain and superficial. 

This directly ties into the quote above. Near the story’s end, Grace steals a beautiful silk scarf reminiscent of the sea from Fiona. This could be seen as her fall from grace. In choosing to steal the scarf, Grace’s authenticity is effectively replaced by materialism and superficiality. As a concept, grace can be thought of as elegance of the spirit. However, Grace gradually replaces the elegance of her spirit with elegance of physical appearance, leaving a void where her spiritual grace used to be. In this sense, Grace has become what she had repeated to herself in the mirror: Miss(ed) Grace.

Nkosi uses the concepts of law and social order brilliantly throughout the play. In particular, Dr. Kerry’s relationship with women and the law intrigues me. Firstly, Dr. Kerry’s dependency on the law is fascinating. He is part of several socialist organizations (which are presumably illegal at the time) and has even attended seminars and parties in Moscow and China. As a character, he seems intent on disrupting social order and creating societal upheaval (given the “guerilla tactics” he learned at the socialist gatherings). At the same time, however, Dr. Kerry uses Western laws to protect and restrict his actions. When he feels threatened, he tries to call the police and threatens to sue the woman for defamation. As someone who seems discontent with the law, it’s interesting how often he uses it to justify himself. This leads to my second point, which is Dr. Kerry’s relationship with women. 

Despite his outward calm and professional demeanor, Dr. Kerry is quite aggressive and impulsive. During his trip to Moscow, he sexually assaulted a woman in an area where he could not be seen by other people. He had to be escorted out of the party by security guards, and the incident was covered up. Although Dr. Kerry preaches about equitable opportunities and relationships between men and women (p.20), Nkosi illustrates that to some degree, men might exist above the law. In both Dr. Kerry’s assault of Madam Voronsky and Joubert’s rape of Dr. Kerry’s mother, both take advantage of the social conditions and their power over women. The relationships between points one and two help formulate a complex power dynamic within the play.

-Chris

“One night, I left England, unable to move from image to narrative in ways that were recognized as writing, at that time, by others. But now. Here I am! So far from home! Unable to write. What I came here to write” (Kapil lines 79-86)

A common therapy practice is to write out your thoughts and feelings. Sometimes memories and trauma can form complex and illogical webs, manifesting themselves in unexpected scenarios. While making your morning coffee, you might suddenly feel a surge of emotion without any apparent cause. Finding ways to express oneself is one of the first steps to recognizing pain and recovering from it. In Kapil’s case, however, it was impossible. For whatever reason, her form of writing wasn’t recognized as “proper”, and was consequently either ignored or too difficult to understand (perhaps there’s some deeper context related to minor literature, etc). 

I find Kapil’s “spell” pretty interesting. For those unable to communicate their pain (whether due to fear of social ostracization or the inability to do so), her solution is to seek alternate forms of connection; to connect with the past, present, and future by experiencing the same things as those who are on the same boat (lines 104-114). Isn’t it ironic how magical spells typically require verbal or written incantations, but Kapil’s spell doesn’t require any form of linguistic expression? Even the literal definition of “spell” denotes the usage of letters or characters to form a word. Kapil doesn’t care. She proves that anyone willing to put forth the effort can become a wizard.

-chris chang

Admittedly, I have very little understanding of European and Indian history. I presume that the (fictional?) events of the story and poem are based on the Partition of India and Pakistan. From the short excerpt from “The Return”, we can gather that there is significant civil unrest in Pakistan. Our narrator, Sirajuddin mentions boarding a train at 2:00 PM in Amritsar, a city in India, which arrives eight hours later (10:00 PM) in the Pakistan city of Mughalpura. Given that our narrator refers to the attackers as “rioters”, it is unlikely that an actual war has broken out yet (especially since trains are carrying civilians between the two regions). 

What interests me is that the events of the poem and story are only possible because our narrator arrives late at night, when darkness covers the train. The narrator’s wife is disemboweled in front of him (the graphic details and process are most likely further described in the accompanying poem, “Sorry”). After rereading both the poem and story, I realized the entire situation was pretty funny. In the poem, the attacker slashes out the intestines of a “man” and feels regret after realizing he killed not a man, but a woman (“the man with the knife looked down and said, ‘oh no! That was a mishtake!). This illuminates two important points: 

(1) Women have very few, if any rights in this region. The attacker clearly believes that this conflict is the responsibility of men, which excludes women and children, as though they don’t have any say in the regional conflict. This is important to understanding the second point:

(2) It takes a woman to make the man realize he is killing people. It doesn’t matter that the attackers are killing civilians (instead of, say, soldiers). Had the attacker struck down a man, he would’ve continued without any regrets. I found this point particularly humorous because war necessitates the dehumanization of your enemy. Once you see your enemy as something less than human, it makes it easier to massacre them. This brings out a glaring contradiction in which women and children can be deprived of rights since they exist in a group that isn’t necessarily “human”. After all, if men saw women as equal human beings, they would have second thoughts about depriving them of rights. Simultaneously, however, women and children embody the aspect of “humanity”. It takes someone not seen as a human (a woman) to remind the attacker he is killing actual humans. 

These are just some things I found interesting about the two passages. As I mentioned above, my understanding of the historical context is very limited. Please let me know if my interpretation is historically incorrect or flawed. 

-Chris