Complete sample essay for Essay 1 assignment

Faster. Faster. Time waits for no man, especially in summer school. I quickly looked over the finals from the Fall 2003 Immigrant Literature Course and found that the theme of rapidity is as present in the immigrant narrative as it was presented in our five-week session summer class (Lori and Claudine). The dilemma of how fast one could learn and understand different ways of learning separate to those that they are accustomed was interweaved within our coursework. Some guidance into how to work with these new concepts and not around them came directly after the midterm (Lecture Notes, June 17). Whether the notes were timely effective I will address in the following paragraph. Overall the theme of a steadfast enemy prevailed in both the class and the coursework.

            Everyone gets a turn. The words seemed as apparent as they were projected on the white screen that overlapped the blackboard, but as stated in the lecture notes, this democratic objective has its downsides. The haste of the class made it difficult for everyone to receive their turn equally. The focus was often on defending one’s current perspective over hearing another students. Students are often, “Blind to different histories of ethnic groups…Participants in discussion tend to participate (or not) according to their identification with the group under review.”  Although it is not blatantly stating an enemy, the defensive nature of students to correct or justify actions or writings from their ethnic group in a limited amount of time, categorizes an “us” and a “them”.

The same subtle separation between the immigrant, the minority, and dominant culture is in the immigrant narratives. Time deteriorates the majority of immigrant’s perspective on who they recognize as the enemy. This is better understood when we acknowledge that the enemy of these narratives is not the same based on ethnic group; time is a more valuable indicator than ethnicity. Time leads way to experience, based on these experiences an immigrant will identify as a minority or as a part of the dominant culture.

In “Silver Pavements” Jayanti and her aunt have dissimilar ideas of the enemy in America. The aunt has been in America a while and has endured life-altering experiences with the dominant culture, where as Jayanti with little exposure admires the dominant culture. Divakaruni uses the symbolism of the snow to acknowledge the different viewpoints, “ ‘You know, I’ve only seen snow in movies! It always looked so pretty and delicate’… ‘It is not that great’…She kicks at the brown slush on the side of the road with a force that surprises me”(78). Snow, like soap and water, denotes a sudden assimilation that Jayanti welcomes until the end, but her aunt undesirably kicks to the side.

“In the Land”, also showed dual identification of the enemy with a repeated understanding of time. Keeping of time in this short story is portrayed with the passing of moons and the arrival of the sun. “Five moons or five months” had passed since the officers took Hom Hing and Lae Choo’s “Little One”. At this time, Lae Choo concluded that the white men were the enemy, “You not one hundred man good; you just common white man.” Her exposure of the dominant culture was that they were uncompassionate and all desiring some means or her family’s end. One of the phrases that foreshadowed Little One’s reaction in the end was the reminder that “children soon forget” (said by both the officer and the missionary woman) that they adapt to their environments and forget about what is not directly in front of them. In the end the Little One saw his mother as the enemy, because of the time and exposure spent with the dominant culture.

 It is important to see whom the immigrant in the immigrant narrative identifies as the enemy, because it usually determines what group they identify themselves with. Additionally it is important to see whom the students in class identify themselves with (“we” or “them”), because it has a large impact on their class participation. Complete coverage is “impossible”, but the hope is that we can find the similarities between us (literature, higher learning) such as June Jordan said in her “Report from the Bahamas”, to best understand the tasks of reading and interpreting the themes of contemporary immigrant literature. [SG-R]