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Sample Final Exam submissions 2015 (2015 final exam assignment) Essay 1 Sample |
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Assignment: Describe and evaluate your learning experience, referring to texts, seminar, objectives, research, and midterm. (may incorporate or overlap with midterm essay[s])
Caryn
Livingston
6
December 2015
A
Whole New World of Literature
It
has never been particularly difficult for me to acknowledge the colonial past of
the United States. While growing up in Osage County, Oklahoma, I attended
elementary schools with Indian Education courses, which my friends with Native
American ancestry attended a few times a month to learn more about their
heritage. I also remember an intensive unit in the fourth grade on the forcible
relocation of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes to what later became the state
of Oklahoma, with little whitewashing of the suffering during events like the
Trail of Tears. However, while I grew up with an awareness of what the federal
government had done to people whose ancestors were living in North America
before English settlers began colonizing the east coast, it was always taught to
me as something from the distant past. Colonized people, as far as I knew, were
now either adjusted to the mainstream society in their country, or were
withdrawn from it into places like reservations, where they had little
interaction with the outside world. As bizarre as it seems to me now, it never
occurred to me that colonized people could instead have very complicated and
diverse feelings about how colonialism had affected their lives, and could
channel those thoughts and feelings into the creation of art.
Even though during history class I learned about the terrible things done
to Native Americans so that white settlers could have their land, the literary
canon taught at the schools I attended was seemingly as inconsistent with the
more historically honest perspective of my history class as it was possible to
be. My university experience was slightly better in that I experienced more
world literature, but Heart of Darkness
is still the only thing I was assigned that dealt with colonial issues. Even at
the graduate level, a majority of the classes offered focus on European
literature, because that seems to be the ethnic background of most of the people
who influence the curriculum.
In my midterm, I wanted to explore why Americans tend to be so
uncomfortable with post-colonial literature, and I decided that Americans tend
to dislike the idea that despite some lessons we have learned over the years we
are still flawed, and our actions in the past still have consequences that play
out in the present. When we do acknowledge the terrible things we have done in
the past, we do so with the attitude that what’s done is done, and of course we
would never do something so terrible now that we understand how bad it is, so
shouldn’t everyone agree to let bygones be bygones? In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel
Jasmine Bud doesn’t want to hear
about the things Jasmine endured in her past, and similarly Americans are more
comfortable when we aren’t confronted too much with the foreignness of other
people and the ways we have hurt them or disregarded their suffering. Rather, we
prefer a view of ourselves as bringers of freedom and democracy to oppressed
peoples—never mind if we had or have a hand in their oppression.
The risk when thinking about ourselves as oppressors is that we may
dehumanize colonized people from the other end of the spectrum, which is
something I hadn’t thought much about before this class. I try to have empathy
for other people, and when I learn about colonial violence it tends to be very
upsetting to me, but the thing I really learned the most about in this class is
how dangerous the self-other worldview is. It is so easy to fall into that
worldview by seeing oppressed people as victims, or others, crushed by the more
powerful self, which Americans tend to identify with. The novel
Train to Pakistan was really
eye-opening for me in that respect, because the religious conflict of more
powerful Sikhs against less powerful Muslims depicted in it is so unlike
anything we tend to encounter in American media. Our view of Muslims here tends
to be either the post-9/11 suspicion and dislike or the reaction to that fear
that claims that Islam is in no way a violent religion and so real Muslims are
peaceful. Both of those reactions, though, turn Muslims into the “other”—either
the threatening boogeyman out to destroy American culture, or the victimized,
peaceful group that is only a scapegoat for white America’s fears of everything
related to the Middle East. Train to
Pakistan presents a different view of Muslims, because while in the novel’s
setting they have less power than the Sikhs, on the other side of the Pakistan
border, Muslim people are participating in exactly the same behavior the Sikhs
are in Mano Majra. Both groups are human, and so both groups are capable of the
violence that occurs.
I discussed some of the history of violence during the partition of India
in my research journal, but before late in my undergraduate career I knew
absolutely nothing about it, as it was never taught in my high school history
classes. In one of his final essays, Ryan Smith mentioned that he was struck
with the same feeling of shock to learn just how historically accurate the
violence depicted in Train to Pakistan
really was. “As the novel progressed, I was particularly struck by my own
ignorance (and most of the class’ for that matter) of the history being related
here, and of this level of suffering. This many people died? There was this much
political and social turmoil?” Smith wrote. As I researched the violence against
women during the partition for my research journal, I also kept wondering, “How
could I be entirely ignorant of the death of up to one million people during
this twentieth century event?” I wondered why U.S. schools didn’t feel the need
to teach its high school students about it, and it’s hard to fathom, considering
the amount of time most students spend learning about the Holocaust. The only
conclusion I have been able to reach also seems to be further explanation of why
most of the literature studied in U.S. high schools is written by American or
English people (and mostly men, at that). In our curiosity for knowledge, it
seems to me that Americans are almost totally self-absorbed. We do not have
interest in things that we aren’t involved in, which is why we learn about the
Holocaust and the concentration camps we helped to liberate, and not about the
hundreds of thousands of people, at least, who died in a few months in India and
Pakistan in 1947, so soon after the camps were liberated.
As painful as it is to realize how totally ignorant I have been and still am about both colonial history and post-colonial literature, the advantage to learning this so early in my life means I still have time to correct it. To that end, the film The Quiet American seemed the perfect film to conclude the semester with, because while America’s role in colonialism has been marginal during the semester, it is really the lens through which all students in the class filtered the information we received during the class. Even today, with all of our opportunities for hindsight, many Americans consider it a duty to confront countries with different types of thinking than ours, just as in the film Pyle was so concerned with the spread of Communism in Vietnam that he could justify any number of atrocities in pursuit of a democratic and, it goes without saying, capitalist Vietnamese government. When I reread Heart of Darkness after watching The Quiet American, I thought about something I never had before during the class—just as Marlow travels to Africa with a company from the European continent instead of from England, we Americans have been following the colonial stories of primarily England throughout the semester. It is easy to see the damage left by colonialism and think to yourself how bad it is, and that England really has a lot to answer for. The Quiet American reminded me that the U.S. is racking up its own list of hurt people it needs to answer for, and we need to remember that if we don’t want the list to keep growing.
