Onions as a history lesson?

            Naomi Shihab Nye wrote a great poem about, believe it or not, an onion. Tis onion is incorporated into the story as if it were really something else. This is the poem:

“When I think how far the onion has traveled

just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise

All small forgotten miracles,

crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,

pearly layers in smooth agreement,

the way the knife enters the onion

and onion falls apart on the chopping block,

a history revealed.

And I would never scold the onion

for causing tears.

It is rights that tears fall

for something so small and forgotten.

How at meal, we sit to eat,

commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma

but never on the translucence of onion,

now limp, now divided,

or its traditionally honorable career:

For the sake of others,

disappear.”

             -Naomi Shihab Nye

This onion that Nye talks about is figurative, could stand for any number of things. Before the poem there is a small fact about the history of the onion, being that it is originally said to have come from India and was brought along on trips to other parts of the world from there. This figurative onion could represent any number of things. But I think it could be referring to history itself.

The words that stick out to me in the poem would be “a history revealed”. This history could be the onion’s history but it could also be the world’s history. Like an onion, history has layers, or otherwise known as different eras. Throughout these eras, there have been wars, tears, loss and victories. These layers make up what we have and know today. Like an onion, these layers can be pulled apart or left as a whole, just like history can be focused on one area or another. The only difference is how it is done.

Though these types of things happened they are often forgotten about. No one thinks to talk about history at the dinner table, just like no one thinks about talking about onions that were used in the meal. We have come a long way as a civilization just as the onion has gone a long way in traveling across the world and being all over the world.

An Affair or Something More??

Masks, by Fumiko Enchi, is about how women behave in a patriarchal society. Mieko is an old woman who had Akio and Harumé. Akio, who married Yasuko, died in a skiing accident and now Yasuko is in love with Ibuki, but planning on marrying Mikamé. Though this sounds very backward, Mieko has a huge role in everyone’s love lives. Yasuko feels that Mieko is really controlling her, even though Mieko is not Yasuko’s biological mother. Towards the end of the book, we find out Mieko’s plot, to get Harumé pregnant so that she will be able to have Akio’s bloodline continued in another generation because Harumé and Akio were twins and weren’t their father’s kids. Mieko had had an affair with another man while she was married and had the children of another man.

            Yasuko, who has an affair with Ibuki nearer the end of the novel, has a role in what Mieko was plotting. Yasuko would switch places with Harumé, while Ibuki was sleeping. This way, the two woman managed to get Harumé pregnant. What stuck out to me the most would be that how did Ibuki not know that he was not with Yasuko. Mikamé, while talking with Ibuki about the ordeal, said that the woman slipped something into his drink so that he was not aware of what he was doing. Though he may have been drunk, he still would have known that he was not with the one that he thought he was with. And this happened more than one time as well.

            Yasuko tries to brush it off by telling him that he sounded like a poem “from the Tales of Ise: ‘Did you come, I wonder, or was it I who went? I scarcely know – was it dream or reality, did I sleep or wake?” (111-112) The fact that this happened more than one time makes a person think. Though the two women wanted to continue on Akio’s bloodline and the Toganō bloodline, they were willing to risk Harumé’s safety and health in order to get what they wanted. And Ibuki seemed oblivious to what they were doing or trying to do to both Harumé and himself.

            These women, though they seemed harmless, where trying to further themselves, hurting not only Harume but Ibuki and his small family too. They did not think of what the consequences would be when they did this and at the end of this book, Mieko seems as if frozen in one place because of all that she has lost in her lifetime. She lost her son and also, now, her daughter because of what happened with Harume and Ibuki. A lot of the things that happen throughout the book happen because of Mieko and her greed and ability to have things turn out exactly the way that she wants them to.

The Woman with the Long Arms

            The Icarus Girl, by Helene Oyeyemi, is about a young girl, Jessemy, who is from a mixed family. She has a Nigerian mother and an English father and they live in England. One summer they go to Nigeria to see her mother’s family and there she meets a girl her age that Jess calls Tilly. Tilly is, at the time, the only friend that Jessemy has and Jessemy is amazed by everything that her and Tilly do together. After a while, things start to get weird and strange things start to happen when she gets home from Nigeria. But right before they leave for home, Jess goes and looks for Tilly in the old Boys Quarters, an old abandoned building that her grandfather’s workers used to sleep and eat meals in. As she looks for Tilly, she sees a crudely done drawing of a woman with very long arms behind a sort of shrine.

            This woman never leaves Jessemy’s mind and also makes me wonder, who is this woman with the long arms. This picture stays with Jessemy throughout the story and invades not only her thoughts, but also her dreams as she sleeps. Personally, I feel that this woman that has the long arms may in fact be Tilly. This could account for why she was so very protective of the picture and any kind of reproduction of the picture.

            Throughout this book, twins come up again and again. Jessemy is a twin, though she finds out rather late in her life that she is or had a twin, though she dies at birth. Tilly is also a twin or at least says that she is a twin of someone. A lot of hype is placed on the idea of twins in that culture and it says in the book that twins are said “to live in three worlds: this one, the spirit world and the Bush, which is a sort of wilderness of the mind.” In the book, it also says that if a twin dies at birth, the family normally has a statue made for the dead twin, depicted as the family thinks he/she would look when they would get older. Could this long armed woman really be Tilly Tilly. And that is why she is so protective of the picture throughout the novel.

            Even when they were just drawing, Jessemy happened to draw the long armed woman and Tilly got very defensive about the picture and destroyed it. Though I may be wrong in this fact, throughout the book there are numerous things, like some of the small details that I had just discussed that make me believe that the long armed woman may really be Tilly Tilly, and that her twin is still alive somewhere. And that is why Tilly really wants to be with Jessemy.

Introduction to Myself

My name is Katherine, and I was born on September 17.  I live in a small town called Howards Grove where everyone feels like family. I am in pursuit of a triple major at Silver Lake College, studying Music Education – Kodaly, Choral, and Instrumental. I study piano, voice, and oboe privately. Yes, I took English classes straight through from elementary school until my last year of high school, and part of taking that class was reading books. Classics were read all the time, but they were books from Charlotte Bronte and Homer. We were never asked to read books or literature from cultures other than our own.  

One of my expectations for this class would be that I will learn many things about other cultures and the books that have come from all of the different cultures. For example, with the poems by Anna Akhmatova, you could tell that maybe there was more behind her poetry than what met the eye, and it could have been about numerous other things. Being able to not only understand the books, but to be able to connect the books with the social atmosphere and culture that was happening at the time is another of my expectations. Being from a smaller town in Wisconsin, we never had much diversity within our community. However, we had two very different cultures, farming and small-town people. Everyone knows everyone else and what they do and how they act, and, being from a small town and not having many different cultures and societies, I have not seen many of the different kinds of people that there are.

            I have read hundreds of books, but I have never found poetry very easy to understand what it may actually means and to be able to connect to the different materials. Where I grew up, poetry was not something that was taught above the 6^th grade English class. In this class, I look forward to being able to broaden my horizons and read more literature than just the books that are in my own personal library at home.

            Some of the goals that I would have for myself this semester would be that I want to keep up with the readings that we are supposed to do for the class, because it will be very hard to be able to catch up if I fall behind in the class. Also, another goal that I have for myself would be that I become more able to understand what I am reading. It is one thing to be able to keep up with the reading, but another whole thing entirely to be able to understand and apply what I will be reading in this class.