Hughes Clues: The World Tour

You may not know this, but not all English teachers like every text that we teach. WHAT?!? you may be thinking. Mrs. Hughes, that can’t be! You are a teacher! You love reading! How dare you? Well, it’s true. I have selective tastes in reading, just like you do. HOWEVER, I was pleasantly surprised by the very natural dialogue and striking themes of The Ring of General Macías. If you haven’t read this play by displaced and ex-patriot Josephina Niggli, you are missing out on a unique approach to the Mexican Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Threaded through the interchanges between the characters is the ultimate question: Which is more honorable – love or duty? Both Raquel and her husband have to face this dilemma at various points in the play, and while I won’t ruin it for those of you have haven’t had the pleasure of studying this text, suffice it to say that one seems to excel where the other one crumbles under the pressure.

Below you will find my own attempt to apply this theme of the dual between love and duty to an original poetic form. As my students must, I identify figurative language in blue and parallelism in red.

“The Destination”

For love of money, a family went without.
For love of time, a house was never built.
For love of education, common sense was lost.
For love of video games, relationships were broken.

When our devotion overpowers our obligations,
When our goals consume our lives,
When our desires replace our duties,
This is when love fails.

For love of money, a business donated.
For love of time, a city was erected.
For love of education, community was gained.
For love of video games, strangers bonded.

When our hopes drive us to greatness,
When our dreams blossom into collaboration,
When our aspirations develop our generosity,
This is when love prevails.

This poem grew from my hope to portray the complexity of the battle between love and duty. I don’t believe there is a simple answer, hence the paradoxical ideas conflicting in the first and latter half of my poetry.

While I do use a lot of repetition, which is something I often try to avoid, being an English teacher and therefore an advocate of strong, specific, unique word choice, here I think it works by showing the varying dynamics of the seemingly obvious word love. I tried to contrast that overuse by varying in the explanatory stanzas (2 and 4) the way I identified that emotion or idea.

Though this might not have been the way that Niggli imagined her theme, it is the way I envision it. Too often people throw around the word love without really thinking about all that it entails. This poem seeks to break open the traditional definition and make the audience think critically about their own motivations for their actions.

For the past week my English 10 students and I have been exploring the details and conflicts of Isabel Allende’s “And of Clay Are We Created”. Through the eyes of a lover, this fictional tale, based on the real-life 1985 eruption of Nevada del Ruiz in Colombia, follows television reporter Rolf Carlé (a pseudonym for the real journalist Frank Fournier) as he tries desperately to help free Azucena (whose real name is Omayra Sanchez) , who is trapped in the mud and debris.

My students have been asked to carefully consider how audience affects style and content and translate that into a creative narrative of the same story from a different point of view – Rolf’s. What you see below is my own attempt at “level-two” composition, that is writing to someone familiar, someone personally known. In an attempt to stretch my own vocabulary and style, in blue I’ve identified my use of figurative language and in green, more specifically, of personification.

___________________________________________________

M—,

By the time you receive this letter, I imagine you will have seen the tears and heard the pleas of my little flower, Azucena, who is an iconic fixture on every television in the modern world, I’m sure. Displayed as a beacon of hope, she is so much more than that to me.

No one can begin to comprehend the depth of her grace, her strength, her poise. She doesn’t give up, even when the mud threatens to swallow her. She refuses to fold under the pressure of the angry steel and choking debris. While she does cry for the loss of her siblings, she simultaneously tries to comfort me in the midst of her torment.

Like the uncontrollable mudslides, disastrous waves of memory drown me as I look into those obsidian eyes. For so many years I’ve tried to repress the threatening images of death, the smell of the furnaces, the feel of my father’s belt, the sound of my sister’s sobs. Until now I never understood that the only way to move past the crushing choke hold of my past is to fight back, to reflect, to consider, and ultimately to let it go.

But I can’t let it go. Not yet. Not while Azucena needs me to hope for her. You know I’ve never been one to pray, but I’m hoping that out there someone is a god who is willing and able to bring the Colombian government to its knees, to finally  produce the pump necessary to free her.

If by some miracle this letter makes it through the labyrinth of bureaucracy and diplomacy and finds its way into your hands in time, please Maria, please send us help. We both need you.

Rolf

___________________________________________________

Writing this letter wasn’t easy. Delving into the mind of Rolf, who was surely experiencing one of the most terrifying and helpless moments of his life, I came to realize that he was probably suffering for not only Azucena, but also himself and his sister and the millions who died under the reign of Hitler. That is a huge burden to carry.

Because of that, I tried to make his word choice powerful and provocative. He wanted someone to understand his pain, to connect with him in some way, but I believe he also understood that no one, not even his lover, would be able to fully comprehend the depth of this journey.

The opening and closing paragraphs of the letter are the only times that I use the personal pronoun you. This was quite intentional. Since this is a letter, Rolf’s audience is direct and personal, yet in the middle of the letter he probably relives some of the most tiresome, overwhelming moments of the day, resulting in his somewhat forgetting who he’s writing to, opening up in ways he didn’t really expect to, almost exposing his private thoughts to his lover and himself in the process. Hence, the absence of you in the middle of the letter.

So tell me what you think. Did I effectively capture his pain and torment? What would you have done differently?

Omayra Sanchez in some her last moments after being trapped for three days in the flooding following the eruption of the Nevada del Ruiz in 1985.

I’d like to think that most of us, in our own little ways, leave some kind of impression on this world. Tombstones will often attest to our relationships (“Here lies our loving mother.”), and I suppose that now FaceBook will continue on our legacy (whether good or bad) centuries after we’ve gone to that social network in the sky, but what kind of “stain” do we really leave? How will we be remembered? Or better yet, what do people around me think of the trail I’m leaving?

In recent years, my grandmother, or G-ma as I call her, has left a HUGE impression on me. I’m not talking the traditional ugly Christmas sweaters or birthday cards stuffed with Washingtons. While my grandma is generous beyond belief, it’s not the monetary gifts that I most admire about her. It’s her steadfastness, her strong-will, her perseverance in the face of atrocious adversities that I would most like to mirror in my own life. In the wake of my mother’s death, G-ma became my rock. She comforted me, loved me, and held me up when all I wanted to do was crumble. Five years later, she’s still writing me cards in honor of Mom. She’s still buying me my favorite chocolates like Mom used to do. And she’s still telling me about the great deals at Aldi’s. Yeh, I want to be like my grandma when I “grow up.”

Unfortunately, not all marks at desirable. Despite Carmen Tafolla‘s plead for us to “never write with pencil”, sometimes I wish that certain individuals could be erased. Some obvious names come to mind: Adolf Hitler, El Jefe, and Mao Zedong, for example. But truthfully, haven’t there been times when you wished that you could erase something that you’ve done? Rolling your eyes, giving someone a dirty look, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or just ignoring someone who needs your help — we’ve all done things that we aren’t exactly proud of. So maybe Tafolla was right about leaving our permanent mark on this world… but what about when we make mistakes? Tafolla tells us to be proud of our flaws, as they create beauty. But wouldn’t the world be even more beautiful if we had never had the likes of, say, Saddam Hussein?

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but this blog is actually the fourth I have started… and sadly, I’ve never made it past four posts. Ever. I’m hoping this time it’ll be different. I love to write. But I only mildly like blogging. I think my problem before was that I never had followers, people to read my blog. But now that I have a captive audience in my students, I might just have the necessary motivation to make this something more than a glorified journal.

The big question on my mind is: What will this school year bring? I don’t know about you, but I suffer from insomnia for about two weeks prior to the first day of class. It’s not that I’m fearful, exactly, but rather a bit anticipatory, perhaps. I have all these lesson ideas fighting for attention, jostling through my head. I wonder about the personalities of my soon-to-be students, the activities they’re involved in, what they’ve been doing all summer. I regret wasting some of mine playing video games, and now I worry I won’t be on top of the real game that starts in just a week’s time. But I also smile knowing it will all come together just as it should.

This year will, without a doubt, be awesome. Okay, so it’s a new course for me. A new course for all of us. New stories. New books. New assessments. New projects. But that means that we really do get to learn together. And learning is really for me one of the greatest gifts. It’s what drew me to teaching in the first place. I just can’t get enough of it. So as we trek together through the oppressive governments of Latin America, as we swelter under the oppressive sun of the African desert, and as we commiserate over the oppressive writing of the ominous Research Paper, I think it’s best to remember that we are in this together. You and me and all your classmates. Welcome to your new community of writers!