Audio/Visual- The Living Room of the Campus

Final Profile Piece- The Living Room of the Campus

Intended publication: The Index

The Living Room of the Campus

If you were to follow the red brick paved road of Academy St, turn up the fork and drive past the fork on the left-hand side of the road with the Kalamazoo College sign surrounded by blooming flowers and drive past Hoben Hall, you would see the impressive building standing right in front of you known as the Hicks Center. Like many of the buildings on the campus of Kalamazoo College, Hicks Center is a long rectangular building with a red brick façade, white windows and a grey roof. What distinguishes Hicks from the other buildings on campus however, is not the sleek black windows that cover the front of the building, but the four tall while columns that hold up a part of the roof that juts out in which a large white K symbol is placed directly in the middle. Underneath the K sign is the name Weimer K. Hicks. If you look on a map you can see that Hicks is strategically placed far back on campus, pass the quad and closer to Lovell Street.

As a building that houses the Mail Center, Cafeteria or Dining Hall, Student Resource Center, security and Student Development offices, organization rooms and a Union Desk, at any given time during business hours there is a constant stream of students, faculty, administrators and professionals going in and out of the building, and the inside functions well for lots of movement. When you walk passed the tall black windows and into the building, it isn’t difficult to be amazed by the open design of the internal structure of the building. Every level is an open space. You could stand on the main floor of the atrium and only have to look down to see the Mail Center on the bottom floor, or look up to view students entering the Dining Hall. However, while there is a constant flow of activity within, the impression that many K students give when describing Hicks is that it is a place for them to escape the craziness of an academy life, and just wind down by grabbing a sandwich at Jazzman’s café, listening to music being played by Union Desk attendants over the loud speakers, play pool in the game room or socialize with friends in the movie room. When K students give tours of the campus and they make a stop in Hicks they often speak of it as the “living room” of the campus. Students go to Hicks to eat, sleep, do homework and hang out or talk with friends, all of the key components of a college student’s daily existence.

The Hick Center was named after Weimer K. Hicks, who served as President of Kalamazoo College (from 1953-1971) for eighteen years. Hicks’s legacy to the school in which he served as President comes from the fact that he was very instrumental in the development of the “K” plan as a permanent fixture within the school-wide curriculum. The “K” plan continues to be extremely important and serves as the groundwork for a true liberal arts education at the college. The original “K” plan created by Hicks stressed that students gain more awareness of the world around them by spending a term doing an internship and at least more than one term studying abroad. When entering Kalamazoo College students first matriculate as first-years, they are bombarded with symbols of the successes of the “K” plan, study abroad or study away testimonies, service learning projects or internships that previous students have participated in, and an introduction to the Senior Individualized Thesis (SIP) project that they will have to stress about in three years even before being made fully aware of what it actually is. As described on the Kalamazoo College website, the “K” plan is specifically geared towards getting the full breath of a liberal arts education and is highly individualized for each student in order for them to become more self aware of the world around and them and envision their own possibilities for becoming an enlightened person by the time they graduate. Hicks’s implementing of the “K” plan forever changed Kalamazoo College’s reputation as an undergraduate institution to one that heavily focused on integrating an international education into the curriculum. It is no surprise that the top academic administrator whose namesake Hicks is named after was the pioneer who heralded in the introduction of the “K” plan.

On any day during the week you can walk past the meeting rooms on the second floor of the building and observe one of the many student organizations meeting. Student Commission, Student Activities and the Index all have permanent offices in Hicks. On Tuesday’s an informational movie or documentary is shown via a partnership with one of the student organizations or student advocacy groups who want people on campus to engage in issues or support a cause. Recently, the gay alliance group Kaleidoscope played the iconic movie depicting drag ball culture Paris is Burning to eager audiences. Some days free food is given out at indoor music concerts, or there are free massage days or public speakers and important dinners or events are often held in the banquet hall. Overall, you could say that Hicks’s multiple functions as a student center makes it just as much as a part of the “K” plan as the academic curriculums or study abroad programs. Of all the buildings on campus, Hicks is definitely a liberal space.  

The Events of October Response

As I stated before in class I spent the majority of my time reading this book while I was taking a trip out of the state, and found it so surreal that I was reading a book written by an author who was once my professor about events that have happened on my campus years ago. For one thing, I thought that Gail's descriptions of K's campus (even as she was writing from the perspective of the late 90s early 2000s time period) were so obviously spot on. That said, this book was insanely difficult to read because of its subject matter. While I have heard of the events of the murder-suicide on campus, I never got all the details from one source. Like we talked about in class, I was always reminded that Gail knew more about the murder-suicide than anybody else. I was really impressed by her reporting and interviewing of so many sources.

Profile Piece- Revision

Intended publication: The Index 

A Family Girl

“I’m an open book. There is no such thing as getting too personal,”

Mele says to me as she reassures my fears about being biased by writing about her as a friend. It becomes clear that there isn’t any personal topic from her life story that is off limits to talk about. It’s close to midnight and we are sitting in her freshman dorm room, her roommate absent and at the library, and her laptop rests on her desk and there is a webpage opened to her Facebook profile. She has thirty-two notifications that haven’t been checked yet.  Mele sits cross-legged, comfortable on a pink beanbag chair, and above her is a series of picture collages. Some show the faces many brown skinned, dark haired people smiling happily into the camera, hugging each other. I assume that the pictures are snapshots of large family gatherings. 

A large poster of Tupac floats on the wall right above the pillows on her bed, surrounded by smaller pictures, swirly designs and symbols that look like a shrine. She’s a bonafide Cali girl, for sure. We talk animatedly about a hundred different things, what new techniques is she learning in her Documentary Film class, whether or not we can get a big group together to walk to a club in downtown Kalamazoo that caters to the under-21 crowd on Thursdays, before we she begins talking about her family.

Mele Makalo is the youngest of six children, and grew up having to navigate the intricate social dynamic of being the baby amongst four older brothers and a sister. The most important parts of her life, faith, family, education and ethnic culture constitute parts of her identity.

 “All my identities are interrelated. Because I value my culture I value my faith, because I value my faith I value my family, because I value my family I value my education,” she notes.

Mele is from a low-income community in Ingleside California, and a Mormon, but prefers to be called a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I assume because of the negative connotations associated with being Mormon, like stereotypes of polygamy and religious fundamentalism. She’s the first in her family to attend a four-year college, and her parents emigrated from Tonga a little over 30 years ago, and made a home for her family in the U.S. Situated in the South Pacific Ocean, Tonga is a chain of over a hundred islands and rests in between New Zealand and Hawaii. Also, its no surprise that a country which provides free and mandatory education for its citizens and scholarships for foreign secondary and post-secondary study abroad and whose economy is dependant upon remittances from the large population of diaspora living in Australia, New Zealand and the United States boasts over a 98% literacy rate.

According to Mele, woman hold high social status relative to men. One important traditional cultural practice gives the oldest sister in a family the power to name the future children of her younger siblings. Being the oldest sister means upholding a strong feminine presence within the extended family, as well. In Tongan tradition the Fahu is the oldest sister of your father, and is often blessed with the gift of gratitude from the family at every event, weddings, funerals and other celebrations. When I asked about her fraternal aunt, Mele’s face lights up,

“She is praised. Big stuff! She’s really important.”

When I ask whether her oldest sister will be the Fahu of her immediate family, she looks uncertain.

“We don’t practice Fahu because my father believes all family is important.”

I first met Mele at a Black Student Organization meeting at the beginning of the Fall term, and I introduced myself because I wanted to get to know the new fresh faces of diversity at Kalamazoo College. I, like many others probably couldn't quite place her ethnicity before she told me she was Tongan. I once made the mistake of referring to her as Polynesian to another student, and was promptly chastised for the slight misrepresentation of her cultural identity. Mele has one of those unique voices that can immediately command your attention. She doesn’t speak softly for anyone’s delicate sensibilities, because she keeps it real. She doesn’t even need to open her mouth for others to be intimidated in her presence. Often, when I ask other students on campus to talk to me about their first impressions of Mele they all sing the same tune of,

 “She is so cool!” While still a first year, she travels in and out of culture cliques and social circles with ease, displaying a maturity and openness to frank discussions about nearly anything with members of her own class standing and seniors alike. I once overheard someone say that it’s easy for Mele to become friends with everyone on this campus because she is literally the only one of her kind around on a majority white campus.

Mele says that she gets that inherent realness from her mother, Olga.

“My mom is very blunt, I learned how to be real from her.” Although Mele confesses that she didn’t inherit her mother’s culinary skills.

“My mom, she’s a bomb cook too, she puts it down! I think that's my downfall. Because she’s known around the way as a bomb cooker, and I don’t have those skills. I guess I’m known for my smarts.”

Mele’s voice changes to a warmer tone when the conversation travels to talking about her parents.

“My dad is a huge reason why I work as hard as I do.” She gets her work ethic from her parents, and grew up learning not the make the same mistakes of her older brothers and sister.

“My siblings were always the ones f’ing up.” She expresses with a laugh.

“Growing up, we only had one car,” she reveals over the phone almost a week later after her first time opening up to me about her family.

“My dad, my whole life has always held two full time jobs. My parents never told us how we were struggling financially and they were frustrated but always found a way to pay the bills.”

Mele’s dad Siosaia is 59 years old and worked at a warehouse to support the family while Olga was a stay at home mother and wife, who knitted quilts in her spare time to earn extra money. Mele’s mother sacrificed a social life to take care of her family, and her dad sacrificed being close to his side of the family to move to California so that Olga could be around her family.

A mind socialized by Western gender traditions and social codes would take a little more time to understand the complexity of the relationship between her mother and father.

“Tongan culture is weird like that. Women are valued, and that is different from other cultures.” I thought back to our first conversation, when Mele mused how as a girl she wasn’t allowed to hang around boys out of respect for the Tongan tradition of Faka’Apa'Apa, which literally means respect between genders.

Growing up “felt weird because it was hard to find someone to chill with,” she remarks. So she built a strong interpersonal relationship with her mother. In the course of our short conversation I become immediately aware that Mele is fiercely protective of her family. That same insight lead me to believe that when Mele talks about family, she isn’t just referring to her blood relations but to her interpersonal relationships on campus with friends. In my many social interactions with Mele, I have often noticed that when any event, celebration or personal issue comes up, Mele is often the first to volunteer, offer to give or extend a helping hand.

She once attended my twenty-second birthday party at an expensive restaurant, even though she couldn’t afford to go. Like many others, I can’t help but feel that I am a part of Mele’s multiple extended family that crosses state lines and color or culture boundaries in the short time that I’ve known her.   

“I have a very tough shell, but deep inside I have a very big heart for others, I put my family first. I don’t get butt hurt by things, but if you cross my family or my loved ones then it's a wrap.”

You could call Mele’s descriptions of her family traditions and customs a culture in its own right. You could even see her as one of those unique people who can find family virtually anywhere, and often proves herself time and again by sticking up for them. 

CYOA- "The French Fry Connection"

For our CYOA, in anticipation of our next assignment, we decided to find an example of explanatory narrative. We considered choosing the Ted Conover article, but while we recommend everyone read that anyway at their leisure, we instead opted for Richard Read's Pulitzer Prize-winning four-part article "The French Fry Connection," which follows a shipment of McDonalds french fries from potato crop to preparation in McDonalds locations in Asia, and explores the Asian economic crisis through this lens. This narrative was originally published in The Oregonian in four parts over the course of four issues in 1998. The first part can be found here, at the University of Chicago Press website; each subsequent part is linked at the bottom of each page. As you read, we urge you to consider the following questions:

1. How effective is this as an explanatory/enterprise-type narrative?
2. How does Read develop the relationship between the Pacific Northwest farmers and Asian business partners in his narrative?
3. Did this capture your attention as a reader? Could you follow the narrative with your current level of familiarity with the subject matter?
4. After reading this, have you taken away more knowledge of the world economy? Did the subject matter explored in this narrative change your understanding of the intricacies of business relationships?

Happy reading! Tanj and Saskia

Profile Process Piece

I knew from the get go that I was stepping out of my comfort zone by writing this profile. I've never written anything like a profile before, so I think I was intimidated by the task. I didn't know where to start, really. How do I capture Mele in action? Do I follow her around and take notes or just observe her in social situations? I knew had so much material from her from our interviews that I wanted to add to the profile, but wasn't sure how to fill in those gaps between quotes.

I wound up waiting until the last minute to finish this, and called it a day. So that's why I think the piece itself began to look like an interview write-up (like Marin said) rather than a profile.

Profile Piece (rough draft)

Here is the VERY rough draft of my profile piece. I'm positive that I still have a lot of work to do, and am welcoming feedback from everyone. Not exactly sure which publication I would want this to be published too, but I'm sure I will figure that out in the revision process as well.  

“I’m an open book. There is no such thing as getting too personal,”

Mele says to me as she reassures my fears about being biased by writing about her as a friend. It becomes clear that there isn’t any personal topic from her life story that is off limits to talk about. It’s close to midnight and we are sitting in her roommate-less freshman dorm room, her laptop rests on her desk and there is a webpage opened to her Facebook profile. She has thirty-two notifications that haven’t been checked yet.  Mele sits cross-legged, comfortable on a pink beanbag chair, and above her is a series of picture collages. Some show the faces many brown skinned, dark haired people smiling happily into the camera, hugging each other. I assume that the pictures are snapshots of large family gatherings. 

A large poster of Tupac floats on the wall right above the pillows on her bed, surrounded by smaller pictures, swirly designs and symbols that look like a shrine. She’s a bonafide Cali girl, for sure. We talk animatedly about a hundred different things, what new techniques is she learning in her Documentary Film class, whether or not we can get a big group together to walk to a club in downtown Kalamazoo that caters to the under-21 crowd on Thursdays, before we she begins talking about her family.

Mele Makalo is the youngest of six children, and grew up having to navigate the intricate social dynamic of being the baby amongst four older brothers and a sister. The most important parts of her life, faith, family, education and ethnic culture constitute parts of her identity.

 “All my identities are interrelated. Because I value my culture I value my faith, because I value my faith I value my family, because I value my family I value my education,” she notes.

Mele is from a low-income community in Ingleside California, and a Mormon, but prefers to be called a member of the LDS, I assume because of the negative connotations associated with being Mormon. She’s the first in her family to attend a four-year college, and her parents emigrated from Tonga a little over 30 years ago, and made a home for her family in the U.S. Situated in the South Pacific Ocean, Tonga is a chain of over a hundred islands and rests in between New Zealand and Hawaii. Also, its no surprise that a country which provides free and mandatory education for its citizens and scholarships for foreign secondary and post-secondary study abroad and whose economy is dependant upon remittances from the large population of diaspora living in Australia, New Zealand and the United States boasts over a 98% literacy rate.

According to Mele, woman hold high social status relative to men. One important traditional cultural practice gives the oldest sister in a family the power to name the future children of her younger siblings. Being the oldest sister means upholding a strong feminine presence within the extended family, as well. In Tongan tradition the Fahu is the oldest sister of your father, and is often blessed with the gift of gratitude from the family at every event, weddings, funerals and other celebrations. When I asked about her fraternal aunt, Mele’s face lights up,

“she is praised. Big stuff! She’s really important.”

When I ask whether her oldest sister will be the Fahu of her immediate family, she looks uncertain.

“We don’t practice Fahu because my father believes all family is important.”

I first met Mele at a Black Student Organization meeting at the beginning of the Fall term, and I introduced myself because I wanted to get to know the new fresh faces of diversity at Kalamazoo College. I, like many others probably couldn't quite place her ethnicity before she told me she was Tongan. I once made the mistake of referring to her as Polynesian to another student, and was promptly chastised for the slight misrepresentation of her cultural identity. Mele has one of those unique voices that can immediately command your attention. She doesn’t speak softly for anyone’s delicate sensibilities, because she keeps it real. She doesn’t even need to open her mouth for others to be intimidated in her presence. She says that she gets that inherent realness from her mother, Olga.

“My mom is very blunt, I learned how to be real from her.” Although Mele confesses that she didn’t inherit her mother’s culinary skills.

“My mom, she’s a bomb cook too, she puts it down! I think that's my downfall. Because she’s known around the way as a bomb cooker, and I don’t have those skills. I guess I’m known for my smarts.”

Mele’s voice changes to a warmer tone when the conversation travels to talking about her parents.

“My dad is a huge reason why I work as hard as I do.” She gets her work ethic from her parents, and grew up learning not the make the same mistakes of her older brothers and sister.

“My siblings were always the ones f’ing up.” She expresses with a laugh.

“Growing up, we only had one car,” she reveals over the phone almost a week later after her first time opening up to me about her family. “My dad, my whole life has always held two full time jobs. My parents never told us how we were struggling financially and they were frustrated but always found a way to pay the bills.”

Mele’s dad Siosaia is 59 years old and worked at a warehouse to support the family while Olga was a stay at home mother and wife, who knitted quilts in her spare time to earn extra money.

A mind socialized by Western gender traditions and social codes would take a little more time to understand the complexity of the relationship between her mother and father.

“Tongan culture is weird like that. Women are valued, and that is different from other cultures.” I thought back to our first conversation, when Mele mused how as a girl she wasn’t allowed to hang around boys out of respect for the Tongan tradition of Faka’Apa'Apa, which literally means respect between genders.

Growing up “felt weird because it was hard to find someone to chill with,” she remarks. So she built a strong interpersonal relationship with her mother.

“My mom was my best friend from late elementary school years, and I was her best friend too.”

Mele’s mother sacrificed a social life to take care of her family, and her dad sacrificed being close to his side of the family to move to California so that Olga could be around her family. In the course of our short conversation I become immediately aware that Mele is fiercely protective of her family.

“I have a very tough shell, but deep inside I have a very big heart for others, I put my family first,” she says to me.

“I don’t get butt hurt by things, but if you cross my family or my loved ones then it's a wrap.”

You could call Mele’s descriptions of her family traditions and customs a culture in its own right.

“On a Sunday or Monday we have this thing called family home evenings, it comes from the LDS tradition. Because the encourages for LDS members to have family meetings, and we would catch up on family, what we can do as a family or how we can strengthen our bond as a family.” 

Personal Essay- The BC (Revised)

*This is the revision of my NYTimes Lives piece

According to many of the members of my extended family being bad at taking care of my hair is one of my personality traits, along with being nerdy and a little weird. Since the age of 10, when I was old enough to sit still in a chair in the salon to get my hair relaxed enough to make it straight, my mother would always make it a point to chastise me with the one insult that every girl lived in terror of,

“It will all fall out if you never take good care of it.”

She would always follow that statement with a judgmental look and say,

“I didn’t grow up like you. I took care of my hair.”

The journey from my childhood to adolescence was spent ignoring the ideology engrained in my head by so many women in my family, that my hair was essential and important, and having straight hair is deemed even more essential to my existence as a little black girl. I never felt the same as my mother did as a child by cherishing those precious strands that poured out of my head, if anything I felt the opposite.

Being African-American meant constant comparisons between yourself and other’s skin color, hair, noses, and butts. While I was born in the 90s my mother, who came from a previous generation spurned by the legacy of Madame C. J. Walker, believed that a woman’s hair should be straightened to look acceptable in society.

I learned at a young age that light skin was good, and good hair was good. Nappy, unkempt, tightly coiled locks were bad, like Celie’s hair in The Color Purple. I spent all of my pre-teen years realizing that I was a made of a frustrating genetic combination that I had no control over. My skin was always going to be darker than both my parents, and my hair was never going to grow past my shoulders. While the other female members of my family would coyly smile as others observed new inches of hair growth when we saw each other during holidays and family vacations, I wore ponytails, pretended to care less about being girly, and sat in silence at the hair salon while my scalp burned from the chemicals in the Just For Me hair relaxers.

At this point, I also was beginning to forget what my hair ever looked like before my curls were permanently altered through damaging chemicals and heat. My whole life revolved around appointments at the Dominican salon around the corner from my house, and my hair was suffering for it. Often, the beauticians at the salons would take over my mother’s job of shaming my lack of commitment to maintaining my hair while putting on plastic gloves to protect their hands and applying the white, creamy, chemical relaxer just above my scalp.

            “You scratch you head mami,”
They would say. Tisk tisk. Scratching the tender scalp before a relaxer almost always resulted in the festering of painful sores that are difficult to get rid of. I would sit through the pain because, the longer one waited to rinse out the relaxer, and the straighter one’s hair will be. Routinely every 4-6 weeks I went in to get it relaxed, and then every two weeks I got it washed, roller set, flat ironed and dried. I wrapped my hair at night, stayed the hell away from pools and rain in order to preserve my hairstyle longer. I hid the detrimental effects of hair loss due to constant chemical treatments in tightly wrapped tissues thrown away in the bathroom wastebasket, and rarely wore it down in order to avoid showing my embarrassing bald spots.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I began to conceive of my hair as something more than just a burden of failed expectations from my family, and that I could take agency over challenging what I originally felt that I was powerless situation with help and advice from other black women. In my sophomore year I met another African-American K student, whose enlightened philosophies on hair maintenance enlightened me when she asked,

            “Have you ever considered going natural?”
Before that moment I had never understood what the concept of going natural really meant until she explained to me that it entailed,

“Freeing yourself from the harmful effects of hair relaxers in order for your hair to become healthy.”

The summer before I was going to spend six months in Europe on study abroad I decided to cut it all off. As I was sitting on a couch in my best middle school friend Kellie’s living room, surrounded by chatter of other people, my brain repeated the same thought process that I had been fighting with since the school year had ended. To big chop or not to big chop? With my thoughts swirling in my brain and adrenaline rushing through my veins, I ask Kellie,

“Do you have a pair of scissors?”

I rushed to the bathroom in a hurry for no reason, itching to get rid of the hair that seemed to metaphorically weigh me down. I stood in front of the mirror, gripping locks and periodically snipping them off with a pair of kitchen shears, and watching as the hair that was once on my head accumulated all over the floor and in the sink, and what was left was less than an inch of new growth that hadn’t yet been tamed by a relaxer. After a few moments, the emotional backlash of having just made a permanent decision about my personal appearance in the span of a few minutes settled over me and filled the room like fog. I kept reaching for hair that didn’t exist, like people with phantom limbs grasping at parts of the body that aren’t there anymore, still feeling the remnants of what once existed as a part of you. I walked downstairs while running hands in my hair, to the shocked and confused glances of my friends. I was critically self aware of the un-professional hack job that I had done, yet felt emancipated from the pressure of having to conform to a standard of beauty that I didn’t subscribe to. Later in the afternoon, when my father came to pick me up to go to brunch, his face dropped when he saw me standing there, wearing Kellie’s big hoop earrings to compensate for my boyish cut.
 “Why did you do that?” He asked me, echoing my friend’s earlier confused stares.
“I don’t know.” I answered back, not really having the right words to explain why I did it, sinking further into a black hole of self-consciousness that I was finding even harder to climb out of.

“I’m not walking outside with you without a hat on,”

He demanded and I complied, fearful of the judgments and staring I could be subjected to from strangers who had zero interest in my self-defiant act of emancipation. However, as my father devoured blueberry pancakes, I stared out the window of our booth at IHOP, wearing a black beanie in the blistering July heat. It finally hit me that I cut off my hair because I was done sitting passively in that salon chair. I told him so, and eventually my mother. And the one word that kept swirling around my brain was liberation. Even almost two years later in the present, as I come across an article asking what it would mean for black women if “Michelle Obama Had Natural Hair” while perusing blogs and youtube videos looking to imitate the right twist out or bantu knot style, I feel liberated. 

Franklin Outline for Lives Piece

Complication: Tanj fails to take agency 

Development: 

1. Mom chastises Tanj

2. Tanj neglects hair

3. Tanj cuts hair

Resolution: Tanj feels liberated

Story Pitch for Profile Piece

Although we were advised last class to not write about a friend or family member, I have decided to kind of go against that suggestion and write about my friend Mele. 

Some quick facts about her:

From Inglewood, California

A recipient of the Posse Foundation Scholarship and a first year at K

Self identifies as Tongan (her family is from a small island called Tonga in the South Pacific/Polynesia)

A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormon)

The youngest of 6 kids and was raised by both parents

Her parents emigrated from Tonga over 30 years ago

In my initial interview with her I found out that there are four very important facets of her life that contribute to her identity:

- Faith

- Family

- Education

- Culture as a Tongan

We spent a long time talking about Tongan culture from her perspective and here are a few important aspects that I found really compelling:

-       Tongan culture is a Christian influenced culture

-       Education, God, respect for elders and family are highly valued

I was also really interested in how she described gender relations in her family:

-       There is an important tradition called Faka’Apa'Apa', “respect between genders.” Which in practice basically means that if you are a boy you shouldn’t be around girls and vice versa. So being a girl surrounded by boys is usually frowned upon. Mele grew up with four brothers and because of Faka’ Apa'Apa', she found it difficult to hang out with anyone other than her mom, who was a stay at home wife.

-       Growing up as a girl in Tongan culture meant constantly being over protected/parents were very strict about her going out as a girl.

-       However women are highly valued. The oldest sister of the father in her family is called the Fahu, and is treated like deity. Her aunt (father’s sister) is highly praised in the family and is “big stuff” according to Mele. In the Tongan tradition of giving, the Fahu often receives precious gifts from other family members.

-       There is also a tradition in which the oldest sister names the children of the oldest son and daughter in the family.

So based on this, I think I would like to explore/address Mele’s story of being a part of a Tongan household and the gender relations and/or “culture of family” that she grew up a part of and how she negotiated the complex gender dynamics of her own ethnic culture, and how that intersects with traditional gender and family relations in the U.S. 

CYOA- Response to “Wonder Town”

Before reading this article, I had never heard of Sonic Youth, but I think that the author of this story is effective at using words to describe the sounds that he hears while listening to the band play. I was able to visualize the sound of a guitar strum (low F-sharp notes, etc) or the thumping of drums without the experience of playing those instruments.  However, that didn’t stop me from researching more on Sonic Youth and checking out videos of their musical performances in order to get a better feel of what the author was talking about here.

Along with that, I liked that as a reader I was given a glimpse into the dynamics and history of Sonic Youth from the author’s perspective even though I was not familiar with the band. I also like the way that the author weaves in song titles and lyrics to various songs that the band has played/recorded over the years. It is so interesting to see the trajectory of a band’s life history over the span of decades of being in the music scene. 

CYOA- Response to “Shooting an Elephant”

Overall, I found it really interesting to read a piece of narrative journalism written in the 1930s, from George Orwell of all people! I was surprised at the way in which Orwell carefully uses metaphors for imperialism as a backdrop for the entire story, including the action of shooting the elephant as an important factor in how he interacts with the native people.

The reader gets a good glimpse of Orwell’s thought process throughout the entire encounter, including seeing his contempt for imperialism, and his conflicted feelings with being a white man in a position of power who shoots the elephant in order to not be made a fool of in front of the Burma natives. However, I definitely found my mind wandering off while reading all the exposition in his recounting of the story.  However, the immense amount of detail that Orwell put into crafting this story could count as evidence that he did indeed shoot the elephant. 

Response to Writing for Story

According to Jon Franklin, a story is useless if it introduces a complication without a resolution. The sign of a good writer is to seek out a change that resolves a character’s conflict when writing a story. This is something that I often find challenging as a writer. There may be some topic that I wish to write about, but I often have a lot of trouble seeking out what the real conflict in the story is, and how I can tease out a resolution to the problem. 

This is why I really appreciate reading the chapter on outlining. I have always assumed that creative writing (even creative non-fiction) should develop organically rather than through mechanical mechanisms. I was surprised to read Franklin’s confident assertion that you will have a hard time writing anything without an outline (spaghetti?). This is why I really appreciate that Franklin uses clear and practical rules for writers. I will definitely be using his method of taking index cards and writing the complication on the front and resolution on the back when thinking up a story. The whole idea of noun-verb-noun (i.e. “cancer strikes Joe”) is a really compelling way to force the writer to get straight to the point in an outline. As a writer, I have often found myself writing flowery language in which nothing happens to resolve the story, so I appreciate Franklin’s helpful dose of reality.


I was also really interested in Franklin's comment in the outline chapter the use of action verbs is EXTREMELY important to the creation of a story. I know for a fact that much of the past criticism that I have gotten on my writing has revolved around using passive words. It was another dose of reality to read that writers who don't use active words are hiding behind their passive writing, and are afraid to "hit the main character with a mack truck" so to speak. I am definitely a perpetrator of this. 

1.  I, like Franklin have an intimate knowledge of the "spaghetti" disaster when attempting to write a draft.  What are others experiences with it and how do you overcome this problem, through outlining or otherwise?

2. While Franklin is definitely giving helpful advice to new writers his authoritative voice comes off as rather arrogant and patronizing. Do others feel the same way and how does it impede or further your understanding of what he is trying to say in the novel?

3. Franklin states that the single most important part of writing a dramatic outline is to use action verbs. He makes it extremely clear that your story literally will go nowhere if you don't include them? I often have a hard time consistently doing this in my writing... do you feel the same? 

CYOA- Response to "Emergence"

This piece was something that I have never listened to before. It was like a unique mix between an interactive podcast, Animal Planet or Discovery channel episode, scientific hypothesis and creative non-fiction. While I was advised to close my door and turn off lights in order to really listen to this, I had a hard time listening while wishing I could actually “see” the interview with the ant expert and how she describes how the ants interact with each other.

However, I really liked how the narrators of “Emergence” appealed to the other human senses by describing how ants use pheromones and sense of smell through unplanned accidents and I was really fascinated with how this idea of emergence connects to the creations of cities and neighborhoods. I was so intrigued by the fact that organization (or the science of emergence) comes from the actions of everyone and no one at the same time. This was something that I haven't ever heard of before, but plays into the common idea that disorder breeds order.

Also, in terms of the structure of the piece, I really enjoyed the diverse sounds of nature and city life juxtaposed with narrative. It brought everything together and cemented the connection between insect life and nature to how we view the “civilized” world of city planning.

CYOA- Response to "Jacob's Ladder"

I would like to start this response by expressing a little problem that I had with the writing at the beginning of the article on Zuma… why is it that we always make the assumption that Jesus was white? I understand that the author of the article wanted to place a focus on how resistance leader Jacob Zuma has become known as a hero to South African people, but I found it really interesting that Zuma being called a “black Jesus” in the scene with the woman with the sign carried throughout the article as a prevalent theme that seemed to fascinate the author especially in relation to how the politics of race seems to play out in South Africa.

I also found it interesting how the author of the story compared Zuma to Nelson Mandela in many respects including his party affiliations, education background and personal life. Mandela has always been universally known as a world-wide hero, and while the article tries to show a glimpse into Zuma’s rise to power, as a reader I definitely found that Zuma wasn’t as admirable as Mandela, even when the author tried to depict him as personable. It is always interesting to see how what others write about public figures fashion how we see them. Martin Luther King Jr. was a heavy smoker and cheated on his wife for years, but we all still know him for his unwavering courage as a leader in the civil rights movement.  

Although I don’t know much about the political strife happening in South Africa I thought this article was really informative on current events overall, and I really liked how Foster weaved in personal stories from Zuma's life (like his wife's miscarrage for example) with his quest to be president.

Process Piece for the Lives Essay

One thing that I have always known about myself is that I am an honest person and when talking to others I have never had a hard time telling them about my life experiences, feelings or emotions. However, I feel that the honesty that I try so hard to remain genuine to in my real life hardly ever shows though in my writing. In trying to be honest right now, I would definitely say that I have never been comfortable writing creative non-fiction/narrative/personal story pieces like these. 

I guess it is because I have always found comfort in the presumed authority of theory and “objective” analysis to write papers in my English classes. Which is why I spent a long time on this piece, found it much harder to get my thoughts together, and was worried that I was writing something too emotional, too sentimental, too “hallmark.”

I decided to write about my hair because going natural was a moment in my life that was both symbolic and fundamentally changed how I viewed the world around me. Ultimately writing about this was a moment of catharsis for me, which I think is the reason why people look to writing as an outlet for creative expression. 

The BC

This essay is intended for the NYTimes Lives section

According to many of the members of my extended family being bad at taking care of my hair is one of my personality traits, along with being nerdy and a little weird. Since the age of 10, when I was old enough to sit still in a chair in the salon to get my hair relaxed enough to make it straight, my mother would always make it a point to chastise me with the one insult that every girl lived in terror of,

“It will all fall out if you never take good care of it.”

She would always follow that statement with a judgmental look and say,

“I didn’t grow up like you. I took care of my hair.”

The journey from my childhood to adolescence was spent ignoring the ideology engrained in my head by so many women in my family, that my hair was essential and important, and having straight hair is deemed even more essential to my existence as a little black girl. I never felt the same as my mother did as a child by cherishing those precious strands that poured out of my head, if anything I felt the opposite.

Being African-American meant constant comparisons between yourself and other’s skin color, hair, noses, and butts. I learned at a young age that light skin was good, and good hair was good. Nappy, unkempt, tightly coiled locks were bad, like Celie’s hair in The Color Purple. I spent all of my pre-teen years realizing that I was a made of a frustrating genetic combination that I had no control over. My skin was always going to be darker than both my parents, and my hair was never going to grow past my shoulders. While the other female members of my family would coyly smile as others observed new inches of hair growth when we saw each other during holidays and family vacations, I wore ponytails, pretended to care less about being girly, and sat in silence at the hair salon while my scalp burned from the chemicals in the Just For Me hair relaxers.

At this point, I also was beginning to forget what my hair ever looked like before my curls were permanently altered through damaging chemicals and heat. My whole life revolved around appointments at the Dominican salon around the corner from my house, and my hair was suffering for it. Routinely every 4-6 weeks I went in to get it relaxed, and then every two weeks I got it washed, roller set, flat ironed and dried. I wrapped my hair at night, stayed the hell away from pools and rain in order to preserve my hairstyle longer. I hid the detrimental effects of hair loss due to constant chemical treatments in tightly wrapped tissues thrown away in the bathroom wastebasket, and rarely wore it down in order to avoid showing my embarrassing bald spots.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I began to conceive of my hair as something more than just a burden of failed expectations from my family, and that I could take agency over challenging what I originally felt that I was powerless situation with help and advice from other black women. In my sophomore year I met another African-American K student, whose enlightened philosophies on hair maintenance enlightened me when she asked,

            “Have you ever considered going natural?” Before that moment I had never understood what the concept of going natural really meant until she explained to me that it entailed ,

“Freeing yourself from the harmful effects of hair relaxers in order for your hair to become healthy.”

The summer before I was going to spend six months in Europe on study abroad I decided to cut it all off. As I was sitting on a couch in my best friend Kellie’s living room, surrounded by chatter of other people, my brain repeated the same thought process that I had been fighting with since the school year had ended. To big chop or not to big chop? With my thoughts swirling in my brain and adrenaline rushing through my veins, I ask Kellie,

“Do you have a pair of scissors?” I rushed to the bathroom in a hurry for no reason, itching to get rid of the hair that seemed to metaphorically weigh me down. I stood in front of the mirror, gripping locks and periodically snipping them off with a pair of kitchen shears, and watching as the hair that was once on my head accumulated all over the floor and in the sink, and what was left was less than an inch of new growth that hadn’t yet been tamed by a relaxer. After a few moments, the emotional backlash of having just made a permanent decision about my personal appearance in the span of a few minutes settled over me and filled the room like fog. I kept reaching for hair that didn’t exist, like people with phantom limbs grasping at parts of the body that aren’t there anymore, still feeling the remnants of what once existed as a part of you. I walked downstairs while running hands in my hair, to the shocked and confused glances of my friends. I was critically self aware of the un-professional hack job that I had done, yet felt emancipated from the pressure of having to conform to a standard of beauty that I didn’t subscribe to.

            Later in the afternoon, when my father came to pick me up to go to lunch, his face dropped when he saw me standing there, wearing Kellie’s big hoop earrings to compensate for my boyish cut.

            “Why did you do that?” He asked me, echoing my friend’s earlier confused stares.

            “I don’t know.” I answered back, not really having the right words to explain why I did it. Even after he said,
            “I’m not walking outside with you without a hat on,” The one word I kept going back to was liberation. Even now, as I come across an article asking what it would mean for black women if “Michelle Obama Had Natural Hair” while perusing blogs and youtube videos looking to imitate the right twist out or bantu knot style, I feel liberated. 

Link to the Jezebel article: If Michelle Obama Had Natural Hair