Author Archives: a.moustafa

As I read Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, certain elements of the story reminded me of a different memoir I had read years ago by Richard Wright called Black Boy, a narrative of Richard Wright’s childhood in the Jim Crow South and his journey to the North. He discusses his sufferings as a child, including hunger, beatings, and racism, all post slavery as opposed to Frederick Douglas. Douglass was born into slavery on a plantation. As a young child he’d serve in the household rather than work the fields. Douglass was first exposed to reading and writing through his owners’ wife, who never had slaves before. She takes to him and begins to teach him to read until her husband tells her to stop, warning her that educating slaves is dangerous. In Black Boy, Wright grew up in poverty, fatherless at the age of four with a sick mother. He begins working at white folks’ homes at a young age, and quickly learns of the way white people view and treat black people. Wright also picks up a fascination of reading, like Douglass. At first, his grandmother wouldn’t let him read on Saturdays, which was the Lord’s Day and coincidentally the only day Richard had free time to read his books. Same as Frederick Douglass, white people had tried to suppress Wright’s quest to learn all his life. As Wright moved up south, he found work at an optical shop where the white owner hired him with the intention of teaching a black man the trade. But soon enough, his white coworkers were bothered by the fact that he was learning the optic trade and ran him off.  As Douglass was sent to Baltimore to learn the trade of ship balking, the white workers became worried that that the free black workers would eventually take their jobs, so they ran him off as well and forced him to learn the trade somewhere else. Both these writers faced similar challenges, but at different times. In the end, they both recognize the power of reading and writing and become engaged with the equal rights movement for African Americans.

-Amr

Max Ernst’s Gala Eluard: Oil on canvas (1924)

Max Ernst was an artist born in Bruhl, Germany in 1891 to a strict Catholic family. He was introduced to painting at an early age by his deaf father, who was a teacher and a disciplinarian, training Max and his siblings to be God-fearing children alongside his stern wife. Ernst would attend University of Bonn to study philosophy and later drop out to pursue a career in the arts, driven by his interest in the craft of painting. Early on in his career, he was forced to join the German army in the artillery division during World War I. Here he was exposed to traumatic events that would cause his highly critical view of western culture, which would be the root in his vision of the modern world as irrational.

This work is painted by Max Ernst based on a photograph of the eyes of a lady named Gala Eluard, who was lover to three members of the Surrealist movement, her two husbands Paul Eluard and Salvador Dali and Ernst. The painting shows what is inside the head of Gala Eluard, the mysterious and unknown makings of the unconscious mind.

What first drew me to this painting were the three circle-shaped figures that supposedly depict the workings of Eluard’s thoughts. To me, it looked like it could be those strange specks floating about in your field of vision called floaters. As I thought more about it, it seemed like he painted those bizarre figures to represent random thoughts floating away in what seems to be infinite space. If you look at the design of the circles, they are all different from each other. I believe Ernst wanted the focus of the painting not to be on the eyes of Eluard, but the unfurling of her head, the revelation of all the irrational thoughts that filled her subconscious mind.

During the modernism movement, after the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), artists began to explore dreams and the subconscious mind. Ernst shows the influence of this movement on his work here, painting abstract, weird figures to bring attention to Eluard’s mind. It doesn’t seem to resonate with any certain emotion, and Ernst does not apply any constancy to it. Eluard also does not seem to emit any emotion in her eyes, or facial expressions that we can see. Her eyes look blank and ordinary, which makes me wonder, why use Eluard as the subject of this painting? Is it because she had taken upon three lovers, which Ernst would have thought would add depth and complexity? When they say she was lover to those three men, were they all at the same time, or at different times?

-Amr

This is pretty late, but my name is Amr Moustafa, and this is my third year at Baruch. I missed the first two weeks of the semester because I was in Egypt attending my cousins wedding. I transferred in from the University at Buffalo after my freshman year, and lost a couple of credits, so I’ll be at Baruch for an extra semester, three semesters in total. I was a computer science major at Buffalo, and now I have switched over to the finance major and economics minor here.  

I was born in Alexandria, Egypt and came to the states when I was five months old. Growing up in Brooklyn in a magnet school for the arts, my childhood consisted of musicals, clarinet and chorus recitals, and soccer pick-up games at the local high school field. Unfortunately, I later moved to Staten Island. My family and I would spend our summers in Egypt with our relatives, and I used to consider it a burden sometimes when I was young to waste my summer vacation away from my friends. Some years I would choose to stay behind to spend the vacation here. But as the years passed, I started to feel homesick and resumed my travels back to Alexandria. However, I am afraid that soon I will not have time to go for more than a week once I start working a regular job.

For the past couple of years I have been switching majors, unsure of what I want to study and ultimately do for the rest of my life. I’ve decided to stick with studying finance and will most likely end up working in investment banking for the first couple of years after graduation if I don’t decide to switch career paths again. Since I have set up my classes so that I only come to campus two days a week, I have a lot of free time on my hands. I usually spend that free time writing and filming videos with my friends. But ever since I got Netflix and Amazon prime video back, all of that has come to a screeching halt. If I wake up in the morning and decide to watch one episode of The Sopranos, it’s game over. The whole day will pass by while I sit on the living room couch trying to finish season two before my parents come home from work. I have been watching so many movies and shows recently, my father often tells me that I should be studying film instead of finance. However, it would be three years too late for that kind of change. These online streaming platforms are truly the enemy of productivity. Hopefully, I’ll soon realize that Netflix is wasting all of my time and cancel my account. All in good time.

All in all, I am here studying finance but I’m not that happy about it, I am Egyptian, and I am a Netflix addict. That pretty much summarizes who I am. I look forward to the rest of the semester.