Mama is always telling me what to do. She tells me how to walk on which day, how to eat, what to eat, how to smile, how to breathe, how to live! Sometimes it can be extremely overbearing; I just want to do things on my own, in my own way. Like what if I wanted to wash the color clothes on Monday and the white clothes on Tuesday?? I wish sometimes that she would  just let me make my own mistakes so that I can learn from them myself, than control every move I make. But I know that she teaches me these things out of a good heart. I know that she loves me and wants me to be the best that I could be. She wants to mold me to a strong independent woman that can take care of and provide for her family. I know she can be a little hard on me sometimes, but I know she is just warning me about the things that I may be blindsided by because of life. My mother teaches me to love myself and to protect myself. Although she can be hard on me, I am grateful for her and the direction she pushes me towards.

I chose to focus my mind map on the relationships that Clarissa Dalloway have with Richard Dalloway and Peter Walsh. Since the book was written in a stream of consciousness, certain dialogues and things that people say stick to the person they said it to. That line is repeated often within that character’s  stream of consciousness. I represented those quotes in my mind map.

The first relationship is Mr. Dalloway and Mrs. Dalloway, I chose to not represent him as much because for most of the book, Clarissa is thinking about her memories with Peter and when he shows up at her door, she doesn’t know how to feel. She is excited, but then he tells her that he is in love. When their conversation is interrupted by Elizabeth, Peter leaves.

Peter is thinking about Clarissa when he is leaving and their time together. He thinks about their fight in Regent’s Park and then he sees another couple, Rezia and Septimus.

Michele woke up from some noise. She looked over to see Ale getting ready for the day. Why didn’t he wake her up? He knew she had class, but she did not let it take any more of her time. She ran to the bathroom and got ready. It was already 8:15, her class started at 8:40. She has to go, she thought. Right before leaving, she forgot to start a pot of coffee for the train ride, but its okay, Ale is not ready yet so they had a few minutes to spare before walking out the door.

Michele locked the apartment door as they headed to begin their days. Michele said to Ale how beautiful and warm it was outside. She loved when she dressed accordingly to the weather. They headed towards Wyckoff, cut through the parking lot to get to DeKalb, made a right to the L train. As Michele swiped in she thought how great it was to have the unlimited metro card.

They went down the stairs on the Manhattan side and the train was already rolling in. That’s always a sign of a good day. They walked into a packed train. A lady had her train on the L train…during rush hour… why? It’s a beautiful day. Michele thought to herself that she would bike the whole way to Baruch if she had a bike a like that.

Gustave Klimt- Hope II 1907-08

This painting is done with oil, gold and platinum on canvas. It depicts a pregnant woman with her breasts exposed and a skull on her pregnant belly. She is wearing a long colorful detailed robe and there are three other women under her robe with their eyes closed and their hands up. The four women look like they are praying which evokes feelings of hope. The praying and the closed eyes evoke feelings of calmness and peace.

What captured my attention about this piece is detail in terms of color and pattern on the robe and the dress. The robe has a pattern of gold circles and smaller circles overlapping. The dress is yellow with patterns of beautiful blues and pinks. It is really interesting how the woman and the 3 other women are one unified single form of the painting. The colors are also really bright, which also symbolizes hope, and the background is just a rich shade of green. It shows how special and important the process of motherhood is.

The skull and the mother’s pregnant belly represent two parallel ideas of life, birth and death, the circle of life.  Interestingly enough when Gustave Klimt was working on Hope I, his one year old Otto died suddenly. Klimt lived in Vienna around the same time that Sigmund Freud and his ideas on family and sexual drives were starting to get popular. Around this time period, pregnant woman were also rarely depicted.

-Michele

The verse that Philip repeats with the line “I have no mother tongue, no mother to tongue, no tongue to mother to mother tongue me, I must therefore be dumb tongue…” begins to explore the idea of dehumanization. In this line, the speaker is saying they have no native language to express ones self, no mother to guide ones self, so therefore they must be dumber, that is what slaveholder’s believed and what they used to break slaves. When she is reading the poem, she always returns to this verse to emphasize how dehumanization begins.

In the beginning of Douglass’s Narrative, he does not know much about his own self, such as how old he is, he doesn’t seem to be very connected to his mother since they were separated. Dehumanization begins with isolation leading to a lack of knowledge and language, resulting in not being able to communicate one’s feelings and thoughts. Being illiterate restricts one from having human connection. Slaveholders separated children from there mothers and did not teach them how to read or write because they believed that it would give them power, power to think and feel their own thoughts. For slaves,  “English is a foreign anguish”. They feared that if slaves had this power, the slaveholders would lose theirs.

Both Philip’s poem and Douglass’s Narrative explore and goes through the process of dehumanization.

-Michele Li

By Michele Li

(1) Work

I work at a coffee shop and we also make food for the grab and go fridge including wraps, salads, fruit and yogurt bowls. Recently I started to work in the kitchen preparing these foods and I noticed we throw away a lot of food that cannot be eaten but is full of nutrient. Many of these foods can be used for composting and creating nutrient rich soil to grow and give new life. This reminded of a line in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)

In a perfect world, all the food that can be reused for compost that is thrown away daily in kitchens and restaurants would be collected and treated properly to decompose and to be reused again, to complete “circle of life”.

(2) School

At Baruch college and most other colleges there is an academic advisement center to help students complete the correct path in school, take the right classes and get the right degree. However at Baruch College, there are only 12 academic advisors to meet with all the students in Undergraduate. Although students are helped everyday, not everyone is helped and this ends up causing more problems overall. By the time the deadline comes for enrolling in courses, students may be enrolled in the wrong classes, thus taking up space from a student that needs the class. Students then need to spend more time and money on school to take classes needed for their degree. The academic advisement center is a paradox.

(3) Home

In class we discussed the line where Whitman tells his reader to “Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,” how there is a surplus supply of air for everyone. Air is free, but food is not. In New York City, there is a disturbing surplus of food but there is also a large percentage of the population that goes to bed hungry. I live in the East Village where anything I need is in arm’s reach. At work, we have to throw out most of the pastries that do not get sold. At first, I was really upset  that we had to throw away so many croissants a day, but then I realized that we were just one store and just a coffee shop. Imagine the amount of food that a restaurant might throw in a day, then multiply that by the amount of restaurants there are in New York City today. That’s a lot of food! However according to the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, one in six New Yorkers are food insecure. How is this possible if there is so much food available in the city?