i d e n t i t y

“In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my drowning soul...Now that I saw these places, they looked ordinary, dirty, worn down by so many people entering and leaving them in real life, and it occurred to me that I could not be the only person in the world for whom they were a fixture of fantasy. It was not my first bout with the disappointment of reality and it would not be my last.” (3-4)

Lucy’s survival comes from her ability to handle disappointment and her continuance to create her own identity regardless of it. Although she is frustrated, Lucy remains loyal to dreaming. Dreams remain her “lifeboat” during her first few days in America. Even with that, she does not dream about her future but of “green figs cooked in coconut milk” (7). She dreams of home, because her memories keep herself connected with what she knows and understands. At the same time, they will continue to haunt her as she tries desperately to separate ties with her past.

As Lucy describes her living situation she builds independence and pushes past racial boundaries and class that she perceives. I feel that her room represents her alienated state and shows how difficult it is to fit in with the style society has laid out for her. She explains:

“I was only an unhappy young woman living in a maid's room, and I was not even the maid. I was the young girl who watches over the children and goes to school at night.” (7)

This is critical in realizing how Lucy perceives her own self. She makes note that she is not cargo. She also is not commodity, no source of labor whose purpose is related to her ability to work. Thirdly, she is not a maid. Lucy despises any job title. She does not even consider herself an au pair. Lucy only mentions her duties as watching the children and attending school in the evening rather than being defined by a title. Lucy brings up her “unhappy” emotional state as another reason to defend her difficult transition to her new environment.

The title of the chapter, “Poor Visitor,” enhances those feelings. Since everything Lucy is experiencing is new to her, like the running water and food, naming herself too quickly would initially limit herself. Though she exists in a brand new world, she feels alone. Her search for a link home has only brought her farther away.

O and Othello

When Shakespeare composed the play Othello, televisions were not around. Life around the late 1500s also had many different qualities than it does today. The time period of Othello did not have wars on drugs or high school shootings. Peer pressure back then was not an issue. Othello’s audiences in the 1500s did not face the situations that I, once an American high school student, faced. These significant differences make it hard to relate modern day tragedies to those of the 1500s. The common themes and characters from Othello were, I thought decently represented in the movie, O. The movie represents jealousy as a dominating factor over how people live their lives.

As I began thinking about the movie, 0, in comparison to Shakespeare’s Othello, I realized that I would not care much for the movie without having read the play beforehand. The drama, jealousy, and love are all very intriguing and relevant, but a few things caught my eye that I do not believe accurately represent the play. I feel that we never really understand why Hugo involves an unreliable, unpopular, rich kid, Roger, in his scheme. Also, I do not get why his own girlfriend and Desi's roommate, Emily, so easily go along with the deception Hugo presents them, including the scarf. Emily knew very well Desi and O were fighting and the scarf had something to do with it. A great deal of time is spent developing the honest and pure love story between Desi and O, so I find it hard to swallow the fact that O would throw away his obvious potential over a rumor concerning Desi’s impurity he heard from only one person. Though full of confrontations, I sense a missing scene one in which O demands the truth from both Desi and Michael face to face. Racial issues are dealt with in different ways-lightheartedly between Desi and O, obviously. O deals with it directly and Hugo, along with the adults, with understatement. I do, however, find it interesting that O is the only black student possibly in the entire school.

Love

After finishing this book, I thought I’d talk about the theme of love. Love, in Othello, is a bitter victory. It gives Othello strength but not the direction he gets from being a soldier and Desdemona access to his heart but not his mind. Desdemona never fails to stop loving Othello, even when he blames her of cheating on him, calls her a whore, hits her in public, and even strangles her. At her last moment, she still holds herself responsible for her own death rather than accusing Othello. The strength of her love is actually impressive, as it proves to be the only thing resistant to Iago’s scheming. Emilia proved her love through friendship toward Desdemona. She stood up against Iago, her lying husband, for her and was killed for it. Instead of believing in true love, Iago uses it as leverage and resorts to his personal desires-particularly regarding Desdemona. He tells Roderigo he loves him to deceive him, get at his money, or persuade him to do something where he is the only one benefiting. Iago even tells Othello he loves him but actually whispers the cruelest things in his ear. Though he does succeed in ending Desdemona and Othello’s marriage and essentially their lives, he fails to destroy their love. Love’s role in the play is complicated even more by Othello’s statement that he loved "not wisely, but too well." I feel Othello reminds us in this line that the passion of love will always surpass logic.

Plate 7

Between 1998 and 2002, Gregory Crewdson created the “Twilight” series. It consists of 40 very elaborately staged and large photographs. They delve into the relationship between North American homes, landscape, and the imagination. His photos are striking in the way that they reveal a familiar suburban landscape as a place of anxiety and wonder. Typically these photographs contain a single isolated person or figure, giving off a glimpse of shame that almost shouldn’t be there. This idea causes the photos to feel slightly awkward. For example, Crewdson constructs a typical living room setting. The colors in the room are neutral, there are paintings on the wall, furniture in all the right places, a view into the dining room, a few lamps on-one even in the closest-but in the center of the photograph lies a man crouching on the hardwood floor simply gazing at beams of light shooting out from it. He dug out these beams himself. I find it a little odd… For one, if I cut open my floor to find rays of light I’d be a little frantic and confused, but the man is quiet and practically mesmerized. Secondly, it’s as if the room’s telling more of the story. At first glance I did not realize this. The objects within the room are specifically placed to make it seem like the man was previously eating or watching T.V. This leaves me wondering why the man suddenly chose to cut open his floor. Was a small stream of light already exposed?

This photograph, Plate 7, presents a story. Reading the photo more, I notice there’s only one hat on the rack. I’m assuming the man lives by himself, but the table in the corner appears to have enough food for two. I wonder if there’s someone else, waiting in the kitchen perhaps. Regardless, the man is clearly infatuated with the light as if he has just discovered something new about a place that’s always been so ordinary to him. Then I realized why this photograph belongs in the “Twilight” series. The man has been awoken at the very moment of twilight, his moment of twilight. The light represents reality; therefore the man has had a revelation of the real. That’s specifically what this photo reveals. The light exposes the inevitable drama in life. What we don’t know is what the man actually took from the light. Is he suddenly aware of the structure of reality while we remain in the dark, concerned with our made-up beliefs?