\u3ci\u3eMaggie\u3c/i\u3e or \u3ci\u3eDeath and the Gardener\u3c/i\u3e (original) (raw)
Related papers
What Was Left: An essay on Alzheimer's disease, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
What Was Le f t Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer vilhaue rr@ f e lician.e du I remember o ne o f my aunts-I called her Anta, a name left o ver fro m my childho o d-lo o king at the flo wers in the driveway. They had fallen o ff the araliya tree that grew by the garage. Flo wers fell daily, their petals still plump. After they fell, it to o k a day o r two fo r the edges o f the petals to turn bro wn. The gardener must have been keeping up with his sweeping duties because mo st o f the flo wers in the driveway were fresh pink, recently fallen. He had his bro o m o ut, and he had just hitched up his saro ng and begun to sweep. It was early. Dew was flying o ff the grass, brushed o ff by the bro o m's ekel bristles. It might have been the rasping o f the bro o m that drew Anta o ut o n to the po rch that o verlo o ked the driveway. Her hair was still unco mbed, altho ugh she was dressed in daytime clo thes. She sto o d lo o king o ut at the gardener's bro o m whisking the flo wers into a pile, alo ng with a few leaves fro m the mango and rubber trees. "They are so lo vely," she said. "Leave them." The gardener barely paused to lo o k at her. "Lo vely?" he muttered, to the flo wers, to his bro o m. "I can't just leave them lying there, ro tting." He lo o ked at me, sitting o n the po rch with my mo rning tea and sho o k his head pityingly. Anta wasn't paying attentio n to him, o r me. Her eyes were fixed o n the bruising, crumpling flo wers, which the bro o m was pushing. "What a waste, no ?" Anta said.
The In/Visible Aging Woman: Joanna Cannon's Three Things about Elsie
In Joanna Cannon’s Three Things about Elsie (2018), her protagonist, Florence, an 84-year old woman, reflects on old people’s homes like the one she lives in. To her, these places are wrongly called “sheltered accommodation”, as old people are not being protected from anything external, instead, it seems to her that they are “the ones hidden away, collected up and ushered out of sight” (17), nursing homes are “full of forgotten people, waiting to be found again” (133). These are only some examples of the multiple observations she makes from where she is now: lying on the floor, wating to be found after a fall in her flat of the Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly. Lying there, hovering between life and death, she goes over her past, drawing from her unreliable memory. Florence’s physical position during the novel as she waits is a recurrent icon in narratives of vulnerability, as Jean-Michel Ganteau recognises (140), but we soon discover that her vulnerability has many shapes and that the idea of invisibility acquires a new meaning in her case. In this paper I propose to analyse Florence’s life to identify the mechanisms at work in the processes of invisibilisation and silencing of the old. Florence’s life portrays quite clearly Judith Butler’s unequal distribution of vulnerability (Undoing 22); a life clearly marked by the evaluation of certain groups as less valuable than others, their lives “less grievable” (Frames 22) than the rest. In the midst of a pandemic that has brought to the fore new discourses of ageism across the world and that has pointed at the old as the most vulnerable group in our societies, this novel gives voice to one of them, giving them value
The Foundationalist, 2022
{Isabella Brewer, Rutgers University} She lived alone in a neighborhood with many. In a little house with white siding, the simple, slant-roof starter kind that kindergarteners draw with crayons -- it had a quaint suburban symmetry. And the picket fences pressed right up against her flower boxes in the front, right up against her neighbors on each side, right up against her and her tiny garden.
TEXT poetry and prose October 2018
TEXT, 2018
On the next instance of the New South Whales making an appearance in the assignment, she hesitated, then typed out a pithy question. Because a third mention surely deserved sarcasm. She tapped it out two-fingered on her laptop. 'Are these related to the Southern Right Whale?' Was she undermining the student's self-esteem by pointing out he didn't know how to smell the name of his home state? More to the point, had she been teaching too long? It was supposed to be a heart and soul job, a vacation like being a nun. She wanted to do the right thing but increasingly felt she was losing the plot and not just of the students' convoluted assignments. It was like an illness, this feeling stalking her. The bus lurched to a stop and she was jostled by the outflow of passengers spelling of body odour and expensive perfumes and daily grind. She stared blankly at the swelling cityscape beyond the window. Sighed. Not her stop. Dropped her eyes back to the coldface. The hall was deserted. She sometimes doubted students existed in threedimensional space. The laminated A4 on the Professor's door announced Consolation times, handily colour coded on a timetable. No one had introduced him to the vagaries of autocorrect, nor his students to the futility of expecting anything soothing when they came to consult behind that particular door. She arrived just in time, a skerrick before the nick, in a case of hurrying up to get somewhere to sit still. The school meeting dragged, its soul-purpose, it seemed, to prepare them for hell. The diminutive sessional tutor alone did not partake of the neatly triangular sandwiches and cut fruit provided as incentive to get them there. This woman had long subsided on next-to-nothing at all. As the clock on the far wall itched its way closer to the advertised conclusion, she found herself drowning. She woke as her chin hit her chest. 'I meant drowsing,' she apologised. The Head droned on, having made a slightly more complex spelling mistake: perusing agenda items took so much longer than pursuing them. The list of mistakes in the afternoon marking grew. The baddie had another think coming. A ballerina was frilled when she won the Eisteddfod. Some boys went surging. The versus of a song were eluded to.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel written by African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Janie Crawford is the black female protagonist of the novel who dreams of reaching far horizons and for a relationship of equality in marriage. The novel is a saga of Janie Crawford’s journey towards enlightenment and developing an independent feminist identity. The present paper aims at analysing Janie’s struggle from a follower of patriarchy to becoming a self- asserting woman with Downing and Roush’s five stages of feminist identity development. I posit that Janie defies the stereotypical gender roles and breaks the conventional patriarchal boundaries that keep a woman’s movement in check i.e. within the four walls of a house. Although suffered degradation and humiliations in her attempts to realise her dream marriage, she is successful in the end. A step by step analysis of Janie’s journey reveals how she gains her voice, how she builds her identity and how ultimately she reaches the far horizons, the destination of her dreams. In the first phase of her journey, she accepts passively the accepted notions of gender roles and follows the well-trodden path of marrying a wealthy man to have shelter and financial security. Unable to establish any emotional connection with her husband, Logan Killicks, she leaves him for Joe Starks. With Joe Starks, Janie becomes aware of her further degradation. She is reduced to the status of the possession. Slowly and gradually she gathers strength inside her to raise a voice of protest against this sexual oppression. This revelation helps Janie to integrate her fragmented self and she learns to maintain a separate public and a separate private self. In the person of Tea Cake, she has a self-fulfilling and reciprocal loving relationship. Janie learns to acknowledge herself and her strengths. She becomes conscious of her own individual identity. She does not hesitate to shoot Tea Cake as an assertion of her identity. As a mature woman, full of Tea Cake’s love and remembrance, Janie is satisfied with her life.