Perryonline.weebly.com



123456789101112131415161718“Human Things”By Karen ConnellyThe first time I wrote anything political, I was about ten years old. I was a chubby, mouthy child who was good at school and bored by it, too. I often got in trouble for talking too much; sometimes I told my classmates things that children were not supposed to know (and I especially got in trouble for that, often by angry teachers who would then lie to the students, inciting in me a lifelong refusal to lie to children). This must have been one of the reasons the nice kids were friendly with me: I was a teller of secrets, by turns crafty and brash. So though I never had many friends, I was not an outcast.My less obvious isolation was contained a few blocks away from school, in the house on Lakeview Drive where I lived with my family. There was neither a lake nor a view of one within walking distance, a fact that struck me from the time I learned what the word view meant. Our street name, I thought, is just one of many lies. I would never have used the word poor to describe myself or my family. I would still not use it. We had a house and enough to eat, facts that were occasionally pointed out to me, correctly, as reasons to be grateful. And I was grateful. But the differences between my classmates and I grated on me, and many of those differences had to do with money. My father ran a cement plant, drove a cement truck; my mother, to earn extra money of her own, worked as a chambermaid, a gardener, a server at the local Dairy Queen, when she was not running the house and taking care of five kids. My classmates’ fathers were doctors and engineers. My classmates made fun of my clothes. For a couple of years, I was called “Stretchy” because of the cheap polyester slacks my mother bought for me. I don’t know if I ever told her that the kids made fun of me; probably not. She had wild teenagers on her hands, and an absconding, hard-drinking husband, and smaller children after me, and many bills to pay, and food to buy on an allowance that never quite lasted for the two weeks it was supposed to last. I was the good middle child, the peacemaker. Occasionally I fought with my siblings over food, the good stuff, anyway, the fruit and cheese and bread. The upshot of this was that I never had cool shoes, Girl Guides, or trips. Or nice jeans. But we lived in a clean bungalow with decent furniture and I never went hungry.Yet I felt isolated because I did not understand the chaos and anger that was part of my daily family life; I was frightened by it, too, and could do nothing to make it better. Naively, I wanted to make things better. (Yet more naively, given my age—forty-two—I still do.) My older brother had tried to burn down his junior high school, and had almost succeeded. After that happened, there was a lot of screaming and yelling. Then he crashed a car through the front picture window of a nice house in a nearby, richer neighbourhood, and that brought out the sirens, more police cars, more screaming and yelling. Soon after, he and my father had a fistfight at the dinner table. Maybe it was as much as a year later; even the most distinct disasters had a tendency to run together like open cans of paint heaved across a room. But my older brother was not the only problem. My older sister Tracy often ran away from home, and was repeatedly sent to detention centres, from which she returned with horrible stories of being locked up in small rooms and forced to clean toilets with toothbrushes. She may have been exaggerating, but I doubt it. One time, when I was nine or ten—just when I started to write my first political stories—I helped her run away. I locked the door after her and watched her go. I did not raise the alarm to my sleeping parents or siblings. If she wants to leave, I thought, let her leave. Then as now, I was a great believer in free will. I thought she was awfully brave; I didn’t like going away from home. She was carrying a paper grocery bag with some clothes in it. I can still see that paper bag lodged in the crook of her arm, as if it were full of apples and bread. She slipped through the gate into the grey light of a predawn summer morning. It is not the last time I saw her. But it feels like the last time. I don’t think she came back to live at home after that.Something that is “political,” according to the Funk and Wagnall’s Canadian Edition Dictionary, is “concerned with the science, organization, or activities of government.” Certainly what I wrote when I was a kid had nothing to do with the science of government. But if democracy involves the rule of the people, then it follows that language is an enormous part of the political process. We depend on words to understand ourselves and the world we inhabit; words are the most important tools we have for communicating, for grasping the import of our experiences, for trying to figure out what we’ve done right and what we’ve completely messed up. Some academics would argue that language—what people speak and write and argue about—is the political process.There is an ancient meaning to the word, too, from the Greek, polites, meaning the one who lives in the polis, the city. Being political means to be a citizen of the city, the country, the world in which we live. In a contemporary context, it means to think about those places, and our relationship to them, and to each other; it means to have a stake in where we’re standing and what’s happening around us. As in ancient Greece, a modern-day citizen has a responsibility to participate in collective public life. And, especially at the municipal level—the level of the polis—our participation as citizens makes a palpable, measurable difference. No matter what our cultural background, to become a citizen means to have a certain amount of independence. The family home can no longer be the only place that defines us. For me, the two experiences—of growing up, of becoming a citizen—were twinned, and both meant expanding beyond the family, no matter how much my parents and siblings influenced and shaped me. Growing up and being a citizen both involve being able to argue and to talk honestly about where and how and why we live. That is why what I wrote when I was ten was political, though I didn’t know the word then. I don’t think I even knew what I was doing, scribbling late at night while my little sister lay deeply asleep in the bottom bunk, grinding her teeth through dreams. I had notebooks by that time, and loose sheets of paper in old manila folders. I was already becoming what I was going to become, what I am now, and what I will always be: a person who is most content when she is surrounded by pieces of paper with words on them. I am writing this essay in a room full of piles and piles of paper, and bits of paper taped on the wall, and more paper pinned to a bulletin board, printed from a computer file, photocopied, scrawled in my hand or in someone else’s. Paper marked with words means I have a voice in the world, a voice I never have to raise, a voice that does not yell or scream or cry but which stands there, on the page, and speaks. This voice says what it wants to say. That in itself is quintessentially political.I wrote stories about girls who want to run away from home. The girls were unhappy; each one of them saved her money to leave. She put this money in a box on a high kitchen shelf, the disused upper ledge of a cupboard, a collection area for cooking grease and knick-knacks, where no one would ever find it. This kitchen shelf was exactly like the kitchen shelf in my own family’s small kitchen. For that reason, I remember it precisely, the white cupboards with a dark line inlaid two inches away from the periphery of the wood, and metal handles with slightly ornate flourishes, also painted white.No one, to my knowledge, ever read these stories. There were a number of them—six? ten?—each slightly different and all more or less the same, sharing the common theme of longed-for escape and a surprising financial pragmatism, at least for a ten-year-old. None of the characters ever left home because they never had enough money. Unlike my older sister, they were always biding their time, planning, dreaming, organizing, and hoarding food for the trip. To write about running away was the first time I articulated a choice to live in the world beyond my family. Of course the characters in the stories were me; even at ten I knew that. Protest, and therefore change, begins in the imagination. I imagined my protest against my unstable family life in the safest, healthiest way possible: on paper. In the stories, the girl was going to leave, but she had to be prepared. I had the terrible example of my sister not to follow, and perhaps that is also why I never wrote out the fate of my runaway. I knew that running away from home with a grocery bag would not work. Tracy was often unhappy; she became more unhappy as she grew up, had a baby on her own at eighteen, then struggled with crushing poverty and depression and addiction. When she was twenty-four and I was fifteen, she committed suicide. The year after she died, I found my way out, into the world. I had already been living mostly away from home for almost a year, usually sleeping at a friend’s house during the week. Someone I babysat for asked me if I had ever thought about going to live and study in another country. His name was Lorne; he was a member of a local Rotary Club in Calgary. He explained that the Rotary Club had scholarships for teenagers who wanted to live abroad. It was an exchange program. A Rotary Club in the other country hosted you, and you lived with a local family, went to school, learned the language. No, he said, my family didn’t have to belong to the Club, nor did they have to host someone from the other country. I had to ask those questions right away.Occasionally, a kind person hands you a glinting key to your possible life, and you smile at him, accept the key and start trying the row of doors with a pounding heart. The moment Lorne told me about the exchange program, I recognized the key I’d been handed, and I think he must have known what he was trying to give me. Now that I was a teenager, my running away stories had morphed into a vague plan for the future: I was going to become a foreign correspondent and live in faraway places and write about them. And the rest is history, my own history as well as the larger history that I have learned to think about, and the personal history I have lived with friends and colleagues in Burma, Thailand, Greece, Spain, France—the countries where I have spent significant amounts of time. The story of my first year abroad is called Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, and it records the joyful, infuriating, wonder-filled experience of living in a village in northern Thailand when I was seventeen and eighteen. I wrote much of it as a real journal, and as long letters to my mother, who was a great correspondent. She had always supported my dream of becoming a writer, and when I decided to live abroad again, after Thailand, she supported me in that, too. I had waited long enough to learn how to run towards something while also running away. Immersing myself in different cultures and languages became my university, a way of leaving my family behind and educating myself in the world. Thailand was just the beginning. As I grew up, lived my adventures, wrote my books, I slowly came back to my family, and to Canada, though I continued to spend most of my time abroad. In the mid-1990s, I went for the first time to Burma (also called Myanmar), trying to find out about the situation of political prisoners there. For the first time in my free Canadian life, I learned firsthand what it meant to struggle for one’s freedom not just on a personal level but on a cultural, national, political, economic level. Life in Burma meant not being free, and not being able to make one’s freedom either, as I felt I had made mine. I spent a couple of years among people who routinely faced imprisonment, torture, sometimes death, all because they wanted to do the things that I had done pretty much my whole life: speak, write, publish without fear of arrest or imprisonment or death, assemble in groups, vote, have easy access to education, medical care, the basic necessities of life.For the next decade, I wrote about what I had learned in Burma and on the Thai–Burma border, among dissidents, refugees, and political activists. To live among them was to be handed another glittering key. They were the bravest, most generous, and most joyful people I have ever known. When I finally returned to Canada, my eyes were opened both to my own country’s great promise and to the injustice and violence that marks our past and continually violates our present. Maybe it takes one’s whole life to grow up and to become a good citizen. For the first time, I was able to see my own family through a political and historical lens. All that had haunted me—alcoholism, sexual abuse, wacky religious fundamentalism—continued to haunt me, but I learned to look those demons in the eye, to sit down with them, to invite them to tea. As a Burmese writer once said, regarding different forms of political oppression, “These are human things, just like prisons. We think of them, we build them, we use them. And we can dismantle them. They are only human things. They are not the law of nature.” Human things. I like the breadth of that, in both ways, for the good and the bad. We can dismantle it, if we have to, but we can also put it together. A country. A city. A life. Despite everything I know about how flawed we are, I still believe this. I have lived it.Questions:What does the word “absconding” mean when the author uses it to describe her father (paragraph 2)?He is honest and often kind.He is a thief and often steals.He is loud and often fights.He is secretive and often leaves.Why does the author say she would never use the word poor to describe he or her family?She was taught to be grateful for the things she did have.She would not dare use the word poor – she was too proud.She was unaware of her actual situation.She refused to lie and they had the bare essentials.How did the author rebel against her unstable family life?By acting out in school.By running away.By fighting with her siblings.By writing stories.What type of figurative language is being used in the following excerpt? “Paper marked with words means I have a voice in the world, a voice I never have to raise, a voice that does not yell or scream or cry but which stands there, on the page, and speaks.” (paragraph )MetaphorSimilePersonificationRepetitionWhat is the “glinting key”? (paragraph)Exactly what it says – it is a key glinting in the sunlight.It is a metaphor for the speaker’s shining brilliance.It symbolizes an opportunity – a means of running away.It is an example of imagery, being used for emphasis.Choose the word that best describes the tone of this essay.Pitiful. Heartfelt.Determined.Lighthearted.The mood of this narrative can be best described by the following descriptor.Enthusiastic.Weary.Disenchanted.Inspired.What best describes how time spent in Burma effected the author?It changed her perseverance.It changed her perspective.It changed her passion.It changed her position.Why did Connelly say the stories she wrote as a ten-year-old were political?Because they dealt with a difficult home environment.Because they were emotionally charged stories.Because they were about the things her family wrote, spoke and argued about.Because they dealt with serious issues such as child abuse, neglect and poverty.This is a narrative essay because it……tells a story.…is told from the first person point of view.…conveys an important message.…is written in chronological order.What is the significance of the narrative’s title and how does it develop the message? Connect the title and your interpretation of the message using two examples from the text.In the sentence “All that had haunted me—alcoholism, sexual abuse, wacky religious fundamentalism—continued to haunt me, but I learned to look those demons in the eye, to sit down with them, to invite them to tea” what does the author mean? Identify two literary devices used in this excerpt and explain how they develop the message.The poet uses diction and sentence structure for emphasis in this text. Find two examples and explain the effect created.Further Questions:Reading for Meaning: When the author describes helping her?sister?Tracy?run?away,?she?says,?“It?is?not?the?last?time?I?saw?her.?But?it?feels?like?the?last?time.”?What?does?the?author?mean?by?this??What?details?provided?later?in?the?essay?help?to?clarify?the?author’s?meaning?here?Reading for Meaning: Write?a?sentence?that?states?the?author’s?thesis?in?the?essay.?Then,?in?two?or?three?sentences,?summarize?the?argument?the?author?uses?to?support?her?thesis.Understanding Form and Style Explain?what?the?author?communicates?through?the?simile?of?the?paint?cans?(paragraph?5).?Evaluate?the?effectiveness?of?the?simile?in?the?context?of?the?paragraph?in?which?it?is?used.Speaking and Listening: With?a?partner,?take?turns?sharing?your?personal?response?to?this?essay—what?you?liked?and/or?didn’t?like?about?it?and?why.?Listen?for?your?partner’s?main?ideas?and?then?provide?an?oral?summary?of?them?in?one?or?two?sentences.?Ask?your?partner?to?provide?feedback?on?your?summary.Student Voice:? What?does?being?a?“good?citizen”?mean?to?you??In?your?opinion,?what?behaviours,?attitudes,?and?values?make?someone?a?good?citizen?Critical Literacy: Much?of?this?essay?is?based?on?the?author’s?memory?of?events?that?took?place?long?before?she?wrote?this?text.?Some?people?might?question?whether?the?author’s?memory?of?these?events?is?accurate.?If?her?memories?are?not?accurate,?does?this?invalidate?her?thesis??Why?or?why?not? ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download