Expecting the Expected

Gabby Smith

Potiki- Homelands analysis

2/13/13

                In chapter 21, Toko describes how he really listened and understood Granny’s stories much more after many people lost homes and possessions in the fire.  He says how she always told her stories “with a kind of joyfulness” but really “loss and grief were ordinary and expected” (140 Grace).  Today I went to Acts 4 Youth for the second time.  I was working with two 7^th grade boys on studying science and writing a book report.  At one point, I was quizzing M on parts of a nerve cell and he got frustrated.  “Forget it!  If I don’t get this one right I’m not getting into to no high school,” he told me.  Of course, he got it wrong and he continued to express more frustration saying that he could never get into any of those “good high schools.”  A few minutes later, the other boy, A, mentioned Loyola Blakefield that was on a piece of paper.  He said to M how they could never get into Loyola Blakefield, a prestigious high school in Baltimore.  I immediately said, “of course you can go!” because I was always brought up being told that I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted to.  M looked at me and laughed at first, but when I said it again seriously he looked at me almost like I was just being rude.  It was as if everyone knew that going to Loyola was impossible and now I was just being cruel by making them think they actually could go there. 

            I do not know much about their home lives just yet, as it is only the second week, but I do know that most of them are not too well off financially.  When reading this chapter, Granny’s demeanor and stories really reminded me of M today.  These boys have so much energy and are so fun to be around, just as Granny tells her stories always so joyfully.  In this way, I see the contrast between the storytellers, Granny and the boys at Acts 4 Youth both of who are almost always laughing, and the truth in their stories, that they have seen and had to accept difficult circumstances.  Despite such negativity in their lives, both Granny and the kids tell stories with such enthusiasm that one could assume nothing is wrong.  Grace writes how Toko “really understood for the first time that to Granny, loss and grief were ordinary and expected” (140 Grace).  Just as Granny came to expect loss, M and A have accepted their future as going to a mediocre high school and maybe getting into college if they’re lucky.  In the York Road area where many of the students live, violence and death is surprising, but not uncommon.  As for their futures, there is not much dreaming.  We toured a business last week to show them some of the business world and what it takes to be a businessman, but when I asked who was interested in owning their own business, only two of them said, “yeah, maybe.”  This could be because their careers are in the very distant future, but when M laughed and got almost offended when I tried to be hopeful for him, it demonstrated the limits of his world.  The idea of “dreaming big” and “making yourself” as Hoani says in this chapter, is not there.  Hoani says “it’s myself, to give…and your big fish, it’s yourself, to give” (144 Grace).  I feel this idea of investing in people so they can give the best of themselves to other people is not in the mindset of Americans in general.  Perhaps I am being too idealistic.  The reality is that M and A will probably stay in Baltimore for the rest of their lives and be fine without going to a great high school or college.  Most of them are very average students with a little too much energy, so some of the tougher high schools will probably not want to take them.  However, not even having that possibility in mind, not having anything to strive for because M assumes he will never get in, really bothers me.  I want him to be able to dream and give the most of himself to the world; without goals or possibilities for his future, I worry about him accepting mediocrity, settling to be a small fish without striving to be bigger.   

**M and A refer to the boys’ names which I decided to leave out for any security reasons**

Homelands: Not For The Faint of Heart

Patricia Grace’s Potiki explores the intimate connection between the Maori people and the land which gives life to their community.  Several elements emerge from the Maoris’ relationship with the sacred land: spirituality, the well-spring of life from death, the power of stories, and the strength and source of identity. There are many beautiful themes within this text which seem to speak to something within our souls and provide the foundations of one’s homeland.  

 We are offered numerous views of the Maori homeland through the individual stories of Grace’s characters. We learn that the stories and the land are intertwined and could not exist without each other. While past homelands texts have included this connection between home, location and people, Potiki places more emphasis and more sanctity on the physical land.  To lose their land would mean extinction and thus eradication of Maori culture, spirituality and ideals.  The Maoris’ interaction with “Dollarman” elicits a theme that spans from the Industrial Revolution to present day. Fortunately, the Maori people understand what so many fail to see—that money does not bring true happiness.  Despite the Maori's material poverty, they are full in spirit and hope.  In Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, the technological portions of the stories seemed like a distraction for the characters and an inconsequential gloss over the deeper meanings to be found.  In denying the development of their land and modernization, the Maori have chosen what I consider the more courageous path—the return to working with the organic source of all life. The Maori people live these deeper meanings every day. Within the context of the pressures and fears of soon-to-be college graduates, I found this theme quite inspiring when it comes to having the courage to find and follow one’s path and to understand the source of one’s identity.They distribute power, cherish the unique story of each society member and are willing to fight for their identity.  Expressing a feeling of content that draws a suppressed longing in readers, Roimata claims “Our chosen hardship was something that was good and uplifting to all of us….We were whole and life was good” (Grace, 105).  This notion is wrapped within the makeup of one’s homeland.  

This week during Business Ethics our class examined the writings of German philosopher Max Scheler.  In his work Christian Love and the Twentieth Century, Scheler discusses mans’ “estate,” claiming that there is an inherent longing for man to be part of a community, to be surrounded by his family, to develop a craft and to grow with the spirit of the estate which is founded on the love of creation and its quality, not profits (Scheler, 400). The Maori of Potiki live this same ideology coupled with the spirituality of culture and the reverence of tradition and story. As I connect these texts, I begin to understand the integral role these themes play in the development of one’s homeland. 

Not only does “Dollarman” represent the false happiness of modernization and money, he symbolizes the refusal to understand another’s homeland.  This is seen when Toko looks into the eyes of the “Dollarman” and responds, “I saw what he saw. What he saw was brokenness, a broken race. He saw in my Granny, my Mary and me a whole people, decrepit, deranged, deformed” (Grace, 102).  It is a version of this perspective that led to the destruction of Ibo culture in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.  Many are not willing to see what it is that makes another’s homeland unique and truly home. One thing I have learned from Homelands is the importance of totally removing yourself from your own homeland and placing yourself in someone else’s.  Something as near and dear to us as home can only be understood when all beliefs, relationships and geographies are considered and embraced. 

Do You Have to Let it Linger? Letting Pain Linger as a Home is Rebuilt

As Alex and I had previously mentioned in class, we spent some time in Vanceburg, Kentucky during Spring Break of last year.  I could not help but retrace my memories of experiencing this incredibly tight-knit homeland as I read the second section of Potiki.  The effects of puncturing, altering, and chipping away at that natural space in which a community dwells can be dire and often come with economic or cultural depression.  In Kentucky, I experienced a microcosm of Maori-equivalent individuals, who had been trampled on and abused by corporations seeking to seize their land for monetary gain while somehow exhibiting joy and cultivating their community. 

My favorite day of that week was spent at a day center for individuals with serious social disorders, anger problems, and/or depression.  These individuals had clearly felt the effects of their steeply declining economic climate.  In Kentucky, many owe the poor economic situation of many rural areas to the imposition of mining practices, specifically fracking, which put people out of jobs, destroy land, destroy homes, and in turn, often propel many towards depression or unemployment.  So, these individuals had been displaced, raised in poor conditions, and more than often abused.  They seemed to have no where to call a “traditional home.”  The more I spoke to them, though, about their experiences with addiction, rape, incest, and poverty, the more I saw the goodness they had created for themselves in this makeshift home that was New Beginnings.  Two teens who both had social anxiety disorders as a result of ill treatment at home were in a loving relationship, one girl, a victim of incest and other forms of abuse, used her go-getter personality to inject life into the white walls of the day center—teaching us how to dance and making us laugh. 

What I experienced was a rebuilding of a homeland.  Like the Maori people, these individuals had seen their land literally stripped away and witnessed their families fail them countless times.  What was supposed to be “home” was not home to them.  As the Maori people begin to plan their new construction and design plans for their new sacred house.  I found Toko’s description of all they’d incorporate into the house to be especially poignant.  He observes: “Some of the patterns and designs followed the old ones, these being already part of ourselves.  They were etched on the memory and were patterns of the stars and the sea, of the fish and the birds and plants, and also of learning and relationships, conflict, sorrow, and joy.  But there were new patterns too, of flooding and fire, roads and machines, oneness and strength, and work and growth” (143-44).  What I think is so unique about Toko’s observation here is that he says that they are able to apply all that is good from their old stories and “patters” to this new home, but they also recognize new things that they have endured an encountered.

 Roimata, especially, seems to own that which has been dealt to her.  She is such a strong woman, as we saw in the first section, and she loves her people and her family, but Grace allows Roimata to still recognize her new home as a genuine one while allowing her to feel pain.  She is not necessarily remedied in the end, either.  But she stays strong because she recognizes the pain she feels and faces it head on: “At another level was pain.  We had not forgotten what had happened, what had been done.  We could not ignore the falling rock, the leveling of land, the arrival of materials, and the new yellow colour of the sea” (152). 

This really makes sense when sized up with the people I met at New Beginnings in Kentucky.  They felt, understood, and recognized their pain, but they decided to make New Beginnings a home.  All the while, pain doesn’t have to be fixed, rather it just lingers and becomes a part of the edifice, the etchings on the walls.

Scallops To Go: I'm Eating On The Road

            I remember in class discussing what is part of our literary lineage.  Most books I have read imprinted something of significance, but what is engrained, as the greatest influences are On The Road and Walden.  Jack Kerouac and Henry David Thoreau, respectively, monumentally altered my mind in a plethora of ways.  Both have supplied my shaping of an aversion for conformity and an instinct to be free.  It might seem cliché because we all have to conform, like taking classes, and all long to be free, as liberated people, but it’s different if the fight is deliberate.  Warding off external influences is difficult, but Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau, 182).  Now to “live deliberately” or “front only the essential facts of life” may seem wide open, but it affected me to simplify my life.  Thoreau spoke to me and I listened; by not letting my life get “fretted away by detail” and not worrying about superfluous and superficial things (183).  Kerouac has lit a different fire; his road trip as Sal Paradise, absorbing the vibrant life of Dean Moriarity is how I interpret myself.  The dichotomy of Sal and Dean is stark, so is my life’s spectrum.  Sometimes I am unpredictably impulsive and truly wild like Sal, other times I am reserved and reflective as Sal, the narrator of the novel.  I have internalized this wonderful book and integrated it with how to experience life and accept my prodigal nature.  On The Road and Walden have made a tremendous impact on my thought patterns and perspective; they have afforded me with a homeland that engenders freedom, spontaneity, and aversion for conformity.  This foundation, this homeland, this duo of books make all the difference for how I interpret the past and envision the future.

            Patricia Grace builds her own homeland, New Zealand, through the depiction of the Maori community.  She conveys a struggle of geographic and physical homelands through a diverse multitude of POV story telling. The physical description of the land in Roimata is significant because it points to larger scenes.  Grace writes, “this piece of land is the family land of the Tamihanas. Our houses stand close together on this, the papakainga, and they window the neatened curve of sea. Towards this curve we pitch our eyes constantly, tides of eyes rolling in reverse action to the sea” (Grace, 15).  The beginning of the novel posits themes through the typified depiction of the physical setting. The connotation or interpretation I felt and had was: “the family land of the Tamihanas” means legacy and tradition by means of relating character to land, “our houses stand close together” or communal fortitude, “neatened curve of the sea” conveys a picturesque landscape and a theme of natural order ( the sea neatens or organizes the land).  When Grace says about the Pacific Ocean, “we pitch our eyes constantly, tide of eyes rolling in reverses action to the sea” she implies multiple things.  She is saying that we, the Maori community, soar above and admire the sea or nature’s control, but loathe the incoming tide of eyes who interrupt the natural order of things.  This brings up the conflict of sacred lands and tourist attractions (reverse actions).

I love the imagery of “scalloped edges of the land” it takes my mind to the perfectly formed shell of a scallop (15).  I infer a land of smooth pinkish sand and rounded edges because of the timelessness of the Pacific Ocean.  It has been said that the Pacific Ocean “has no memory” and its effect should be of constant impression (Shawshank Redemption).

Sharing is Caring

    We are “service-learners.”  We go out into the world and we make the unfortunate more fortunate.  We improve the lives of others.  We help them be more like us.  Our presence is a service to the needy. 
    I don’t believe any of that, and I do not believe that there are many students at Loyola who do believe it.  However, it is a common mindset that those people who are blessed enough to have the time and resources to spare in devotion to other people are doing a “service” to the objects of their efforts. 
    Working with the boys at Acts 4 Youth is not a service.  If anything, I am humbled and blessed and taught by the rambunctious eighth graders who surpass me in energy and inquiry every time we meet.  I am not there to help them because I do not think that is what they need.  Boys at that age just want somebody who will listen to their stories.  Let me tell you, they have some stories.
    The first thing I heard out of one of their mouths was a question posed at the director of Acts 4 Youth: “Do you have a mistress?”  He was (of course!) referring to a show he had seen where men have mistresses and then kill their wives.  I didn’t laugh (though, I’ll admit that I wanted to) and I didn’t judge.  I kind of wanted to ask what the show was called—but he dropped the subject without waiting for an answer.  He had gotten a reaction which was all he needed.  The second boy I met was doing vocabulary homework so I asked him if he could tell me what an antonym was.  He couldn’t believe that a college student didn’t know how to recognize something an eighth grader could do in his sleep.  I’m an English major—of course I know what an antonym is, but this boy was sitting sullenly in his seat for a solid ten minutes without talking to me before he felt confident enough to speak.  He didn’t need someone he didn’t know coming into his space and telling him how to do his homework, he just needed somebody to make him feel like he was the smartest boy in the room.  And once he started talking to me, I had trouble getting him to listen to the teacher, to me, to anybody else.  All he wanted was to be heard.
    The Maori people neither wanted nor needed an invading culture to come into their land with their money and their machines in an attempt to “improve” the landscape or the lives of the people who had lived there for generations.  Roimata, Hemi, and their family held their ground when the “Dollarmen” came and when the machines came and when the flood came, they finally spoke up.  But they could not be heard.  Even though the flood seemed deliberate and Toko’s death appeared to be linked to their presence and the fire was presumably caused by the Dollarman or his crew, nobody would acknowledge these very real concerns.  They were brushed off.  The natives who had established their lives on the shore were seen as the parasites rather than the invaders who had turned Roimata, Mary, Toko, Hemi, Manu, James, and Tangi’s lives upside-down. 
    It is possible that the British believed that they were helping the Maori by making their lives more modern.  It’s unlikely, but possible.  But they never listened to the Maori to consider what was at risk by violating the land that was so sacred to them and manipulating the water that was a way of life to have the opposite effect.  It’s possible that modernization was a “service” that the Dollarmen were offering to the Maori.  But is it service if there are strings attached?  If their motives were selfish?
    Toko catches a big fish and his family shares that fish with their entire family—despite the fact that they were not wealthy and this fish was a rare catch.  Toko questions this approach, but Hemi says, “you didn’t eat food until it had been shared, especially if it was from the sea” (53).  The earth is kind enough to share with the people; the people are kind enough to share with their people. 
    When I was working on vocab with my student, the word we were looking for was “bountiful.”  All he had to do was fill in the blank.  The sentence was along the lines of “a family shares their ___________ food with the less fortunate.”  I was asking leading questions and thought I had the perfect lead-in when I said, “You know how people who have a ton of stuff share the extra with other people?” And my student humbled me by giving me the same quizzical look he had worn when I asked what an antonym was.  According to him, people don’t just share when they have enough to go around—people share because that’s what people do.  We give ourselves to others with no strings attached and no selfish motives.

Target and Agent Perspectives on the Promotion of Justice in Homelands

The best part about reading Letter from Birmingham Jail and The Service of Faith and Promotion of Justice in congruence with one another was the juxtaposition of perspective.  Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach comes from a position of esteem, respect, and whether we like to admit it or not, social and, yes, racial hierarchy.  King, although verily equal in intellect, wit, and rhetoric to Kolvenbach, is articulating social ideals and arguing for the implementation of just practices, like Kolvenbach, but writes from the perspective of one representing the target group.  Thus, we as readers, must understand, that King’s rhetoric and appeal takes on a different meaning than Kolvenbach’s. 

Both discuss “home” in some sense no doubt.  Kolvenbach largely discusses a “home” or “identity” that is well established.  His propositions regarding the promotion of justice in Jesuit higher education aim to strengthen a homeland that already exists (but does not yet wholly exist, in his opinion).  In regard to this bolstering of one’s homeland or identity, Kolvenbach says: “…The faith dimension was too often presumed and left implicit, as if our identity as Jesuits were enough.  Some rushed headlong towards the promotion of justice without much analysis or reflection and with only occasional reference to the justice of the Gospel.  They seemed to consign the service of faith to a dying past. […] The Lord has patiently been teaching us to serve faith that does justice in a more integral way” (28-29).  This very idea of “a faith that does justice” is the idea that Kolvenbach uses to attribute meaning to the homeland that is Jesuit higher education.  He revises it—he, in a sense, draws up a new blueprint, a new schema, for this home.

King, being, as I mentioned before, of the target group, needs to start at square one.  He must, at a very basic level, tell his audience of white clergymen: “Hey, this is my home too.”  Before getting on par with Kolvenbach—at a place where he can recognize his homeland and attribute further meaning to it—he must ensure that his homeland really is his.  King believes that his home cannot be his if all people do not recognize it.  He says: “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states.  I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (1).  Like Kolvenbach, he makes a call for a stronger implementation of justice in his homeland, but unlike Kolvenbach, he asks for a sort of justice, which, at a very fundamental level, gives him a homeland.

The two men believe that home and/or one’s identity necessitates the incorporation and promotion of justice.  It is perspective that separates the two.  Having agency (like Kolvenbach) allows an individual to recognize their homeland and call on others to attribute meaning to it.  As a target, though, one may wish for the promotion of justice, but it comes from a different place, a place of suppression, in which one must ask for the right to claim their homeland before asking for anything else.

“The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice”

Catlin Castan

“The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice”

In Kolvenbach’s text, “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice”, Kolvenbach asserts the importance of the union of faith and justice,” claiming that it is, “central to the mission of the entire Society” (23). More specifically, Kolvenbach explores the promotion of justice within the educational apostolate. He includes an excerpt from Father Ignacio Ellacuria’s convocational address at Santa Clara University. Father Ellacuria states that it is important, “to be a voice for those who do not possess the academic qualifications to promote and legitimate their rights”(30). This desire of advocacy is particularly relevant in today’s society as a result of immigration. Kolvenbach notes that, “thousands of immigrants arrive from everywhere…,”(31) thus increasing the necessity to intervene. Most immigrants arrive to America unable to speak English, this creates a linguistic barrier that not only prevents them from being able to advocate for themselves, but also prevents them from appearing to possess academic qualifications. Other immigrants leave their native countries and come to America in order to receive an education; these immigrants deserve to be advocated for.

Later Kolvenbach calls attention to a new social divide in society. He writes: “the United States struggles with new social divisions aggravated by “the digital divide”(31). This separation exists, “ between those with access to the world of technology and those left out”(31). Although this is a recent issue, the “digital divide” is affecting class, race, and socio-economic “differences”(31). These effects do not only pose a difference in an individual’s quality of life, but “has its root cause in chronic discrepancies in the quality of education”(31).  In essence, the technological gap that now exists within society must be closed in order to provide justice to education.