There is a Garden In Her Face

This is my entry for creating "some sort of vizualisation" for the poem Cherry Ripe by Thomas Campion.

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April

Alicia Ostriker
April
The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing thier e-mail petitions
marching with their satiric signs
singing their we shall overcome songs
posting thier pungent twitters and blogs
believing in a better world
for no good reason
I envy them
said the old woman

The seasons go round they
go round and around
said the tulip
dancing among her friends
in the brown bed in the sun
in the April breeze
under a maple canopy
that was also dancing
only with greater motions
casting greater shadows
and the grass
hardly stirring

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon
sniffing this way and that
how gratifying the cellos of the river
the tubas of the traffic
the trombones
of the leafing elms with the legato
of my rivals' piss at thier feet
and the leftover meat and grease
singning alo0ng in all the wastebaskets

Voice Behind The Character

When I read the article, by Anthony DePalma, about whom Huckleberry was inspired by. I immediately thought about voice actors. The article is, after all, called, "A Scholar Finds Huck Finn's Voice in Twain's Writing About a Black Youth" . I specifically thought of the voice actress Tara Strong, who plays various characters. She has played characters where her voice and personality helped create the entire character. There could be drawings of the character, or an animation with a storyline, but she helped complete the entire character by placing her voice, allowing the character to stand out. The , "10 year old black servant" Twain met just before starting his book, is not different to Tara Strong. Instead of placing his voice into a character on screen, his personality resounds in Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn is ,"the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker" just like the 10 year old boy, who gave him his voice.

Mammy

I remember when I was in elementary school, I use to watch all the old cartoons that were created way before I was born. I loved them, I found them entertaining, Bugs Bunny, Dumbo, Mickey Mouse, all of them. Last school year I found all those cartoons on YouTube, and what shocked me was that I did not realize how racist a lot of them are, when I was little. I never saw it as racist when I was little, I saw the dumb white hunter from bugs bunny exactly same way I saw the dumb African American hunter. I think the reason why I see those things as racist is because I have been taught to. When I hear someone say, "the Dumb Blond man" I think nothing of it, but when someone says, "The Dumb African American man" I immediately judge that person as racist. Off course I realize those cartoons were racists and were meant to make fun of the various non-Caucasian races.

Black face appears in a lot of the cartoons. Bugs Bunny even goes in Black face several times. People enjoyed it, and were fascinated by this form of entertainment. Even Mark Twain called it "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show." But Mark Twain does see African Americans as humans. He shows this with his character Jim. Even though Jim has a lot of stereotypical characteristics, he is also shown to be smart, think on his own, and a good friend to Huck Finn.
White people saw nothing wrong with Black Face; they enjoyed the imitation of "black man" dance and singing. But this is not because they were ignorant or blind to racism; they were purely racist and making fun of blacks. This is clearly seen by Court, a white man who posed as Jim for Mark Twains book, "he would jam his little black wool cap over his head, shoot out his lips and mumble coon talk.’ And when I look at Kemble's representations of Jim, I don't see a human being, but this same caricature. "

Yes people were racist, but even Mark Twain, a man who was entertained by Black Face, saw that racism was wrong, and that African Americans were equal to Whites. Huckleberry goes through the same transformation were he realizes that 'Jim is a Black man who has the mind of a white man' therefore showing we are the same.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/minstrl.html

Can't Change The Past, Learn From It, Change the Present

During the winter Holiday we were assigned to read the book, "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. Although I did note that the "N" word and the "I" word popped up several times, I just thought of it as the way people spoke back then. Off course these two words were racist back then, and they are racist now, but as Mark Twain states at the beginning of the book, he uses the language used by people he is writing about, "The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech."

A new edition of the book, is planned to replace the "N" word by the word slave, as shown in the article from the Guardian . When my sister first told me about this during winter break my first reaction was, "What? No, they can't do that! Authors chose specific words to explain their ideas or to pass on a story. Why would they change the words of Mark Twain?". I realize these words are racist, but I don't feel that teachers need to be afraid to teach it. It’s part of history, and we need to be able to understand the mistakes made in the past, so that they will not be repeated. I completely agree with Churchwell, a senior lecturer from the University of East Anglia, who says that, “fault lies with the teaching, not the book." which is true. The book is not teaching people how to be racist, but how to move away from being afraid of something unknown. "You can't say 'I'll change Dickens so it is compatible with my teaching method'" it’s not right, and it takes away part of the idea the author was trying to express. They are ideas formed, and are locked memories of the past, "Twain's books are not just literary documents but historical documents, and that word is totemic because it encodes all of the violence of slavery."

'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', is a book to learn from, there is a moral to the story, and even a transformation to the lead character Huck Finn, "The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society."

The past can hurt, but so can the present, the only way we can learn from them is if we know why we were wrong. Literature points things out in the world that we may or may not have realized, it’s not something to be afraid of.

Geff Barton, "It seems depressing that we are so squeamish that we can't credit youngsters with seeing the context for texts. Are we going to teach a sanitized version of The Merchant of Venice? What I would want to do is to explore issues of how language changes in context and culture,".