It's late and I should be sleeping, but I just started re-reading Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in preparation for this project, and it's provoked a post. The first lines of this book helped me more clearly pinpoint the energy I feel in this work. I wanted to share:
"They say it came first from America, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú--generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse or the Doom of the New World. Also called fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite "discovering" the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphillitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral's very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've been in the shit ever since. Santo Domigo might be fukú's Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not."
~ Junot Diaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao I offer this up for thought and discussion. Do you consider yourself a child of Santo Domingo? What do you know about this idea of fukú? Is there any credence to such a thought?
Monday, April 4, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
An explanation
If I'm going to name this PROJECT AMERICAN BELLYBUTTON, it seems like I should give a sort of explanation....
As I entered year three at Warren and decided to go for this Lilly Grant, I number of ideas for travel and adventure entered my head. I pondered India to delve into my love of yoga and spiritual questing. I considered Argentina to study tango and the interplay of Italian and Spanish histories that exists within that culture. I thought about a cross-country trip within the United States to explore history of the Native peoples of North America. Yet in the end, I decided I wanted to go to the source of American history so as to gain insight into the American society in which I live and teach. My first internal question became what is the source of our creation story? Every culture has a story they pass down generation after generation that explains society's origins...as I ran through the versions of American history I learned growing up in the Midwest, I kept coming back to,
"In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue"....
Oh yes, he most definitely did arrive in the "New World", which was quickly named Hispaniola, though it had been occupied for over 5,000 years by the Taino, who called their homeland Quisqueya, Haití, or Bohío. What ensued following Columbus's arrival is nothing short of the nexus of American history...our metaphorical bellybutton and the subject of my questing, questioning, and exploration over the next few months. I want to understand the source of our history with the hope that this will give me insight into the ways in which we choose our identities today.
This will be a participatory blog--I want your input into my question-making process. Are there any questions related to the story of how we all got here that you've always wanted to ask? Please post them if so.
As I entered year three at Warren and decided to go for this Lilly Grant, I number of ideas for travel and adventure entered my head. I pondered India to delve into my love of yoga and spiritual questing. I considered Argentina to study tango and the interplay of Italian and Spanish histories that exists within that culture. I thought about a cross-country trip within the United States to explore history of the Native peoples of North America. Yet in the end, I decided I wanted to go to the source of American history so as to gain insight into the American society in which I live and teach. My first internal question became what is the source of our creation story? Every culture has a story they pass down generation after generation that explains society's origins...as I ran through the versions of American history I learned growing up in the Midwest, I kept coming back to,
"In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue"....
Oh yes, he most definitely did arrive in the "New World", which was quickly named Hispaniola, though it had been occupied for over 5,000 years by the Taino, who called their homeland Quisqueya, Haití, or Bohío. What ensued following Columbus's arrival is nothing short of the nexus of American history...our metaphorical bellybutton and the subject of my questing, questioning, and exploration over the next few months. I want to understand the source of our history with the hope that this will give me insight into the ways in which we choose our identities today.
This will be a participatory blog--I want your input into my question-making process. Are there any questions related to the story of how we all got here that you've always wanted to ask? Please post them if so.
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