Sunday, October 19, 2008

woman hollering creek pt. 1

I. My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn

Once again we have multi-narration going on. or at least i think so. the first few sub-chapters or stories are told by a girl with many sisters, rachel i think. and then in "mericans" the protagonist is a boy with many brothers. i thought it was interesting the difference in the style of writing from "my lucy friend who smells like corn" with its run on, super-descriptive, slang sentences to the more mature style of "tepeyac". 
Both i love. after reading the first two pages i felt as if Cisneros was once a little person, sitting on my shoulder, commenting on my childhood. she talks about things that i thought nobody else did, like scratching your friends mosquito bites when they're not looking so they itch. who does that? i thought i was the only one. 

II. One Holy Night

"tepeyac" neatly connects the last story with the next. i noticed how at the beginning of the book, people are named by association to their smell, hair colour, appearance, demeanor etc which is perfect for these stories. when you are young you can't remember all the big peoples names, especially all those aunts and uncles. so you make mental notes of what they look like and then at least you remember, well, what they look like. 
another theme that popped up in both stories is age and time. in "eleven" rachel describes turning eleven but feels three when she cries and four when she can't speak up for herself. there are so many social constructs that go with age. people expecting that you are eleven and not five anymore even though that is sometimes how you feel. and then in "one holy night", chaq/boy baby/chato philosophically says that 'the past and the future are the same thing'. im not sure if i agree with this but as i look on my past, not yesterday past but maybe four years ago past, that all feels the same. 

i haven't decided how to interpret this book from our chicano study perspective, i think its to early on in the book for me. but what i did notice is that i think lucy is chicano and the rachel is not (from rachel wanting to be as tan as lucy in the first chapter).

in my opinion, our readings in this class have gotten better and better. probably going to finish this one tonight.

2 comments:

heather said...

I totally agree and definitely resonated with the childish ways of thinking acting and speaking that are portrayed, especially in my lucy friend who smells like corn and eleven.

Probably the best part was "Have you ever eated dog food?" It made me laugh and reminded me of those silly childhood past tense mistakes such as eated, talkded, brung/brang/broughted etc...what silly words, but everyone said them! So, no, I don't think you were the only one who scratched your friends mosquito bites either.

Valerie said...

I think something we haven't talked about really is a theme of loss of innocence in this novel. We're all commenting on the child's point of view, the honesty of it, and we need to connect it to the later losses of innocence that occur in the novel. The girl who gets pregnant at 13 to a "Mayan God" loses her innnocence and must suddenly, brutally become a woman. Later on in the novel there are no descriptions from childrens' points of view...the innocence and goodness of children is overcome by the adult world.