Remnants

I can smell it now. The soggy, wet, and earthy smell of dead oak leaves lying on the ground, spreading their fragrance in the musty air. It was in this time that my class, English 353, had begun and I was walking around campus wondering what to write for my first blog. I felt a sense of freedom I had not felt before. My mind was set on the goal of graduating the semester and moving out into the “career world.” I was also excited in anticipation for the creative ability to express my thoughts in words through the medium of an English class. Certainly, blogging was something that I had never experienced before. Maybe it was the open-ended mindset of most Internet users, “editorial-free”. While most of us students in this class agree that it isn't quite the case with the class, there is more seriousness to our writings than just a text message, or ranting in a comment box.

The best writing I believe is instinctive, it goes straight to the jugular. No need to double back and check if everything is in line. This only hurts the process. However, editing is a valuable process, something that can be exercised at a later time. But once the creative edge begins to take hold, the writer is driven to point, a place where he or she must execute their given purpose. Perhaps this is the reason of An Artist of the Floating World. The book, written by Robert Burton, tells about the journeys of different authors who not only write on works about the floating world, but experience it as well.

The stories vary tremendously: from the villages of Africa, to the open plains of American prairie land. The thread that ties these authors together is their role as authors of the floating world. They are prime examples of people caught between these two worlds and their struggle to find a home.

In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel, Jasmine, the story follows the journey of a young Indian widow who leaves her home in India and comes to reside in the United States. Because of the strict cultural and political repressions of her home country against women, Jasmine feels driven to leave and make a life of her own. Going against the wishes of her parents, she leaves on a boat bound for the United States, but finds trouble quickly. Upon her arrival in the States, she is confronted by a rapist and ultimately kills the man. As the turn of events begin to unfold, Jasmine finds that longer she is away from her birthplace in India, the more estranged she feels. Contrary to her plan to find a home and a platform for her voice, Jasmine finds that the U.S. is also home to prejudice.

Nothing seems to be going well for Jasmine as she finds herself living with a handicapped man, Bud, who seems to do nothing but drain the very life out of her. Not only is Bud physically handicapped, but emotionally as well. This puts a severe strain on Jasmine as she struggles to cope with her sense of misplaced identity. In this place, Jasmine realizes that she is being pulled in two different directions, between two different worlds, and in our case, an “artist of a floating world”. Much of the metamorphosis that she goes through is due in part to remnants of her past. As much as Jasmine tries to escape the suffocating confines of her society, she had been already shaped by it. It is in this realization that she comes to a conclusion that she will always be in a constant state of flux, of ever-evolving state of being. She realizes that the life she lives is not so binary and black-and-white, but a world full of complexities and color. Mukherjee ends her novel with this line, “There is nothing I can do. Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud. I am out the door and in the potholed and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope.”(Mukherjee, 241)

For Bessie Head, author of A Question of Power, her journey takes the reader in and out of sanity, through mind-bending narratives that pull the reader into almost endless directions. The book, based loosely on her own life, reveals her own struggle to make sense out of a world where she feels she has no home. It is in this place, that Elizabeth, Head’s character, finds no point of reference, or “frame”. Part of her framelessness comes even from her own race, the one thing that she could never change. Being born out of wedlock from a white woman and black man, Elizabeth not only struggles with her identity, but is also persecuted for being of mixed race.

Later in Head’s novel, Elizabeth goes to rural Botswana with her son to escape her fears of rejection by society. However, when she arrives, she learns that the tribes of the area do not accept her either, but regard her as an outcast because of her lighter skin. According to the tribespeople, her lighter skin makes her unwanted because of their hatred for the “bushmen” who are heavily despised. Not only is Elizabeth caught in a world with no home, but her inner world as well. Her mind begins to torment her as hallucinations and dreams and visions slowly begin to erode her mental well being. As the turn of events gets worse, Elizabeth begins to fall in to complete mental breakdown, “I cannot seem to absorb anything now, my heart and mind are dead, as though they are not really there.” (Head, 196) Just as Elizabeth sees no end in sight, Sello explains to her why Dan, a brutal personification of the Devil, hurt her and used her for his own gain. He goes on to explain that she has infinitely more power than Dan or anyone else trying to hurt her could attain. Sello tells her that he allowed her to be victimized so that she could help render Dan powerless. In a profound statement of illumination, Sello tells her this, “You will never know your power. I will never let you see it because I know what power does. If the things of the soul are really a question of power, then anyone in possession of power of the spirit could be Lucifer.” (Head, 199) Not only does this statement pinpoint the depth and sincerity of the book, but it is an important lesson for us artists in this floating world to recognize the weight of our power. The question remains though, will we choose to act responsibly with this power? Only time will tell.