Genre Blog: Drown

A common theme that is present within Drown is change. The narrator begins the story talking about how things used to be with his friend Beto, "Days were spent in the mall or out in the parking lot playing stickball, but our nights were what we waited for (Diaz 92)." The narrator was used to spending days with his best friend who was two years older than him, but when it came time for Beto to go off to college the narrator wasn't sure how to deal with that and what was happening between the two of them. The narrator also isn't sure how he should change his life. He's not sure what choice he should make whether it is going into the army, staying on his path that he is on now, or going to college like Beto. I can relate to the feeling of change that the narrator is experiencing. The future can bring a lot of change and that can create a lot of stress. A lot of people experience the fear of change due to future things. There's always and internal debate of where to go to college, if college is the right path, or so many other options that can be considered. It's also hard to go from being in a place where you know everyone to a place where you know no one.
The quote that was stated above is important to this text because even beyond that quote the narrator in reminiscing almost the whole time. Although it's not directly stated, he is realizing that things aren't the same nor will they ever be. It seems that Beto has outgrown their old ways of selling drugs and committing crimes. He has moved on to being a good student at college and has gotten out of the city where he grew up and I think that's what changed Beto. The narrator doesn't really know if he wants to leave his city, but Beto is a good example that if someone can leave, the path they take will be better than one that will be taken by staying in that city. Beto said, "I don't know how you can do it, he said to me. I would just find me a job anywhere and just go (Diaz 91)." For the narrator, though, I don't think he can really just up and go like Beto. He has to worry about his mother. He doesn't have a father around so he feels like he needs to the man of the house and make the money for his mother. The easiest thing for the narrator to do to get money is sell drugs and steal things because that's what he grew up doing. As much as the narrator doesn't want change, I think the change he fears most is leaving his mother alone to change himself. At the end of the story where she tells the narrator to check the windows makes it seem like the narrator himself isn't the only one committing crime in that neighborhood, and to leave his mother alone with that kind of activities going on has got to be scary. I think this does connect to real life situations, there are plenty of kids/young adults who grow up in more poverty stricken areas without a father and they feel it is there job to care of their mother and it plays out just like this story. They could go to college to get themselves out of that situation and better themselves, but when it comes down to making that change they feel obligated to stay home to take care of their family by making money anyway they can and protecting them as well.


Díaz, Junot. Drown. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Print.

Beloved Literary Analysis

The theme I chose in Uncle Tom's Cabin was religion because it was so predominant, but when reading Beloved the theme of religion was almost nonexistent. I think the reason for religion not having such a large role in Beloved was because Morrison doesn't have a motive behind her book. She wants to tell the raw, real truths of slavery and the lasting impact it made on so many African Americans. The few connections that can be made to religion within Beloved is Baby Suggs. She would preach to the community at her in the woods "'Listen here, girl,' he told her, 'you can't quit the Word. It's given to you to speak. You can't quit the word, I don't what all happen to you.' (Morrison 105)" which makes her seem like Uncle Tom for a little bit. She has that God-like stature when she is mentioned in the novel, whereas Uncle Tom was straight out depicted in words as "“a sort of patriarch in religious matters (Stowe 27)."
It's pretty obvious that religion isn't a very big theme within Beloved, but why? I think that it has something to do with what Jeanna Fuston-White was talking about within her article. "Beloved represents a working out of subjectivity through the representation of history," rather than what Uncle Tom's Cabin stands for. Morrison indirectly shows that almost no amount of religion can force you to overcome what has happened to a person. Hypothetically, if Sethe were a very religious person, I believe that the story or plot line would play out almost the same. Sethe is essentially scarred and wasn't like Uncle Tom who grew up with fairly decent slave owners who taught him unshakable faith. Sethe had a terrible upbringing with no education at all, let alone a religious education. "Morrison's narrative work poses a strong theoretical challenge to the Modernist tradition of knowledge, reason, language, history, and identity.(Fuston-White 461)." Although Beloved has an inconceivable, almost crazy scenario it does a great job of telling the truths and realities of African American slaves.
Although Uncle Tom's Cabin was recognizably one of the great novels, a lot of reviewers will argue that it embraces white-washing the true stories that did happen to slaves at that time " It is not only a white intellectual tradition that has required the black experience of slavery to be viewed through a white lens (Fuston-White 461)". Beloved doesn't do that, and if it included as much religion as Uncle Tom's Cabin it would. In Uncle Tom's Cabin all the slaves on the Shelby plantation knew about and were so passionate about religion because it was taught to them by white people. If it weren't for the white people within the book the slaves probably wouldn't even believe in a religion. Even within Uncle Tom's Cabin the solution for the white slave owner to deal with misbehaving slaves is to teach them religion, "Miss Ophelia busied herself very earnestly on Sundays, teaching Topsy the catechism (Stowe 213), forcing their religion on them. I also think that the absence of religion within Beloved was a literary move by Morrison. "Morrison found that American slave museums represented slavery through works of handicraft made by slaves, rather than with chains or restraining devices (Fuston-White 463)" Overall I think Morrison was really passionate about telling the real, sometimes even rare, stories that were a result of slavery and that's what drove her to peal away any white influence, namely religion, within Beloved.

Fuston, Jeanna. "From the Seen to the Told": The Construction of Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's "Beloved." African American Review, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall2002, pp. 461-473. EBSCOhost

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Mineola, NY: Dover Pubublications, Inc., 2011. Print

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Paris: C. Bourgois éditeur, 2008. Print.

Beloved Contemporary Connections

An issue within the United States that has somewhat passed, is the election, but just because the election is over doesn't mean anything because Donald Trump is our new president. The election has caused many disputes and riots among many racially diverse groups.  A study done by Philip Klinkner from Hamilton College analyzed a survey done by the American National Election Study (ANES) to determine what this past election was about and the title says it all, "It’s Not the Economy, Stupid: Why Race, Religion, and Immigration “Trump” the Economy in the 2016 Election." Kinkner looked at the responses to several questions, "those who express more resentment toward African Americans, those who think the word 'violent' describes Muslims well, and those who believe that President Obama is a Muslim... (Klinkner)." Klinkner found that those who fit that criteria or answered with those anwers were usually had a higher support for Trump (Klinkner). "For example, moving from the least to the most resentful view of African Americans increases from Trump by 44 points, those who think that Obama is Muslim (54 percent of all Republicans) are 24 points more favorable to Trump, and those who think the word 'violent' describes Muslims extremely well are about 13 points more pro-Trump...(Klinkner)" He also found that attitudes about legal immigrations did not show favoritism towards either candidate. The everyday person was under the impression that the state of the economy was what would put either candidate over the other, but through this analytical article, it shows that the contributing factors were race, religion, and immigration. This connects to my theme of religion because people are discriminated constantly just because of what they believe in. In today's world Uncle Tom's Cabin would be ridiculed for such a religious presence, so many people are just against having any type of religion because those religious views get mixed in with politics and today no two people can agree to disagree. This event relates with Beloved because it shows how race is still playing a role in America so long after the abolishment of slavery. It also related to my overall theme of religion because it shows a different take on it compared to my previous blogs, it shows how people who fully believe in their faith are discriminated against.

Another article that pulls in both religion and race is about a letter that Iran's former President wrote to Trump, who recently had an executive order that banned travel from several countries. In his letter Ahmadinejad wrote about "the spread of  discriminatory, racist and profit-driven attitudes in human relations, as well as expansion of false boundaries and causing rifts among the people (Sepahvand)". The former President also used the fact that society is changing and becoming more accepting everyday and by placing the travel ban its just hindering the progress of an ever changing society (Sepahvand). This article related well to Beloved because Sethe, Denver and then Beloved are very isolated from society after what Sethe did, but not everyone in their community fully understood what Sethe had been through and that's what cut them off from everyone else. It wasn't until Denver reached out to them that they saw how much help she really needed.


Sepahvand, Mehdi. "Iran’s Ex-President Writes to Trump of Racial Discrimination." Trend Capital.English, Feb 26, 2017, Business Premium Collection.

Klinkner, Philip. "It’s Not the Economy, Stupid: Why Race, Religion, and Immigration “Trump” the Economy in the 2016 Election." ResearchGate. Hamilton College, June 2016. Web. 3 May 2017.

Critical Commentary Beloved

In the article "From the Seen to the Told": The Construction of Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved the author Jeanna Fuston-White talks about how in the novel the characters break out of the confines that is built by society because of their race, "Morrison's characters, who have been rendered voiceless and helpless by their society, speak, command reason, and demonstrate agency (Fuston-White 462)." She also discusses how Morrison wrote the book in a way that differentiates between "seen" and "told". Fuston-White says, "Therefore, she creates a new way of knowing and of telling the story that empowers the powerless, and that recalls the 'disremembered and unaccounted for,' those 'Sixty Million and more' who died as captives in the Middle Passage, never making it into American slavery (463)." In this article I think the author is analyzing Beloved as a representative of those who didn't make it through the middle passage and not solely Sethe's lost child.
This article adds to the understanding of the novel because it brings a whole new vantage point. I read several different takes on the book and quite a few stated that Beloved could represent the route to America and the other well-known hardships of African Americans, but in class we didn't really discuss that take on Beloved's character. It also helps to better understand the situation that Sethe was in when she decided to commit infanticide, I've never heard or read anything about slaves or previous slaves doing anything like that so at first it shocked me, but after reading "From the Seen to the Told": The Construction of Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved it provokes thought about if this was an actual reality for some African Americans. Personally, I never really thought about that while reading the book, I was too much in shock to even think past what Sethe had just done. It also provokes thought on what other horrific events or thoughts could have gone through slaves or previous slaves minds whether it was on their way over to America or after they had been freed or escaped. I really do like the analysis of Fuston-White, she says that Beloved is a thought provoking book, but to me, her article brings you to think about what she's saying, but then you're drawn into thinking about the novel and the characters and the events.

Fuston, Jeanna. "From the Seen to the Told": The Construction of Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's "Beloved." African American Review, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall2002, pp. 461-473. EBSCOhost.

Symposium Blog

The symposium presentation that I will be discussing is the one about biofeedback and anxiety. I thought overall the presentation was a really good one along with the idea. Anxiety gets to all of us, 6 million to be exact. It's good to have coping mechanisms that aren't always drug related. In extreme cases medications can be used with biofeedback mechanisms to help relieve the anxiety. I was also apart of the experiment done, but I was in the control group. I would have like to have been in the groups that learned biofeedback exercises because who doesn't want ways to deal with stress an anxiety. I wished that they would have given more examples to the audience to teach us, but also to other visually help us see what the exercises were and how they could possibly help us deal with stress. Their results were that those with the biofeedback mechanisms did in fact have less anxiety when reading embarrassing stories. I did find it interesting that they mentioned that theater members could act not embarrassed, but their vital signs showed that they were experiencing anxiety.