Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Blog #8 Suheir Hammad's "First Writing Since"- BREE MOTLEY !

This video was very emotional. I could tell that she was building up a lot of anger in her life in her life and it seems as if all the  anger was post 9/11.What made her poem so affective and appealing was that she used ethos, pathos, and logos. She used the emotion sense by making the audience empathize with her issues and problems dealing with race and stereotypes and how hard it is for her to live her life normally.When she was speaking about how her brother was in the Navy and how he was Arabic also and how that equaled double trouble and when people assumed that she knew the hijackers on 9/11 and they assumed that she represented all of the Arabic and Muslim people, that really affected me because I use to have those same issues. Being African American I sometimes get that stereotype of being loud, obnoxious, and "ghetto". I totally understood why Suheir was angry , because its not fair to get singled out and get judged based on what others from your same race has done. I feel like just because a select few make decisions and sometimes do things to harm others they don't represent the entire group of people and that just because certain people look alike the shouldn't be grouped as a whole, because everyone is different. I could tell that the audience was moved and they were on the same page with her when she said, " We didn't vilify the white men when they bombed Oklahoma". That's because the media chooses who they want to pick on. they usually choose minorities to make out to be the bad guys. which isn't fair at all! She also made the crowd emotional not in a since of sadness but in a sense of anger when she said " when we talk about the holy book, hooded man", we don't ever speak of the KKK. She is absolutely right and it just goes to show that once again minorities are made out to be the bad guys ! All in all this was a great poem and it was very affective. it made me think, and it also made me realize how corrupt this world actually is !

1 comment:

  1. This is why I brought up ideas of essentialism on Monday--Hammad is calling attention to how the dominant culture will often assign characteristics to a particular group for the purpose of vilification, or ostracism, and that it never goes against the dominant culture, such as with McVeigh, or the KKK. Spivak is brilliant on this point in her work "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Hammad is also quite brilliant on this point, and in much simpler language, which is very difficult to do. I never teach an understanding of identity without her :-).

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