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The New and Old

          I think it was Jasmine that so demonized the characteristics of “old India”. It spoke of superstition, of futile pursuits, and of a lack of agency. The “old India”, the recently postcolonial India lacked a motivation to it. The “new India” as it were, thought to be prime for a younger generation of rationalists, working in “productive”, timely jobs like tech and medicine. It was believed that the two were incompatible and one could not exist without the vanquish of the other. But I would argue that Dharma’s Love and Longing in Bombay , from what we have read views the India of old in a much more romantic light. Can it be no wonder that the very solution to Jago’s problem is an embrace of the ancient and spiritual? Jago’s apparent conversion then seems to be the driving force of this excerpt and, in turn, an attempt at blending or at least fostering a camaraderie between the “new” and “old” India’s.         ...
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Spiral of Time in Potiki

Potiki is a story focusing on a Maori community fighting to maintain their autonomy from hungry land developers who are desperately trying to coerce the Maori people off of their sacred land. The author, Patricia Grace, constructs the story through a patchwork of memories, where different events, different times, and different viewpoints come together in like a mosaic.   Grace disrupts the linear narrative and describes time in a cyclical way, a never-ending spiral. Rather than segregating time the “past time” of the ancestors from the “present time” of the community, there is a new way of describing time. I found “now-time” to be a fascinating concept, where there’s this spiral temporality where past and future time are narratively experienced. The concept of “sacred time” was more challenging to understand, where the narrative of Christ and the and the ancient myth of Mäui align.   The spiral, like kowhaiwhai, signifies repetition with a difference. Toko...
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Kisses in the Nederends and Silver Linings

Nathan Galloway 10/23/19 EN376 Dr. Ellis Silver Linings in “Kisses in the Nederends”             The driving force behind the plot of Epeli Hau’ofa’s book  Kisses in the Nederends is the pain and suffering that Oilei Bomboki experiences as a result of his multiple anal fistulas. Hau’ofa initially presents Oilei’s experiences as largely negative. However, by the conclusion of the story, Oilei has been transformed into a new man because of the trials he has gone through.               In the first half of the book, the experiences that Oilei has are harmful to both himself and his community. His farting and pain result in arguments between his wife and himself where he threatens her viciously. "I promise you, you dried up old bag, if anyone outside these walls hears of this, I'll wring your fucking neck four fucking times. Do you hear, me?" (Hau...
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