Identity Juice

**NOTE: Short story can be found if you click “Read the rest of this entry.” It’s also attached to this following link: “Short Story”

“Complaint and Answer” was interesting to me because I had some trouble determining what I thought was the general theme of the poem. On one end, there was the complaint – the narrator of the poem addressing God about his frustrations, accusing God of betraying him and his people and going against His promise of giving them salvation and blessing them with protection and fortunes against their enemies – and on the other end, there was the answer – God telling the reader that he had no right to complain, as he and his people had long lost their true identities as believers of the faith and weren’t deserving to receive whatever promise they were hoping for, let alone have the right to challenge God himself. At the same time, there was a general idea that neither of these sides was more favorable than the other; rather, the poem was about misunderstanding and misconceptions between two sides. When trying to figure out what the theme was and how exactly to portray it in the form of a creative response, I took a slightly different route. I wanted to focus more on the idea of a child feeling as if he were deserted by his parent, someone whom he admired deeply, without being given an explicit reason and left broken and confused. This was a concept that I found really heartbreaking: that a child could be left alone with no where to turn to, no role models to follow, and no clear path to journey through, all the while struggling with his or her identity during a time of crisis. I’m definitely not saying that the relationship between believers and God is like that, but I know personally that there are moments in the walk of faith when you can really feel as if you’re not worthy of God’s love and blessings, and that maybe God really has deserted you because of who you are. I don’t think this is true, but it’s definitely something that many believers struggle with.

I kind of went on the riskier side and decided to write a short story, an allegory of sorts that revolved around this theme. I haven’t explored any creative writing since the sixth or seventh grade, so it didn’t really hit me until around ten minutes before I started writing that I was finally about to sit down at my laptop and start writing a piece of fiction again. Having the opportunity to do this again really brought back some strong emotional connections to the past for me; I really love writing and I haven’t even thought about creative writing since the end of middle school, I believe. My untitled short story ended up having a sort of interesting synopsis. An unnamed boy, presumably a high school senior, attends his last meeting with the school guidance counselor, an unnamed woman who’s known the boy for the past four years and can read him like a book. Throughout the majority of their meeting, silence fills the room and they play a game of chess, a tradition that they continue at every meeting with each other; the length of the game determines the length of the boy’s story for that particular meeting, and thus the length of the meeting itself. As the story continues, it’s clear why the boy sees the guidance counselor so often; he’s plagued by issues with his family, primarily his father, who just recently left the house for no apparent reason. The boy believes that it’s his own struggle with identity and his own self-image as a disappointment that causes his father to abandon his family, although the counselor disagrees. Before the reader is able to tell why exactly the father left or whether or not a resolution can occur, the chess game is announced as a “stalemate” – there is no winner, no loser, and the game has been defeated by a never-ending loop of pointless chess pieces being placed here and there and back again. The boy feels as if he’s driven his father away, and this crushes him to a certain extent inside. If there is a parallel between the short story and “Complaint and Answer”, it is this: sometimes, a child misunderstands, and the absence of a parent can imply many things to such a naïve, insecure soul. Read the rest of this entry »

In all honesty, I have no clue why I immediately thought of Pink Floyd when coming up with a creative response for “Children of the Alley.” Or more specifically, why my first thought when thinking about themes for this particular week was Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album cover. It’s one of the iconic covers of all time, and even though I certainly didn’t do it justice, I think my intention behind it came off pretty clear. “Children of the Alley” is still one of my favorite readings out of all of the ones we’ve done throughout the course, and I think it’s because the message of it was really something that we can all remind ourselves of time and time again. In our current world, a world that’s filled with turmoil and conflict between belief systems and cultures, I feel like our self-reminder to always remember our similarities and common pursuits is integral to keeping conflict at bay and resolving issues such as prejudice and bigotry. “Children of the Alley” shows us that while humans can be divided along certain lines, these lines stem from the same origin and should bring us together rather than drive us apart.

This is especially apparent in the divides between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, divides that have existed for literally thousands of years and continue to exist to this very day. Known as “People of the Book,” followers of these three world religious all share common beliefs at one point or another. In  “Children of the Alley,” for example, the stories of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad are all told one by one, and the reader can see very clearly just how these stories tie together, how we as believers can use lessons drawn from each one of these stories to better ourselves and strength our faiths. In addition, it shows how each of these individuals relates to the one “ancestor” of the Children – Gebelaawi, who represents the origin of these three distinct faiths and thus the commonality that links these three religions together For my creative response, I really wanted to portray the important message that certain beliefs or systems that may appear incredibly different on the external surface may actually hold deep, significant similarities with one another, or perhaps a common origin that makes them more similar to each other than originally perceived. To show this, I decided to draw my own recreation of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album cover with oil pastels. This cover, which features a pitch black background and a triangular prism in the foreground, represents the idea of one “thing” bursting into a multitude of other “things”; this is shown by the ray of light that hits the prism and thus forced to split into the entire range of visible colors of light – a glowing rainbow in the pitch blackness of the background. I thought this fit perfectly with the message I wanted to show with “Children of the Alley” – the idea that one specific thing can essentially be transformed or branched off into so many vibrant, meaningful products that have the power to give meaning and light to darkness. In order to make it more “my own,” I attempted to redraw the main part of the album cover, but instead of a rainbow spectrum of colors, I chose to have the rays made up of different symbols of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The ray of light shooting into the prism, of course, represents God – the same God that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe in and the same God that should be uniting brothers and sisters of each faith into a cooperative community rather than keep them as separate rivals.

Religious Pluralism Album Cover (based on Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”)

I found that the main theme in “The Saint’s Lamp” was identity, something that we’ve discussed in class almost every week. Identity, perhaps, is one of the most confusing things about being human – what is life, after all, than a constant struggle and determination to answer the questions, “Who am I? What kind of person was I in the past, and what kind of person can I become in the future? What, in this never-ending chaos of labels, stereotypes, and cultural boundaries, truly DEFINES me?” In class, we’ve often discussed the dangers that can come about due to the conflicts surrounding identity. People view and label others as having one identity – your race. Your religion. Your skin color, hair color, height, speech pattern, body language, clothes, and the list goes on. Yet what we fail to remember and what we consistently fail to see in each other is the plethora of identities that exists within each of us. I’m Asian. My name is Leon. I’m a Christian. I’m from California. My parents are…etcetera. Having said these characteristics (and with the ability to continue the list virtually endlessly), can anyone really tell who I am as a person? In “The Saint’s Lamp,” we’ve got a prime example of two cultures being stereotyped and presented by each other as if they were destined to clash with one another. On one hand, there’s Fatima – the fragile, but overall gentle and obedient representative of what Ismail’s traditional Egyptian world was to him – and on the other hand there’s Mary, the representative of Western culture that appears to be corruptive of Ismail’s traditional, holy mindset. I felt like Mary – and Western culture as a whole – was almost “villain-ized” in a way, meant to appear shallow, strange, and superficial compared to the way Ismail’s Egyptian world was portrayed.

What I chose to do with Session 3 and “The Saint’s Lamp” was take a picture of each one of my classmates in this seminar, allowing them to make whatever face they wanted. Looking at these different portraits themselves showed me a lot about identity, but I wanted to further emphasize it by researching each students’ name and the meaning/origin behind their names. I’m not 100% sure whether or not these meanings are completely accurate, as many names are more than one meaning, but the point behind this response was to show just one aspect of each of our identities. The result – a collage or poster of sorts, containing portraits of each of my classmates with their names, their names written in the same spelling/characters as they had originated from, and finally the meaning behind each of them. Looking at this collage, one can see that each one of us is incredibly different from the other – we make different faces to the camera, we wear different clothes, have different hairstyles, different voices, different backgrounds, and we have different names with different meanings. If I just gave you a picture of each student with their names, would you know their stories? Would you know their cultural backgrounds, their beliefs, their lifestyles? Even if I gave you in-depth meanings behind the origins of their names, would they accurately describe who they were or what their lives were like? These portrait photos of each of my fellow classmates represent not only our diversity and differences, but also the importance of knowing that our “image” of each other only gives us one identity. We need to look beyond our images and names to explore each other’s different identities and varying backgrounds.

Names and Identities Collage

Growing up in a predominantly Christian family, I attended church every Sunday with my family from before pre-k to the weekend before I left for college. It was the whole package – morning sermon, afternoon Sunday school, and always with the occasional Friday or Saturday night Bible Study mixed in between. Memorizing Bible verses was something I was familiar with, something I knew was expected of me and, to put it simply, something that all of the other kids did. Something they all had to do. Although I silently followed this instruction for years and years, I came to the realization around my sophomore year of high school that even though I knew so many Bible verses by heart, I couldn’t truthfully say that I knew them. What was the context behind each of them? What did they mean? Did they have the power to transform me or shape me into a better follower of Christ? These are all questions that I still struggle to answer day by day in my developing journey of faith, and it was a pleasant surprise that “An Egyptian Childhood” actually helped me put all of these questions to sense.

In “An Egyptian Childhood,” the author retells the story of his own growing up in Egypt, his struggles memorizing the Qur’an and his many attempts to prove to both his father and his teacher that he could memorize the verses in the scripture without fault. When reading “An Egyptian Childhood,” I was still pretty naïve about what the Qur’an really was and more importantly, what it meant to Muslims all around the world. To me, the Qur’an was “the Muslim Bible,” almost – a very narrow-minded view, now that I think of it, but pretty common for someone who’s only known how to base other religions around his or her own. After reading this novel, I found myself criticizing the narrator – and other characters in the book – for putting so much emphasis on “blindly” memorizing the entire Qur’an without really thinking about the words and what they meant. I realized, at the same time, that this was exactly what I was doing with verses from the Bible – in fact, this was what I’ve been doing since pre-k and above. During class that week, Professor Asani explained something that I had never really thought about previously: constantly reading and repeating scripture, he said, wasn’t just a blind practice that meant nothing once you committed it to memory. Memorization was a way of transforming the Word into something that was a part of you, something that was attached to your very being that you could absorb and feel inside of you. In relation, he explained that the Qur’an wasn’t just something that was meant to be read – it was meant to be heard, to be said, to be treated like an art. It was not only visual, but it was aural.

Using this information, I thought it would be interesting to explore an art form that we had actually seen in class. The calligrams that we saw – images that were created using verses from the Qur’an, in the form of calligraphic Arabic characters – were visually stunning to me, and by seeing the calligrams I could really tell how the Qur’an was so much more than just a book to Muslim believers. I chose to practice some English forms of calligrams – as seen in the “elephant,” “swan,” and “panther” drawings – and finally create my own calligram that represented sacred scripture as an authority that could take the shape of many art forms – visual and aural alike. Now looking back, I can see how this definitely applies to my own study of the Bible and my own “blind memorization” of Biblical verses and parables. Like the Qur’an, the Bible can be viewed as something a lot more than a book – it can reach human hearts through many senses at once, and viewing it through different types of lenses can help you transcend to a new, tangible level of spirituality.

Practice Calligrams

Calligram