Session Three: “The Saint’s Lamp”
October 31st, 2014 by leonpanI 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