Final Travels

I fly back to California today, just a few days past the year anniversary since I arrived in the UK. I just finished an amazing, whirlwind trip of Europe in which I visited many new places and saw a few great old friends. Being in Sweden for Midsummer was absolutely fantastic - if you ever get the chance to be in Sweden for that holiday, go! As we were so far north, it would get darker at night but never get fully dark, and the sun was up blazing through the windows by 4am. Midsummer's Eve involved copious amounts of herring, Swedish drinking songs, wildfowers and coffee. Besides the amazing Midsummer celebrations, one of my favorite things about Sweden was the idea of "doing a fika", which means sitting down somewhere and enjoying a cup of coffee, normally with a friend and some cake or a little bite to eat. This is a tradition I hope to bring back with me to the US, where coffee (or whatever your drink of choice) is not something to be sucked down in a take-away mug during your commute but rather an excuse mid-morning or mid-afternoon to take a 15 minute break from your day and enjoy it. From Sweden I flew to Germany and spent a few days in Berlin before meeting up with my friend in Göttingen. Berlin was not my favorite city, and I was a bit worried that I might not enjoy the rest of my trip in Germany, but Göttingen is a lovely little university town that reminded me just a bit of Ann Arbor with, of course, a very strong German flavor to it. Through a series of events, I was able to participate in an open event at the World Master's Orienteering Competition and had a great time sprint orienteering in the town of Gosler. From Germany I went to Belgium and visited Brussels, which is very small and somewhat like a dingier Paris but has a lovely charm of its own, and took a day trip to Bruges and Ghent as well. I spent my last few days in Paris and then took a quick trip to the town of Reims, which is the capital of the champagne region, so we toured both the Pommery and Veuve Cliquot champagne cellars (and of course sampled their products as well). All in all it was an excellent trip, and I'm excited now to be headed back home to enjoy the California sunshine and to unpack my suitcase and do some laundry. I've had an amazing year and I can't express how happy I am to have had these opportunities. Thank you Roger M Jones! Signing off for good now, thank you to everyone who has read this over the past few months. Cheers!

Until Next Time

And I'm off!  I'm leaving England today to embark on my last European adventures before returning home to California.  I'm headed first to Sweden, to stay with a family friend on a farm about 2 hours north of Stockholm and celebrate Midsummer this weekend in true Swedish style.  Then I'm going to Berlin for a few days, then to the German university town of Gottingen to stay with a friend from high school.  From Germany I'll go to Brussels for a few days before taking the train to Paris to meet up with a friend from Michigan who is currently working in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia but is taking her vacation in France.  Then I'll come back to London for one last night to catch my flight from Heathrow and fly back to San Francisco!  It's been a difficult few weeks trying to wrap everything up here and say goodbye to the places and people I've grown to love so much.  Leaving someplace is always difficult for me, and I'm juggling the feelings of being so sad to go but excited about the next part of my life and so glad to have had this opportunity.  I'll try to get in a post or two about my travels before I finish off this blog for good and hand it off to next year's Fellow.  A la prochaine...

Jubilee Weekend

Happy Jubilee!  Apologies for not posting in so long.  I have finally finished up exams and have been trying to pack in all the last touristy things I've wanted to do before I leave.  I'll do a post shortly on all the fun little day trips and London things I've done, but first a bit about the Jubilee and finishing up at UCL.

This weekend was/is, of course, the Queen's Jubilee (Monday and Tuesday are bank holidays).  London is decked out with impressive amounts of bunting, Union Jacks, and signs thanking the queen for her years of service.  Pret, the take-away sandwich chain that is more ubiquitous than Starbucks, has signs in front of each shop saying "Keep It Clean for the Queen", and many buildings have displayed giant signs saying "Congratulations" or "Thank You, Your Majesty".  On Sunday, I went with a friend to try to watch the flotilla on the Thames but due to the crushing amount of people we were only able to watch on the giant viewing screens.  It was amazing seeing London packed with so many people, though it made me very glad that I'll no longer be here for the Olympics.  We tried to get on the tube at Leicester Square and there were queues to even get into the station - I can't imagine how difficult it will be to get anywhere in July and August!  Today I'm hoping to catch a glimpse of the carriage procession of all the royals as they follow a route through central London from Westminster to Buckingham Palace.  I'll be sure to post pictures if I get close enough to actually see anything.

I am now officially done with my time at UCL, having finished up my last final (though technically the term doesn't end until this Friday).  Exams here are very different to how we do them in the US - all the exams here take place during term 3 (May 1 - June 9th) and include exams for all the classes you take throughout the year (including the ones that ended in December).  It's different for science and engineering courses, but all my exams here were 3-hour essay exams.  Luckily you get a choice for every single question (the exam may consist of 4 questions, for example, but for each of those you have a choice of maybe 3-5 various questions), but 3 hours is a long time to continuously write without any breaks.  I have no idea how I've done on my exams either, as every piece of work (exam or coursework essay) that you submit at UCL has to be graded by both a first marker or examiner at UCL, and then also a second marker outside of UCL who ensures the grades given by the UCL markers are fair and consistent with other schools.  It's a very complicated process, as is taking the exams themselves.  All students are provided with candidate number cards, which you write on your exam instead of your name (everything is graded anonymously).  Exams are scheduled in a variety of locations all around London and each exam hall normally includes people taking several different exams at once.  My tutor (professor) was present at only 1 of the 4 exams I took - each exam is run by "invigilators" who read the rules out and escort students to the bathroom, etc... It's very much like taking the SAT or another standardized test.  Especially given the length of normal UK exams, I would imagine British students would be excellent at the SAT!

More on day trips and touristy London things later - and hopefully some photos of royal carriages!

Grad Schools and Americanisms

Whoops, sorry - realized it's been a bit long since I last posted!  I'm finally back in the UK, after a whirlwind month and a half of traveling to the US for interviews for Pharmacology PhD programs.  I first did a weekend interview at UM to interview with the PIBS program, then flew back to London for three days before hopping on a plane to San Francisco to start a 2 1/2 week trip all around the States.  I interviewed at UCSF, went home for a few days, and flew to Philadelphia to interview at UPenn.  From there I went to Madison, Wisconsin where I stayed with some friends from water polo and interviewed at UW, then I flew down to North Carolina to visit UNC.  I flew back to London and was back for a whole 10 days before taking another weekend trip, this time to Northwestern.  I returned (for good) on last Monday, so now I'm back to enjoying all that London has to offer.  Also, I've decided on UCSF for grad school (the Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics program) so though I know I'll be extremely sad to leave London this summer, I know I can look forward to moving to San Francisco and I'm very excited about joining that program!

Speaking of America, I stumbled across this list of "Americanisms" a while back and had a thoroughly fun time reading through the list. Some of them ("my bad", fanny packs, "I could care less") bother me just as much as the people who wrote in. Others were truly amusing to me, such as #29 "The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when 'fortnightly' would suffice just fine" (really?  'fortnightly?') and #36 "Surely the most irritating is: 'You do the math.' Math? It's MATHS!". Most British people are quite used to having Americans around and generally understand most Americanisms (if you ask for the "bathroom" or "restroom" in an American accent, no one ever looks surprised), but every once in a while a word that seems completely normal to me will elicit blank stares from my British friends, and vice-versa.  For instance, I've learned that a "gilet" is a vest and a "dummy" is a pacifier, and I've taught my friends what a "sidewalk" is (they call it "footpath" or "pavement") and what it means to "scrimmage" (I'm very happy to say that this one is catching on with my water polo team).  The one phrase I have a very hard time remembering has a different meaning here is "pants".  In the UK, the term "trousers" refers to everything that would fall under the heading of "pants" in the US (got that one, not too hard) - but "pants" only means "underpants", which leads to some amusing situation when I forget to say "trousers" and say "pants" instead.

In another striking difference between the US and UK, when I set up my bank account over the summer, I received a letter from my new bank telling me not to choose a PIN number that's easy to guess, like 1111 (ok), 1234 (of course), or 1066 - I guess thieves in the UK are well-schooled in their history.  I have a hard time imagining Bank of America warning me not to choose "1776" for my pin number based on the historical significance of the date.  I've been thinking a lot about Britishisms vs. Americanisms over the time I've been here, and while I've found that I have quite consciously tried to replace some American phrases with their British equivalents (lift instead of elevator, take-away instead of take-out, half one instead of 1:30), I'm not as good at noticing when a particular phrase or comment sounds very American.  It's funny the things people just assume because of how we've grown up: when I brought back some Girl Scout cookies from one of my interview weekends to a rugby game (one of the girls said "Oh wow, I saw these once on an episode of Friends!") it reminded me of how much we take for granted other people will know about our own culture, as my excitement over a hot cross bun (I had no idea they were real and actually existed outside of a nursery rhyme!) highlighted for my British friends as well.

Ta ta, off to write more essays.  Only a week and a half left of classes, shockingly - we finish on March 23rd!

(Belated) Happy New Year!

I can't believe it's already mid-January, and I'm already 20% of the way through term 2!  I've started all my new classes and have been very much enjoying them, and again I have a great schedule (2 hours of class a day, Monday through Thursday).  I'm taking four new classes this term, two in the Classics department and two more in other departments.  First is Greek Myth, which is the class that made me apply to the Classics department at UCL in the first place - I've loved Greek myths since elementary school!  Reading our "Classical Mythology" textbook has hardly been like work at all.  The other course I'm taking in the Greek & Latin department is Greek Comedy, which has turned out to be really fun so far.  The tutor is so very English and it's great fun to listen to his lectures on Aristophanes and Menander.  I'm also taking London Before the Great Fire, which is an Archeology course quite similar in structure to the course I took last term at the British Museum and the classes I took over the summer - instead of sitting in a classroom listening to our tutor lecture, we go on field trips every class to visit museums and archeological sites.  Last week we went to the Museum of London (one of my favorite museums in the city after I visited it over the summer with my Multicultural Literature course) and we have 8 more trips coming up, from walking the remnants of the old city wall to Southwark.  Lastly, I'm taking an ELCS course (European Language and Cultural Studies - the same department that offered the Literature of the First World War course I took last term) called Literature and Memory in a Globalized Society.  So far it's been a bit theoretical for me, discussing the various kinds of cultural memory, but next week we start talking about the first novel on the reading list and the reading list (Julian Barnes, Milan Kundera, Jorge Semprun) was what attracted me to the course in the first place, so I'm looking forward future classes.    All in all it looks to be a very interesting and engaging term.  I've also received back several of my essays from last term and got decently good marks on all of them, so I feel like I've got a good handle on what's expected of me.

I've received great responses from my grad school applications and so far I have invitations to interview at 9 schools (still waiting to hear back from one).  It's a little complicated to work out the interviews, as flying back and forth from London for each interview doesn't make much sense, but I have worked out to fly back to Ann Arbor on January 26-29 to interview for PIBS, and then I'm going to take a week off from school and combine it with reading week to interview at 4-5 more schools (UCSF, UPenn, Wisconsin and UNC - possibly UCSD as well).  Two weeks after I return from that trip, I've booked a visit to Northwestern from March 1-4.  It'll be very busy and a lot of traveling, but I'm looking forward to visiting so many schools and taking the next steps towards figuring out where I'll be getting my Ph.D!  Luckily grad schools pay for all your expenses to visit (they don't normally do this for international students, but round trip flights from London are incredibly cheap right now so it worked out very much in my favor)!

One more thing - I very highly recommend the BBC show "Sherlock"!  I just started watching it a little while ago and I've been very impressed with it.  It's a modern retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, and the location where they filmed 221B Baker St is just a 2-minute walk from where I live (it's not actually on Baker St).  "Sherlock" may even have replaced "Downton Abbey" as my favorite British television show...

London in December

Hiya!  (That's a very English phrase - it sounds like "Hi yeah" but just quicker and sometimes with a question mark at the end, not like "hi-YAH" how Mario says it in Nintendo 64 when he dropkicks something.)  Short update:

I have now officially turned in 3 papers for my UCL classes: one about whether or not the British Museum should repatriate items like the Elgin Marbles or the Rosetta Stone to their countries of origin, one on the importance of the trench setting for the play Journey's End, and one on women and goddesses in The Odyssey.  It's still somewhat weird to me that these papers and an exam in May are all that my grades are based on - it's definitely very different from American classes, especially engineering ones.  I've also turned in 5 graduate school applications in the past week, so I've been writing a lot!  I have two more essays due the last day of class, December 16th, but I have two full weeks to get those done so I have a bit of time to relax.

My parents flew over to London for the week of Thanksgiving and I had a wonderful time showing them around town.  We went to see War Horse and Les Miserables (both of which were fabulous), climbed to the top of St. Paul's, and managed to get evacuated from the Tate for a fire alarm.  We had a very unconventional Thanksgiving with a trip to Borough Market in the morning, Mexican food from Lupita for dinner, and a candlelight performance of Mozart's Requiem at St. Martin in the Fields.  Thanksgiving is obviously not celebrated in the UK, but I was surprised how many of my British friends wished me a happy Thanksgiving and how many strangers did as well!  The rugby team even had a potluck Thanksgiving dinner, though they had rugby on tv instead of American football.

I don't think I've written much about the sports teams I'm on, so maybe now is a good time to do that.  Water polo has been going quite well - I've gone to tournaments in Manchester, Birmingham, and just got back from 2 games in Basingstoke this weekend.  I've mostly been playing for a club team, London Polytechnic, with a range of girls from all around London.  I'm actually one of the youngest girls on the team (whereas for rugby and UCL classes I'm definitely on the older side) and a lot of the players are out of university and working, so it's been nice to get to know some people outside of UCL.  Rugby has been incredibly fun as well, though I still don't really know what I'm doing!  The girls rugby team at UCL is huge (you play 15 people at a time, normally have 22 come to games, and we have 57 on the team) but very welcoming and friendly.  I thought that having played water polo for 10 years I'd be fully prepared for the agression and physical contact required by rugby, but when we literally started wrestling during the first practice I realized I was in for a surprise.  I've played in a few games so far and generally end up limping around for some reason or other for a few days after the game.  Between rugby and water polo, I've racked up a pretty impressive collection of bruises and scratches as well!

Only two more weeks of first term to go - I can't believe how fast the time has been flying by.  London is beautifully decorated for Christmas but I'm excited to be heading home for a bit to enjoy some of my favorite American things!  Until next time.

Essays from the summer

I apologize for not posting in a while - the pace of things here has picked up quite a bit!  I am hard at work on my first UCL essay right now, for my Ancient World in London Collections class (I'm writing about whether or not the British Museum should return artifacts like the Elgin Marbles or the Rosetta Stone to their countries of origin), so in the spirit of that I've decided to post two of my papers from over the summer.  The first is from my Multicultural London Literature course and is focused on the novel "Small Island" and the experience of London immigrants, while the second is a close reading of one passage in "Much Ado About Nothing" ('close reading' is a very popular theme in UK courses, it seems).  If anyone was wondering what I'm actually doing school-wise over here in London, here's some of it!  (And if no one was wondering, I promise to post soon with pictures and escapades).

ESSAY: The Migrant Experience: Drawing from Historical and Fictional Accounts

“The feeling I had to know that I’m going to touch the soil of the mother country, that was the feeling I had.  How I can describe?  It’s just a wonderful feeling.  You know how it is when a child, you hear about the mother country, and you know you’re going to touch the soil of the mother country, you know what feeling is that?  And I can’t describe it.  That’s why I compose the song.  Imagine how I felt.  Here’s where I want to be, London.”  (Lord Kitchener, quoted in Phillips Windrush, 64).

From the first few notes of Lord Kitchener’s calypso song “London is the Place for Me,” the optimism and hope of the Caribbean migrants arriving on the SS Empire Windrush is immediately evident.  Composed before Lord Kitchener had even glimpsed the United Kingdom, the song refers to the “lovely city” where Kitchener can “feel like a millionaire” and live a “magnificent” life.   These ideas of England and especially London as the apex of the British Empire, a place where opportunity was everywhere and dreams could be easily achieved, were characteristic of most (if not all) migrants arriving on British soil.   The feelings that typified these Caribbean migrants are present not just in personal statements by Lord Kitchener and other passengers aboard the Windrush and later ships, but also in the artistic creations, from Kitchener’s popular calypso lyrics to later literature and poetic works, of the 1950s and beyond. 

Andrea Levy’s 2004 novel Small Island describes the experiences of four characters, two English and two Jamaican, who find their lives inextricably bound together in the aftermath of the Second World War.  Though telling a fictional story, Levy describes many aspects of actual Caribbean migrants’ experiences and captures the essence of how many immigrants felt.  In Small Island, Gilbert, a young Jamaican man who volunteers to join the RAF to fight for his mother country, returns to his home island after the war and finds himself longing to return to England: “If you would listen then we would talk – widen your eyes with stories of war and the Mother Country… Come, ask a question you have always wanted to know.  The King – oh, a fine man, and Shakespeare too.  Paved with gold, no – but yes, diamonds appear on the ground in the rain” (Levy 172).  Gilbert so strongly believes in his mother country that he essentially sells himself, promising to marry a woman he does not love and who doesn’t give any indication of loving him, for the price of a passage to England.  Like her new husband, Gilbert’s wife Hortense idealizes the land of England and initially idolizes its inhabitants.  Hortense repeats several times that England is her “destiny,” a choice of words that alludes to all the hopes and sureties that Hortense associates with the country.  Like Lord Kitchener, long before she reaches the shores of England Hortense is sure that she knows what her life will be like there: “I [will] walk to the shop where I am greeted with manners… politeness… and refinement.  A red bus, a cold morning, and daffodils blooming with all the colours of the rainbow” (Levy 82-83).  Hortense is sure of what England and English people will be like, and she holds the cultivated and civilized inhabitants of her future home in high esteem.  While training to be a teacher in Jamaica, Hortense aspires to be like the white tutors at her college, the “white women whose superiority encircled them like an aureole… [whose] formal elocution, eminent intelligence, and imperial demeanour demanded and received obedience from all who beheld them” (Levy 57).  The words Levy uses to describe Hortense’s attitude towards these white women (especially “superiority” and “imperial”) imply reference to both the historical fact of British preponderance (superiority of British armed forces allowing creation of Empire) and the more complicated idea of ‘colonisation of the mind’ (in which the imperial administration established the English at the top of a hierarchy of civilization, with colonists necessarily filling in the lower rungs of the cultural ladder).   

While Small Island is a fictional account of Caribbean migrants in the post-war years, these characters’ feelings arise from historical reality, not only from members of the Windrush generation but from even earlier historical accounts as well.  Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave who rose to prominence in the Abolitionist movement and published an account of his life as a slave in 1789, wrote over 150 years prior to the arrival of the Windrush:

“I now not only felt myself quite easy with these new countrymen, but relished their society and manners.  I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their sprit, and imitate their manners; I therefore embraced every occasion of improvement; and every new thing that I observed I treasured up in my memory” (Equiano). 

The language in this passage is overwhelmingly positive, giving quite a clear picture of how much Equiano reveres the white Englishmen[1].  In the 18^th century, the slave trade was very much in practice and the attitude of white superiority would have been beaten (figuratively and quite possibly literally) into enslaved African and Caribbean peoples.  Describing his initial reaction to the appearance of white Englishmen in his native land, Equiano writes early in his Interesting Narrative that “the white people looked and acted… in so savage a manner.”  As his account progresses, however, and Equiano describes his increased maturity and education, he proclaims that despite the things he finds curious about the English (including their “eating with unwashed hands”), he was  “astonished at the wisdom of the white people in all things.”  Hundreds of years later, Levy borrows much of the sentiment and even the wording from Equiano’s account in her fictional portrayal of Hortense and Gilbert’s arrival in England; words like “superior” and  “imitate” appear again and again in Levy’s novel, along with many other expressions of the Jamaican’s attempts to resemble the British, from Hortense’s baking fairy cakes to Gilbert’s desire to get a degree at an English university.  Hortense’s description of the English women “whose superiority encircled them like an aureole” is strikingly similar to Equiano’s initial description of the English people as “like spirits” – both phrases implying a spiritual or divine aspect to the British as seen by African or Caribbean people. 

Levy’s novel describes the experiences of a few characters who were just part of a much larger social context.  Following in the footsteps of the initial passengers of the SS Empire Windrush, people from the Caribbean flocked to England in great numbers after the end of World War II.  More Caribbean migrants arrived in the UK during the 1950s than people from African, India or Pakistan.  Approximately 500-700 Caribbean immigrants came to the UK in 1948 – less than 10 years later, by 1956, over 40,000 Caribbean people had settled in Britain (Moving Here).  Most were hopeful and expectant that their move to this fabled mother country would bring about positive changes in their lives and afford them opportunities they could not have had in their native countries.  MovingHere.org, a website sponsored by the National Archive, chronicles the experiences of many migrant populations through original documents as well as transcripts and recordings of personal accounts.  Through interviews with immigrants of the Windrush generation and afterwards, the site provides a picture of the actual migration experiences for hundreds of people moving to the UK.  “We were the envy of our friends back home,” reads the account of Trinidadian Esther Jones, “we were bound for the land of freedom and opportunity… [I had] a sense of awe at the history of my motherland” (Moving Here).  Another immigrant arriving on the SS Auriga, which sailed from Kingston to the UK in 1955 carrying 1100 passengers, is quoted as saying, “emigration was at the time a life belt thrown out to a drowning generation” (Moving Here).  Benjamin Zephaniah, a black British poet of Barbadian and Jamaican descent, wrote a poem describing the experiences of those in the Windrush generation that borrows its title from the headline of Peter Fryer’s newspaper article “The men from Jamaica are settling down” (Moving Here)[2].  Zephaniah writes about immigrants arriving with “shiploads of hope” about their futures in “de land of de hope and de glory… de land of pleasant pastures green.”  From these personal reports and many others, along with literary depictions like Zephaniah’s poem and Levy’s novel, it is evident that there existed a commonality of experience shared not just by Jamaican migrants aboard the SS Empire Windrush but by immigrants from all around the Caribbean during this generation and afterwards.   

Contrary to the high hopes of the migrant population, however, the English reception of and response to these Caribbean transplants was strikingly mixed.  Initially, the British government encouraged the arrival of Caribbean immigrants as a labour force to fill the shortage of workers in various British industries.  The Nationality Act (1948) ensured that Commonwealth citizens were also recognized as British subjects, a stipulation that ensured Caribbean migrants could live and work in the UK without being subject to immigration control.  The Commonwealth Immigrants Bill passed in 1962, however, imposed strict regulations on immigrants from the colonies settling in the UK and caused an immediate decrease in the number of Caribbean migrants arriving in England.  The popular reaction to these new arrivals was similarly ambivalent, a lingering effect from the various responses during the Second World War to Caribbean servicemen and other volunteers from the colonies which Levy portrays through Gilbert’s fictional experience.  Arriving in Yorkshire for RAF training and visiting an English countryside village for the first time, Gilbert and his fellow West Indian servicemen are greeted with quite the range of reactions. “‘We’re all in this together, lad,’” one elderly villager tells Gilbert, “‘We’re glad to have you here’” (Levy 114) while another man, who refuses to look Gilbert in the eye, responds to Gilbert’s assertion that he has joined the RAF to fight for his country with a “‘Humph. Your country?’” (Levy 115).  Back in Jamaica, Hortense’s Welsh principal declares to her that “many people, of whom I am one, believe that no matter what their colour, no matter what their creed, men who are fighting to protect the people of Great Britain from the threat of invasion by Germans are gallant heroes” (Levy 66).  Just a few years later in England, Queenie deals with extreme prejudice and judgement from her neighbours and her own husband for allowing black boarders in her home after the war.  Her husband Bernard declares,

“The war was fought so people might live amongst their own kind.  Quite simple.  Everyone had a place.  England for the English and the West Indies for these coloured people… Everyone was trying to get home after the war to be with kith and kin.  Except these blasted coloured colonial.  I’ve nothing against them in their place.  But their place isn’t here.” (Levy 388)

Clearly, British reactions to the arrival of Caribbean immigrants were quite varied.  Migrants also found that their expectations of England and its inhabitants were often proved shockingly incorrect.  A Jamaican immigrant named Owen, sharing his story on MovingHere.org, writes that initially he was so excited to be in England that he didn’t even feel the cold of the English winter but describes his later shock at how difficult it was for Caribbean migrants to find accommodation, as most English landlords would prohibit blacks and Irish from letting a room.  Another immigrant, James Alcide, describes telling his wife about signs that said “No Blacks, No Dogs Allowed” and not being able to convince her that these signs actually existed.  Echoing these actual accounts of immigrants’ surprise and shock at reality of England, Levy describes Hortense’s amazement at the coarseness of the English people she meets (and her utter surprise when they cannot understand her carefully pronounced speech) and the West Indian airmen’s astonishment at finding a white man sweeping the street in England.  In one short sentence, Gilbert illustrates the disappointment and disillusionment of the common immigrant experience by describing how England “deceives” her Caribbean immigrants, betraying “all us pitiful West Indian dreamers who sailed with heads bursting with foolishness” (Levy 269).  In a long passage of Small Island, Gilbert personifies England as a literal Mother, “beautiful… refined, mannerly and cultured,” who calls for help from the best men of her colonies but greets them upon their arrival as a “ragged, old and dusty… stinking cantankerous hag” (Levy 116) who doesn’t embrace her colonial children or even recognize them.  Though this passage is told in much more colourful and descriptive language than most of the historical accounts gathered from Caribbean migrants at this time, Gilbert’s feelings of disappointment and disenchantment are typical of many descriptions of immigrants’ arrivals in England. 

Not all was tragic, however, as the lively melody and huge popularity of Lord Kitchener’s song attests.  Small Island ends on a somewhat hopeful note, with Gilbert and Hortense finally starting to love one another and adopting Queenie’s half-black child in an attempt to provide the baby a better future.  Zephaniah’s poem recognizes the struggles of Caribbean migrants but speaks of a new generation (of which Zephaniah himself was a part) and new era of radicalism, black writers, and cultural celebrations like blues music and carnival.  Like the optimistic lyrics of “London is the Place for Me”, Zephaniah’s poetry proclaims his hope for his people and his future, proclaiming “De future is made up of what we can do,” and his feelings toward his home country are reinforced by another of Zephaniah’s poems “The London Breed.”  Despite the past legacies of British imperialism and rampant racism, Zephaniah – like Lord Kitchener and a host of other Caribbean and colonial transplants before him – sees London as his city and has high hopes for what the future in England holds. 

References

Equiano, Olaudah.  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.  London: Union Street, Marylebone, 1789.

Levy, Andrea.  Small Island.  New York: Picador, 2004. 

Moving Here: Migration Histories – Caribbean and Moving Here: Stories.  Web. 

< http://www.movinghere.org.uk/galleries/histories/caribbean/caribbean.htm> Accessed 14 July 2011.

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[1] However, it is quite possible that Equiano praised the English to such a great extent in his book as a method of increasing its popularity and thus more widely spreading his Abolitionist message.

[2] See full text of poem in this document included after “References” section

ESSAY: Much Ado About Nothing Close Reading Assignment: Act II, Scene I, lines 151-172

In the first scene of Act II of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Don John approaches a masked Claudio and, pretending to believe he is speaking to Benedick, tells Claudio that Don Pedro is not in fact wooing Hero for Claudio’s sake but intends to marry Hero himself.  In earlier sections of this scene (specifically Don Pedro’s wooing of Hero, Ursula’s conversation with Antonio, and Beatrice’s witty words with a masked Benedick), action has occurred with many characters on stage, including three stage directions of characters stepping aside so that a new conversation can draw the audience’s attention.  Just prior to this extract, all the characters but Don John, Borachio and Claudio exit the stage, leaving the three men alone to heighten the drama of these lines.  The audience is clearly told that the masked man on stage is Claudio, yet he answers to the name of Benedick and is unrecognizable enough that he fully believes he could be mistaken for his friend; no matter how this scene is staged, we know Claudio must be wearing a mask when Don John and Borachio approach him to maintain the idea that they could mistake him for Benedick.  Though a reading solely of the lines of this extract would suggest the possibility that Don John may actually believe he is speaking to Benedick, the lines immediately preceding this section make it clear that Don John and Borachio are unquestionably trying to trick Claudio (Borachio tells Don John: “that is Claudio. I know him by his bearing.”)  Borachio and Don John’s description of the (false) situation with Don Pedro and Hero is meant to throw Claudio into a sense of jealousy and betrayal; the villains twice use the word “swear” to underscore the truth of their story.   They further emphasize that Don Pedro plans to marry Hero “tonight” to thrust Claudio into a state of despair; as Humphreys describes in the footnotes of the Arden edition, this is meant “to precipitate Claudio into a sense of hopeless crisis” (118).  As in other sections of the play, Don John cloaks his ill intent under the guise of caring for other characters, telling Claudio he should help Don Pedro by preventing the marriage as Hero’s social status is not high enough for the prince (later he tells Claudio of Hero’s disloyalty as if despite their differences he is just looking out for a good friend of his brother).  Don John’s deceit, hiding his tricks under a pretext of concern, is highlighted by his urging Claudio to have “the part of an honest man” when the audience, if not Claudio, is fully aware of Don John’s dishonesty.  The themes of deception and duplicity, present throughout Much Ado About Nothing, are underscored in this scene by the disguises the characters are wearing in the form of costumes and masks for Leonato’s party.  The masks serve as a physical symbol of the misapprehension that occurs throughout the play. 

            After Don John and Borachio exit, Claudio speaks an 11-line soliloquy about this supposed betrayal.  He remarks on how people betray their friends for love and counsels that anyone in love should act on it himself, not depending on help from his friends.  He calls beauty a “witch” under whose “charms” loyalty and integrity disintegrate into desire and lust, remarking on how often this occurs with men in love but his lack of suspicion that it would happen to him.  Claudio switches into verse for much of his soliloquy, a stylistic choice on Shakespeare’s part that amplifies the drama and tragedy of his words (especially in contrast to the comic prose sections, particularly the conversation between Benedick and Beatrice, that directly precede this extract).  While the switch from prose to verse heightens Claudio’s speech, the way Claudio brings in language of the body (“all hearts,” “own tongues,” “every eye”) serves to make his soliloquy more intimate and creates a stronger connection with the audience.  Much of the language and imagery of this passage speaks to the context of early modern culture in which this play would have been first performed.  For example, Claudio uses language of business in describing love, illustrating the early modern idea of marriage as a contract.  He wishes he had “negotiated” for himself, instead of letting Don Pedro act as his “agent” – these are not words we would typically associate with romance and marriage today, but in early modern society marriage was as much an economic decision as it was an emotional one (despite his many professions of love for Hero, Claudio is sure to ask right away if Hero is Leonato’s only heir).  In another example, the idea of beauty as a witch speaks to the idea at this time of female sexuality as a dangerous and treacherous thing; Claudio claims that “beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melteth into blood”.  Carol Cook, in her article on gender difference in Much Ado, points out that Claudio’s language removes blame from the male figure (Don Pedro) that Claudio believes has betrayed him and instead holds the “witch” of Hero’s beauty responsible.  Cook further describes how “Hero is subsumed into an archetype of destructive female power – of the sorceress who deprives men of their wills and dissolves the solidarity of masculine bonds into the ‘blood’ of passion and violence” (193).  Female sexuality was seen as a threat to the family unit (as men were ever fearful of being cuckolded) and thus a threat to society as a whole, as the family was the cornerstone of early modern society and represented a ‘little Commonwealth’.  As Barbara Everett describes, women (specifically in terms of their sexuality) could be seen as a “hypnotic and possibly devilish enemy” (102) to society if they were not chaste, silent, and obedient.  The idea of female beauty as a witch that could undo the bonds of loyalty among men is a telling illustration of this fear of women and female sexuality in early modern society. 

What occurs in the few lines of this extract presages many of the actions that occur later in the play, especially Don John’s villainy in tricking Claudio to ruin his impending marriage to Hero, and Claudio’s quickness to believe he is the victim of a betrayal. As Cook highlights, Claudio’s soliloquy reveals that “Claudio’s distrust of the witchlike powers of female beauty is close to the surface and easily triggered” (193), which proves integral to the plot when Don John later suggests to Claudio that Hero has been unfaithful.  Having seen Claudio’s quickness to believe the worst of his friend, the audience is not surprised when Claudio immediately believes the worst of his bride.  Unlike later scenes however, Claudio wholeheartedly believes he is betrayed based on nothing other than the word of a man with “a very melancholy disposition” (later in the play it is implied the Claudio actually observes the misleading interaction between Margaret and Borachio) and no other characters are deceived along with Claudio.  The footnotes of the Arden edition of Much Ado suggest that “Shakespeare somewhat exonerates him [Claudio] by showing others no less deceived” (Humphreys 118) later in the play when Don Pedro fully believes Hero’s infidelity as well.  Humphreys suggests that Claudio is exonerated in this scene as well, citing Benedick as another deceived character according to the line “You must wear it one way, for the Prince hath got your Hero.”  This is not compelling evidence, however, of Benedick sharing in Claudio’s belief in betrayal; perhaps Shakespeare leaves Claudio to be deceived alone in this scene to prepare the audience for his future acceptance of Hero’s betrayal, and later gives him ‘exoneration’ in the form of Don Pedro’s complicity so as to temper the feeling of Claudio as a fickle and changeable man. Even the language of this extract is echoed in later parts of the play; during the (first) wedding scene, Claudio again bids farewell to Hero and bemoans love:

“But fare thee well, most foul, most fair!  Farewell…

For thee I’ll lock up all the gates of love,

And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang,

To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,

And never shall it more be gracious.” (Act IV, Scene I)

The echoing of words (“farewell”, “beauty”) and ideas (beauty as something that could be harmful, Claudio’s language of body parts) reminds the audience of Claudio’s earlier capriciousness and perhaps serves to reassure us that things may not all turn tragic; since we have already seen one scene in which Claudio is reconciled with his supposed betrayer, we expect that another resolution may lie in the future. 

            Though these few lines are but a small part of Much Ado About Nothing, the language, themes, and imagery can serve to enhance a reader’s insight into the play as a whole.  Actions in this extract foretell some of the upcoming plot and language from this scene appears again at later points in the play.  The audience gains a clear perception of Don John’s perfidy and Claudio’s capriciousness.  Moreover, especially important for modern audiences, this extract showcases the play’s context and highlights some early modern ideas, specifically regarding marriage as a contract and the danger of female sexuality.   

References

Cook, Carol.  “The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado About Nothing.  PMLA. Vol 10, No. 2 (March 1986), 186-202.  <http://www.jstor.org/stable/462403>  Accessed 4 August 2011. 

Everett, Barbara.  “Much Ado About Nothing.”  Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It – A Casebook.  Ed John Russell Brown.  London: Macmillan, 1979.  100 – 109. 

Humphreys, A. R., ed.  The Arden Edition of the Words of William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing.  London: Methuen, 2009. 

Mares, F. H., ed.  The New Cambridge Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.