Author: jazzy <3

This past May I graduated from Rowan University with two degrees, a minor, and a Certificate of Undergraduate Study in American Sign Language. Yeah, it was a lot.

Here’s some context:

I dual majored in English and Writing Arts while keeping up with a minor in music which required me to perform in an ensemble. I grew up taking piano lessons and started clarinet in the 4th grade, which is the same instrument I chose to play in Rowan’s concert band. Along with poetry I also took a songwriting class that propelled my creative reach much farther than expected, and I hope to release original music sometime in the near future, as well as publishing my own books.

What I’ve noticed now that those four years of day-to-day work are over, is that I have a hundred goals I want to hit with no concrete path to reach them. A million ideas and skill sets, but one mind and one body.

If a student is solely focused on academic success and they complete their academics, what is next for them? After grade school is middle school, then high school, and after high school the expected decision is college. But what’s after that?

I’ve never heard anyone talk about post-grad life beyond job searching, and according to most Americans our job market is not great. So, I’m going to tackle it the best I can. Freelancing seems to be the closest thing to what I want to do, so that is part of the first step of my journey. Wish me luck!

The second draft of my paper is going a lot better, and I find that most of the work consists of expanding on ideas that I already had. I think after the peer review I was able to settle some of my fears about whether or not the way I’m phrasing the argument in my paper is clear. Two people read my first draft and it seemed like it was making sense to them, they could point out my argument and the topic sentences, I just needed to add more sources, which I have made sure to do. Reading through the sources I picked has helped me solidify the direction that I want to go for each section.

Now that I’ve written several paragraphs including quotes I think what is the most taxing is going through the sources so that I can make sure I’m picking out what’s necessary. Some sources from my annotated bibliography are not going to be included in my paper simply because it doesn’t seem like they fit with what I’ve been writing about, and I want to make sure I use my primary text the most instead of jumping around to other sources and claims. Limiting my secondary sources gives me space to dive deeper into the quotes that I already have. Now that I’m confident in what I’m talking about and how I do it, I just need to focus on my writing.

Writing the draft has gotten a bit easier because I’ve started. I have the academic form of narration down and I’m policing my tenses so I don’t make it overly personal, but that is a bit difficult because I can relate to what I’m writing and it’s important to me. So far I’ve written about the under/misrepresentation of Black people in mass media and how that affects them, then the kind of message that it sends. Then following that I’m going into how Black people, women specifically are judged based off of those misrepresentations of them in texts and how that affects how they go about daily life. This is also where I’m beginning to bring in The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and Starr’s experience at a predominantly white prep school. After that section I’ll be digging into generational trauma and microaggressions.

My first draft is not very long, but I know for a fact that there are more ideas in my head than there are on the pages. I think getting feedback from my peers on what I have will be beneficial so that I can take what I do have and develop it more soundly. I also want to make sure that I’m not doing too much summarizing, but I haven’t had the time to sit down and pick out quotes for all of my sources so that’s also what’s keeping it a bit on the shorter side. Generally though, with all of the sources that we had to gather for the annotated bibliography I don’t think length will be that much of an issue, I’m mostly concerned about clarity of the content, which is why the peer review will be helpful!

This week there were many poems to read that surrounded the topics of menstruation, menopause, miscarriages, and abortions–all events that surround a woman’s body. The one that I kind of want to talk about is the miscarriage, because it is a distinctly female loss that a mother or soon-to-be-mother feels, it cannot be so profoundly understood through any other lens. It can be sympathized with, but unless you’ve gone through it you can only imagine the change a loss like that can do to you. The narrator was repeating their baby’s possible names and grieving the life they never had, wondering who they might have come out looking like, and honestly that’s heartbreaking.

Grief from the loss of a loved one you grew up with is rough, but to never get the chance to get to know them is another kind of tragedy. My grandfather recently passed and I found myself thinking about how I didn’t get to know him as I am now, I mostly just have memories from growing up with him but I won’t get to share a lot of things with him now that I’m older. The grief the mother is experiencing is arguably worse because the loss was directly from her body, she could physically feel it happening and nothing can prepare you for that. You could feel the desperation in the lines of the poem, how she wanted more information about the baby, even the smallest details, to give her some sort of solace. That connection that motherhood provides is so special, but can also cause such pain.

Coming up with the outline for my paper wasn’t too bad, but drafting it can definitely feel overwhelming. It feels like when I’m writing I’m overly conscious of the way that I’m writing and how it might be perceived. I want to make sure that the topics I approach are done so accurately and respectfully, but also in a way that makes sense.

What I found that works a bit better is jumping around my paper to write on the different topics from my outline. Sticking to one specific topic for too long (if I don’t already have creative fuel) can sometimes be difficult but I can’t afford to just sit with my computer and do nothing so I try to brainstorm until I come up with something. The parts where I get stumped can be frustrating because I know that I have a lot to say, it’s just fitting it into a research paper feels strange.

Honestly, I think it’s a mix of the end of the semester burn out and upcoming graduation that is making me feel antsy and a little less confident in my writing. I want to end this semester proud of what I wrote this these past months and the four years that I spent here at Rowan–-I want to graduate with proof that I’ve grown. As I mentioned before, I love writing for fun much better than academic writing, but since it involves a book and movie that deeply resonates with me, it’s mixing those two things together. I think maintaining that mindset is what will carry me through.

One of my classmates is analyzing several poems that offer differing perspectives of the myth Leda and the Swan. I’ve heard of the myth and since I’m an English major I’ve definitely encountered it a fair share of times, but for some reason I could not remember what it was specifically about. When it comes to mythologies there is always a lot of lore and extensive family trees that are important and sometimes necessary to understand certain myths, but if it’s not your focus or passion, the hundreds of names can easily slip your mind.

Once I got a refresher on what the myth was about it made a lot of sense that it would be used for the research paper we were assigned since the topic is women’s bodies. What I noticed immediately is that the language used to describe Leda was not only focused on her body, but her helplessness. She was described as white, staggering, like a lost puppy or something. One of the other poems likened her to a statue with a gold collar, and I thought that imagery was just as frustrating. Leda is the victim in this myth, every version of it, but any description of Zeus was about how great and strong he was. What’s worse is that I kind of expected it, which in and of itself speaks volumes about how women are portrayed, because it’s a clue to how they are treated in our reality.

Creating the outline for my research paper was a little less scary when I actually set out to do it since we had done an activity last week to pull together potential sources and ideas, but still quite daunting. Organizing things is something I usually enjoy doing but sometimes it can be frustrating to try and settle all of my thoughts into one set order, especially when I’m writing.

There’s a lot I want to say about my topic, and I’m apprehensive because I know I write the most when I’m passionate about something. Suppressing those feelings into a more academic tone feels like code-switching, if that makes sense. Like I’m dampening my personality, which I suppose for a research paper is the whole point, but it also feels like I’m detaching myself from the topic when it directly correlates to me as a Black woman. This is why I prefer creative writing to academic writing.

Other than that what really helped was the fact that my outline did not have to be in bullet points. We were given other papers that had different shapes that we could put topics into, and writing it out was a bit less stressful than traditional outlining. I’m starting to feel more confident about it.

One of my classmate’s readings was from the first book in a trilogy called His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. I’ve never read this series but from the context (and the pages provided), I think I’d be interested in reading a bit more about it. The concept of having your soul existing outside of your body as an entirely different entity is fascinating, but in this setting, it’s devastating because people are dismembering the souls of children from their bodies. It reminds me a lot of The Golden Compass which if I’m recalling correctly their animal companions had a direct connection to their life force, and Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which every Avatar befriended an animal guide that shared a supernatural bond with them that could not be broken. I like to think that my childhood cat, Copper, would have been my animal guide.

The conversation in the pages often revolved around the protagonist, Lyra, whom it seems they are planning to manipulate in some sort of way. Some of the commentary that I thought was interesting was this line “‘That’s the duty of the old,’ said the Librarian, ‘to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.’” which made me think about society as a whole. I know that it is definitely true that “the old” (mentors, relatives, teachers) are anxious on the behalf of the young. In my own experience you see this especially within the church because there are simultaneously a lack of young people and an abundance that are simply not reached, and they worry about young people staying in the church.

As for the young scorning the anxiety of the old–the YA genre, specifically when it focuses on dystopian stories, was always my favorite as a teenager. There was something about being young that felt powerful, because we had enough freedom and loose ends to rebel. The wisdom of “the old” wasn’t always heeded because it felt restrictive of the future we thought we saw ahead of us. Their knowledge was also heavily influenced by stereotypes that people are still struggling to let go of, which is why our perception of one another can be very flawed.

For my research I had a few key words/phrases that I was searching for: Black women, perception, trauma, society/social, anything along those lines. A lot of my research provided insight for both men and women as a whole, which I’m not surprised by because there are lots of things about BIPOC, regardless of gender, that go unmentioned, especially in academic spaces. I wasn’t entirely sure what specifically to look for, I just was searching for something in the general area of “Black women are affected by…” which I did, and I think I can use them in my paper.

I did however find a source about social theory and trauma, which lines up pretty well with my primary source, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Starr experiences the tragic death of her friend right in front of her eyes, but then later on we realize that Khalil’s death is not the first traumatic experience that Starr has gone through. She bore witness to her other childhood friend’s death at a much younger age, which has no doubt affected her mental state and her desperation to preserve the Starr that goes to a prep school and keep that version of herself separate from the Starr that lives in the “ghetto”.

Socially, Starr has learned which parts of her personality that she needs to dampen in order to survive. She does not want to be seen as weak, so she cannot cry in her prep school. She can’t be seen as ghetto, so she’s more soft-spoken, not to mention the code-switching that she does verbally, which we know is different because we are able to determine her true thoughts through narration. This pressure to keep these split personalities is a subconscious strain on Starr, and it’s because of the stereotypes surrounding Black women that she feels the need to tailor her words and behavior this way.

Having just read As You Like It in my Shakespeare II class, I thought it was cool to see that one of my classmates was going to use it for their paper, likely with a focus on Rosalind. Her agency as a woman is something she expands beyond the normal barriers when she goes undercover and assumes another identity, using her knowledge of gendered expectations to have her way with the people around her. She’s like an advanced cupid who was matchmaking other people along with herself. If you were to compare her cross-dressing experience to Viola from The Tempest, Rosalind had much more freedom and flexibility even considering her circumstance as a banished individual.

With another assigned reading, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, there was a character that was ostracized and disowned after she became pregnant, a life event that is unfortunately common in both works of fiction and real life. She tells her daughter years later that men will always find a way to point an accusatory finger at women, which sets this tone of how ingrained this oppression is. Rosalind was able to take advantage of the expectations of her gender because of her undercover identity as a man. Although she became the object of another woman’s infatuation, Rosalind used her influence and authority as a man to set up the relationships that would most benefit her. She wanted to be married, and at the end of the play she got what she wanted, though not every woman is granted such a choice.

Women are the ones to conceive if sexual relations occur–whether intentional orotherwise–so taking advantage of our life where we can is essential for a positive life experience. Considering that, I think Rosalind serves as quite an example.