Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Global Experience, Tribe, Rage, Religion/superstition, Human Kindness,…

- - - - After Aimee fires M.C. and ruins her career, M.C. releases evidence of an illegal adoption that Aimee was a part of. Aimee and her people responded by saying that those were all lies and that the media eats all this up. The media was telling this story to the masses in one particular light and the people were believing it without thinking everything through. Everything became black and white, Aimee is being used attacked by an old employee and that employee was a horrible person. They were hollow because they weren't looking at the nuance of the situation. They never asked why the employee retaliated, they simply saw her as horrible. If they choose to try not to be hollow and look for nuance, it would mean that Aimee is not some perfect celebrity, which would challenge the black-and-white world that hollow people prefer to live in.
        
        Swing Time - Zadie Smith
  - - - Refugees will always break social norms for the sole reason and they do not move to a new country in the 'traditional' way. In this novel specifically, they have to live on the streets, which is against social norms, they cannot work, also against social norms, and they are also (forced to be) dependent on the government and other people, which is again against social norms. Because refugees go against social norms, they are looked down upon, even though they do not really have any control over the situation.
        
        Throughout the novel, many of the refugees begin to develop the mentality of if they will go against social norms for just existing in this space, then they might as well stop trying to fit in and fight the government to allow them to live in the country - and thus fit into social norms. They work on different types of protests which go against social norms even more. Hunger strikes, trying to set oneself on fire, standing on roofs, and more. All of those go against social norms in a larger way then they were in hopes to make change. In order to be given the opportunity to fit into social norms, they first must break them.
        
        Go, Went, Gone - Jenny Erpenbeck
    - - In connection with tribe, there are other people in the town who do not fit into social norms and so she becomes friends with them. There is a reason why she lives in the woods by herself, just as with her neighbours. They get along with society because they are so different from society and it's norms. So Janina is able to bond with others who are also rejecting social norms. Thus they come their own social community with their own social norms.
    - - It is because she completely rejects social norms that the men in her life start to control her more any more. By rejecting social norms, they lose their grip on her which is why they work so hard to have her eat meat again. This only makes her more adamant in her decision to reject these norms because what they are doing so only proving why she should reject social norms.
        
        The society that she lives in says that because she is a women, she is less than men and are like their property. She is to be treated the same way that that she treats animals. So, Yeong-hye decides to completely reject society. It is impossible to change the world you live in by yourself, so challenging it would be pointless, thus, she stops living by the rules of that society. She stops wearing a bra, doesn't wear any clothes when she can, and stops eating meat. She would not be able to change the world, but she can ignore the social norms that are created. She wants to live in a world that she likes, and to do that she has to pretend that this one does not have any control over her.
  - - - This Mournable Body Tsitsi Dangarembga
  - - - Hollow people is an idea that is introduced in this novel, explained by Oshima on page 181. He explains it as "People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to."
        
        Those who are hollow tend to be angrier and have a life that they enjoy less, as seen clearly with the woman who calls Oshima sexist. Whereas those who are not hollow tend to be happier and more at peace with their lives because they know who they are and who they want to be; and they are content with that.
  - - - Hollow people being dangerous and hurting other people happens several different times throughout the novel. One clear time is what starts Oshima off in talking about hollow people, and that is when two women come into the library and accuse Oshima of being sexist without any actual reasons. They have been told that when a man disagrees with them that there is a sexist element to it, and they bother to think about what that means, they just accept it. So they try and hurt Oshima, emotionally at least, by calling him sexist and mean.
        
        Kafka's father is hollow and so thinks that he has power and is able to use it when he wishes because that ideology benefits him he never challenges it so he continues to live in it, hurting those around him. And that results in his son being so fed up that he kills him.
        
        Though never explicitly said, Kafka's father and Johnnie Walker are the same people. Ish. It is very complicated and supposed to be confusing with no clear answer. But what is clear is that he is very strange, and hollow, at least the father is. Because of this hollowness, he is mean and hurts Kafka. Because he is the father and 'in charge' he thinks that he has the ability to be mean and hurt those under him, mainly his son. (Though I believe it is next said) it is also clear that the reason Kafka's mother left is because of the father and his abusive tendencies.
    - - Essentially all the government workers in this novel are hollow, or at least, they are hollow when it comes to the idea of refugees. Because they are hollow, the government in general, they are unwilling to work with the refugees on case-by-case bases, thus hurting the refugees. The laws that were created about refugees were created without really thinking of refugees as real people. The fact that they can only have refugee status in the country they first arrived in shows that. This law hurts the refugees because it does not see them as people, and it forces them to live in a place that might not be best for them. Not all countries are as realistically available for refugees and this law does not think about that. Thus the government's hollowness and lack of imagination are dangerous as they hurt the refugees and make their lives unnecessarily hard.
- - - - Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
- - - - However, because he is mentally disabled he will never fall into social norms and society is okay with that. He has the ability to separate himself from social norms, and in a way he does, however, he doesn't do it knowingly and that is part of what makes him so interesting. He wants to fall into social norms but would never really be able to
- - - - Zimbabwe was controlled by Britain for a very long time and the way that Britain left was because of the War for Liberation, in which Black Zimbabweans fought the British and they ultimately left the country. The people who fought against the British were just normal, citizens who were tired of seeing a foreign force control their homes and manipulate them into hating themselves and practicing customs from a different culture. In this novel, the women in Tambu's family all fought in the war, and allow to have a connection through that. Tambu, however, was sent to a private White Christain school. So she was separated from them and does not have the bond the way that the majority of the people in her village have with each other. She was sent to the school because it was felt that that would be the best way for her to succeed, but all it did was make her feel alone.
        
        Tambu is not White. But the school that she went to was the majority, if not exclusively. The school taught British and White, very colonial, ideas of what it means to succeed, and so Tambu took those as truths, after all, she was just a child. So Tambu gets stuck in the middle. She is not White, so the way that she has been told to succeed never works for her. The idea that others must suffer for her to succeed does not imply to her, because she is Black, she is the person that is supposed to suffer. But because she did not fight in the war, she does not have that connection with her family and her village - she does not have that culturally shared experience. She is alone, her body is no longer colonized because Britain left, but her mind very much still is.
  - - - Though what happens in this novel is not exactly colonialism or neo-colonialism, it is similar to this idea and so it will be put in this section.
      - Take me: I am from British Columbia, and my grandparents moved there in the 1970s. Would I be considered a native of B.C. in this world? And if not, if only the Coast Salish people would be considered native (we are going to ignore the political tensions and complexities in that area for this example), where would I be native? Would that be Denmark where my mother is from? Though I never lived there and barely know the language. Or would I be considered a native of Maryland as that is currently where I live?
- - - - The only two times that Yeong-hye actively resists what is happening to her and around her. The first is when her father tries to force-feed her meat, and the second time is when is in the hospital and the doctors try to force a feeding tube into her mouth because she is refusing to eat. She refuses to eat because plants do not eat and she feels as though she is one. The only time she acts less like a plant is when people challenge that part of her. Just as plants protect themselves (fungi with poisons and roses with thorns), she protects herself when she is at risk.
        
        When In-hye plans on killing herself, she goes into the woods and plans to hang herself from a tree. She wanted to die in nature, the only place where women can be free.
      - Because plants are (at least seen as) not sentient, they are passive and are not seen as fighting back. Therefore, because she sees herself as a plant, she does not resist when things happen to her or around her (most of the time). That in itself becomes her resisting the patriarchy and the sexism that surrounds her. Her choosing not to care aggravates those who are around her and want to control her.
  - - - Climate change is a motif that, though rarely said, is prevalent in this novel. Nature and animals are being destroyed because of human greed. There is a type of beatle that is dying because humans are cutting down the trees that they lay eggs in for timber. Similarly, some hunters are poaching deer and birds for fun. These people think that they have more of a right to live and to do things than animals and nature. All this destruction is for personal gain.
        
        Drive Your Plow of the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk