Voices
One of the most interesting parts of my research was watching the TED Talk, “How do the poor see life? Uneducated, not stupid” by Rahin Makhijani. For a “you” living on one side of education, certain systemic privileges, and economic security, he asks “you” to envision another “you” who is living on the other side, who sees and approaches life very differently. It takes time commitment, difficult realizations, and compassion to reach an understanding of the other side, but it is ultimately worth it. “When you put together the money that the slum dweller pays for the authorities to look away… [for every] monsoon to avert a threatened demolition… for the illegal electricity point per bulk connection… for a bucket of water… the slum is the most expensive place to live. And the poor are paying it today, but we still call them illegitimate, because it is we, from this side of the world, who define what legitimate is.” His words act as a bridge between the two worlds that raises awareness of how the socioeconomically better-off have defined themselves as the normal, humane side, an idea that is contested and turned on its head in my chosen novel, The White Tiger.
I also loved the article titled “India Schools Stay Closed, and Hopes Fade for a Lost Generation,” published in The New York Times. We’ve discussed how poverty and trauma are passed down generationally, like in Beloved and As I Lay Dying, but this article brought the real, practical mechanisms hampered by corruption and lack of accountability, to life. When education is a privilege, as it is for tens of millions in India’s lower classes, and not a right, social mobility is unimaginably difficult. When there are conflicts of interests in the bureaucracies of education, when school administrators pocket funding for themselves, when there is no sufficient food, and especially when a pandemic makes in-person learning impossible, economic inequality worsens.
I hope people will learn the fundamentals of how caste is created and upheld by societies. The complex storytelling, violence, and segregation that goes into making another group of people the “other” can teach us a lot about social division. Books like The White Tiger personalize and humanize one “other” in society, the socioeconomically disadvantaged, and I hope people will think about how books in general can do this for all different kinds of “other”s.
Some of the most important learning I did at my time here at NNHS occurred in Mrs. Parato’s online AP Language class. She put together three slide presentations for us bursting with poems, essays, short stories, speeches, and videos from American history and modern times. I read/watched every source in those presentations, and it gave me an insatiable curiosity about the stories and experiences of others, which I discovered through books. The best way I have heard it put so far (and this is also included in the last slide of my voices project) is in the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am.
“This is the gift of a novel. No other art form allows us to enter and thereby dignify the inner life of another human being so thoroughly; allows us to experience the inner life of another human being – the secret inner life. What it is that person feels. Not their opinions. Not their social conditions. But what does it feel like to be that person?”
I’ve always viewed high school as a stepping stone, a period of painful growth and instability, to the really great thing, the “time of my life,” college. To future NNHS seniors, I would say that there is so much more ahead of you, whatever you choose to pursue after high school. The world is your oyster; this is just one page of your story, and you get to write the rest. There are so many experiences to be gained and fun to be had during your last year of high school, but if things are ever looking a little bleak or second semester suddenly isn’t feeling like the haven it was promised to be, there is something more beyond, and you will make it through. As I wrote in my last blog last semester, I would argue that AP Literature is as much about life as it is about language; the novels that we study in this class span a wide range of voices from different times and places, and it’s such a privilege to have the resources provided by Mrs. Hitzeman and Mrs. Trowbridge, and the thoughts of your classmates, with you as you journey through this year. Ponder the deeper meaning of a novel, and you may find that it changes the way you see your world.