Freewrite taken from Cristina Peri Rossi's State of Exile, translated by Marilyn Buck (Citylights Books).
Students were instructed to take a line from the poem and reflect on it. Here is the poem:
The Exile II
We speak languages that are not ours
we walk around without passports
or identity papers
we write hopeless letters
that we don't send
we are numerous forlorn intruders
survivors
and at times that
makes us feel guilty (43).
2. The Dance Boots: Write the paper
3. Homework: Complete the paper. Bring to class Monday for feedback
19 comments:
Karesha Lillard
Febuary 23, 2012
Professor Sabir
English 1B
The phrase in the poem that caught my attention was, "We speak languages that are not ours", and that part stuck out to me because if I think deeper into that I basically pulled out it saying that we speak a language that we dont understand, Pretty much amongst each other. A chose this futher think on this specific phrase because I also think its true. Now and days, I do not understand half the things going on in this world. Peoples behaviors, attitudes, and actions. We definately speak languages that are not ours.
Marie Heide
23 February 2012
Prof. Sabir
English 1B
Today, we heard a poem written by Cristina Peri Rossi called “State of Exile.” The poem was translated from Spanish to English by Marilyn Buck. While listening to the poem, I got the sense of someone who had been exiled or placed away from their “normal” life. Rossi describes this type of exile as one where no one knows who you are or even cares to know who you are. The poem states that you have no passports or even identification to show who you are. The last few lines of the poem that state “…we are numerous forlorn intruders…. Survivors…. And at times that…. Makes us feel guilty” (Rossi). That line is so powerful to me because the individuals who are exiled and who actually survive the whole ordeal, have a guilty conscience for doing so. It is almost as if the exile is a group effort, people placed together in one confined place. If any one person does not make it through the exile, the group looses a piece of itself, which is the only identity that they have to show themselves as being anything at all.
Brittney Brunner
23 February 2012
Prof. Sabir
English 1B
"We are numerous forlorn intruders survivors and at times that makes us feel guilty"(43).
To me this line says that we all had our own language at some point in time but in some kind of way we had to learn someone elses language, whether we were forced, or had to learn it in order to survive and being that our native tounge is all we have left of our history and culture, having to give it up makes us feel ashamed and yet it makes us feel exiled by our own language.
Pauline Ng
Prof. Sabir
02/23/2012
Today in class, Professor Sabir had shared a short poem called State of Exile written by Cristina Peri Rossi. We had to choose a line to focus our thought on and I chose the first line that says “We speak languages that are not ours”. The first line stood out for me, because I speak majority English, but that is not my native language. My native language is Cantonese, but since because I am born here in America I have adapted to the Western way of living more than my own culture.I do have families that come from other country and struggle with learning, speaking and understanding the languages. It is an amazing thing that people all over the world have to learn other languages to survive.
Billy Russell
February 23, 2012
Professor Sabir
English 1B
I chose this line, because I believe that it best captures the idea of the poem. The poem is about being exiled to a foreign place. The writer feels like an outcast, she knows that she doesn’t fit in because speaking the new language feels strange to her. The new country or place that she is in speaks either a different language or dialect than she does. At least she is with other exiled people apparently, because she uses the word “we.”
Languages could also be metaphorical; it is possible that the author is using the word language to mean a way of living. It could be the author’s way of saying that she is not used to the culture and customs of the new place. The people she meets in her new country might do things so differently it is like they are speaking a different language.
Jacob (Ingook) Kim
23 February 2012
Professor Sabir
English 1B
The last line of the poem, “that makes us feel guilty,” caught my attention as soon as I heard it, which seemed to me like an expression of survival’s guilt. I am not aware of the exact background of this poem, but I expect that the writer is one of the survivals of a persecuted group. Survival’s guilt refers to the sense of guiltiness that prevails among survivals, who tend to believe that they survived at the expanse of others. My home country, South Korea, used to be under the rule of military dictatorship. My parents, once students, participated in a sequence of movements for democracy, and witnessed their friends dying, still sometimes feeling guilty for their survival. Having experienced the tragedy through secondary sources, I could sympathize with the writer when she showed her grief.
Giao Bui
Febuary 23, 2012
Professor Sabir
English 1B
We listened to a poem called The Exile II from State of Exile by Christina Peri Rossi that is translated into English by Marilyn Buck. The poem is written in the voice of a group of people who are illegal immigrants. The lines that stood out the most to me were “we write hopeless letters that we don’t send.” This line stuck with me because it shows the helpless situation the speaker is. They want to cry out for help but are unable to because they are intruders . The last lines “and at times we feel guilty” also leaves a strong impression. It shows that the speaker is not regretful of their actions because they only admit to feeling guilty but do not claim that they are indeed guilty.
Vanessa Dilworth
Professor Sabir
English 1A 8-8:50
23 February 2012
Exile II: Response
I really like this poem it tells the story of a people’s arrival in a foreign land and their experiences there. The line that stuck out the most to me was, “we write hopeless letters, that we don’t send.” It caught my attention because I don’t understand the meaning of it in this poem. The rest of the poem is very clear to me. The beginning of the poem speaks about a people that speak a foreign language; I interpret this to mean perhaps they communicate in the native tongue of the land in which they now reside in and not where they are from. The poem goes on to say the alien people walk around with no passport. To include that they have no legal documentation stating they can live where they are takes their arrival to another height, and could possibly be interpreted to mean they come to where they are illegally and undocumented. This also could mean that they can’t travel out, even to where they came from. To me this is kind of ironic. The poem goes further and states that their survival makes them feel remorseful. I’m guessing this feeling is directed towards the ones that they have left behind in their homeland.
The phrase that stuck out the most to me was in the middle of these expressions. I guess it could mean letters that the arrivals intend to send but don’t because the new life they are presently living is so different than the family and friend’s they left behind, making them foreign and alien especially to their suffering. The letters are hopeless because they aren’t sent, and are tainted from the start.
sdggbvwsbvgrwea
Mariam Assana
Febuary 23, 2012
Professor Sabir
English 1B
i loved line "we speak languages that are not ours". I love it because it reminded me of how my kids speak Arabic and English,but now they mostly speak English. They are forgetting our language Arabic because the school and the people around them speak English and my kids like to fit in their new life .English is easier for them .I do not allowed English at home ,but when i talk with them Arabic and they some times do not understand , i try to explain it in English.so really "We speak languages that are not ours". forget our language.
Sherrlyne Apostol
February 26, 2012
Professor Sabir
English 1B
In the peom "The Exile II" translated by Marilyn Buck she describes a character that feels some what "alone" in their enviorment. From reading the poem I found that it seemed like the character was forced to live in an unfamiliar place. A place which was not "home" but a place that made them feel unwelcomed. Buck illustrates this when she says, "We speak languages that are not ours". The character being described in the poem seems like someone who feels that they are less important from everyone else. Someone who feels that they've lost thier own identity being in foregin land. The character is an outcast to it's social surroundings. The character feels isolated and even a little hopeless. They feel so different that they feel they are the ones doing the wrong. "We are numerous forlorn intruders survivors and at times that makes us guilty", the character feels guilty for being somewhere they feel like intruders.
Maribel Arrizon
Professor Sabir
27 February 2012
English 1B
The phrase that stuck to me was "we are numerous forlorn intruders/survivors" because it made me think of the various undocumented immigrants in the US. None of these people ever wanted to be in the US undocumented and treated like dogs. But they do this to give their families a better life. They are survivors because believe it or not the messed up life that they get in the US is better than what they had in their home lands.
Alexandra Scannell
24 February 2012
W. Sabir
"We write hopeless letters
that we don't send"
This line stood out to me most because people often give up on speaking THEIR truth. In this poem, it seems as if the author feels like she is out of place. As I was reading most of the responses,I can tell it depicts a woman talking about oppression of immigrants however, from my point of view, this poem meant more than just being an outcast in a physical, foreign place. I see this poem as expression of the abandonment of one's own comfort or lost in translation.
Ryan Gozinsky-Irwin
February 28th, 2012
Professor Sabir
English 1B
From the poem, "State of Exile" by Christina Peri Rossi my favorite line was, " We write hopeless letters, that we don't send". The reason why this line appealed to me so much was because it implies that we aren't being true to ourselves and we are really helpless pathetic people. We are afraid to act on things that really bother us and just let society push us around.
Stephanie Kallens
29 February 2012
Prof. Sabir
English 1B
In the poem "The Exile II", the author is speaking about the transition from her, or immigrants', home country to one that is completely foreign. As a child of an immigrant family, I've heard the stories of feeling hopeless, like an outcast as the author does. Her line "we write hopeless letters that we don't send" draws a picture of a desperate immigrant left alone in a completely foreign land without anyone to talk to. As an immigrant, you don't want the family you left behind to think your voyage wasn't worth it, so no matter how miserable you might feel, it's not worth the pain it could cause your family to feel knowing that you are indeed alone. Whether one is an immigrant or not, feeling like you don't have someone to talk to, or "send letters to", can make you feel like a foreigner in your own environment.
Demetria Owens
Febuary 23,2012
Professor Sabir
Eng 1B
The phrase in the poem. The Exile 2, that caught my attention was, "We speak languages that are not ours". The phrase makes me refelect on how my current generation uses "slang language" to speak to eachother and sometimes even using the langauge as code talk amongst eachother so no one else wound understand and identify the substance of the converstation . Also the phrase makes me think of certain people and cultures of young generation may use a word and not know it's true diffinition and meaning of the word, it's content or where the word orgenated from. For example which country it came from or which language it came from.
Demetria Owens
Febuary 23,2012
Professor Sabir
Eng 1B
The phrase in the poem. The Exile 2, that caught my attention was, "We speak languages that are not ours". The phrase makes me refelect on how my current generation uses "slang language" to speak to eachother and sometimes even using the langauge as code talk amongst eachother so no one else wound understand and identify the substance of the converstation . Also the phrase makes me think of certain people and cultures of young generation may use a word and not know it's true diffinition and meaning of the word, it's content or where the word orgenated from. For example which country it came from or which language it came from.
Post a Comment