Charnay Kirkland Public Feed

Separation

Posted by Charnay Kirkland on

Being a refugee is hard. It can be mentally and physically draining. Leaving everything you know to be somewhere else, a place that you potentially won’t be welcome is a very big sacrifice. Nothing will ever be the same, no matter how hard you try. But one thing that could be affected specifically is relationships. It is very rare that a set of people remain together for the entirety of their trip to wherever they decide to go. When this happens, particularly with children, it can cause many problems and strain in the relationship. And even if they stay together, the harrowing living and traveling conditions can cause arguments and any misstep can ruin the fate of everyone that you are with. Through reading all of the things that I’ve read in class within the past two or three months, I have come to realize that stressful situations can almost always cause a (sometimes permanent) strain on a relationship.

In Enrique’s Journey, the titular character, Enrique, has a mother that immigrates to the United States from Honduras when he was very young. She promises to return, but he grows up and lives a portion of his adult life without her. After a life of yearning for his mother’s love, he decides to travel up to the US to be with her. When he gets there, it’s not at all what he expected. On page 191, it compares this to that of the Odyssey and the works of O. Henry, stating, “Children like Enrique dream of finding their mothers and living happily ever after. For weeks, perhaps months, these children and their mothers cling to romanticized notions of how they should feel toward each other. Then reality intrudes. The children show resentment because they were left behind. They remember broken promises to return and accuse their mothers of lying… The mothers, for their part, demand respect for their sacrifice: leaving their children for the children’s sake. When their children say, “ You abandoned me,” they respond by hauling out tall stacks of money transfer receipts.” As you can presume, what ended up happening was something that neither of them would have expected. The relationship between him and his mother is so strained that they barely even know each other. Her decision to immigrate for a better life ended up messing up whatever great relationship she could have had with her son.

In the story Exit West, Saeed and Nadia are a pair of young people living in an unnamed city that end up falling in love with each other. However, a sudden war enters their city and they were forced to flee. Throughout the entirety of the book, we see Nadia and Saeed drift farther and farther apart from each other. They speak about it a little bit on page 204. “Saeed and Nadia were loyal, and whatever name they gave their bond they each in their own way believed it required them to protect each other, and so neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share, and a shared intimate language that was unique to them, and a sense that what they might break was special and likely irreplaceable.” We can see that all of this traveling and moving around has definitely taken a toll on their relationship. They ended up dating other people by the end of the book. Now, no one can be sure that they would have definitely worked out if the war never happened, but everything that happened in the book definitely expedited the process.

In the short story Wildwood, the main character (and narrator) is a teenager living with her mom and younger brother in New Jersey. This is one story that is not really focused on immigration/refugees; instead focusing on poverty, which is a different kind of stressful situation. The narrator has a very bad relationship with her mother; she constantly berates and abuses her daughter, verbally and sometimes physically.

Immigration is usually a grueling and unenjoyable process. If you add on being a refugee, the process becomes the ultimate test of strength and perseverance. You rarely ever end the journey the same person you were when you started. And based off of stuff that I’ve read in this class, many relationships cannot stand the aforementioned test. The situation is too stressful and strenuous on the psyche, usually in a negative way. In fact, I think that any stressful situation can take a toll on a relationship, in a multitude of different ways.

Works Cited: Nazario, Sonia. Enriques Journey. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014.

Mbue, Imbolo. Behold the Dreamers: a Novel. New York: Random House Inc, 2017.

Meloy, Colin, Carson Ellis, and Junot Diaz. Wildwood. St. Louis, MO: Turtleback Books, 2017.

LOTF Essay- Kirkland

Posted by Charnay Kirkland on

In the book the Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a group of boys are stranded on an island. They have no guidance, and even worse, they have no way to get off. They decide to work together to stay alive. There are around twenty boys in total, but Jack is considered to be the main antagonist of the group. He is a ticking time bomb, even from the beginning, but as the story goes on, he progressively becomes more and more deranged.  This is similar predicament to that of Kanye West. He was known to be a man who spoke up on more taboo issues in society, even when those things could have gotten into a troubling situation. He is now distracted by his title and his role in the rap game. The main thing that these two very different individuals have in common is that they both were always a little unstable, but when they were put into the positions of high power, they changed for the worse. This effect on Jack and Kanye West demonstrates how power has the ability to transform one’s sense of self in multiple negative ways.

Initially, Jack does an okay job at being apart of the team. He makes compromises with other boys, obeys orders, and hunts for pigs. He, in general, did a very good job at trying to make sure that everything on the island went smoothly. Kanye, on the other hand, also did a great job of shaking the table in Hollywood. He was very vocal about his opinions and he was considered to be a voice for the world when the world didn’t want to speak about certain issues. A good example is his songs, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” which tells the story of ‘blood diamonds’, the majority of which are mined using child slave labor in African countries like Sierra Leone.  Another example is his song, “All Falls Down,” which is mainly a self-reflection of his own personal battle with consumerism. A good quote that stands out is, “We'll buy a lot of clothes, but we don't really need 'em, things we buy to cover up what's inside, 'cause they made us hate ourself and love they wealth, that's why shorty's hollerin', "Where the ballers at?” Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack, and the white man get paid off of all of that.” He also discusses other issues in society, such as the problematic judicial and education systems of white America. Acting as a normal human being in their respective worlds, with nothing special about them, Jack and Kanye both were relatively productive beings who knew to do the right thing, and usually did so.

On the island, all’s well for a while, but eventually, chaos ensues. The boys break up into two groups, the bigger group being led by Jack. He was always quite unhinged, but when he gets into the position of power over the boys, he begins to change. They describe this on page 160, “The chief was sitting there, naked to the waist, his face blocked out in white and red. The tribe lay in a semicircle before him.” Before this point in the book, Jack was always referred to by his name. Now, though, he forces himself to be called chief by the other boys that he’s leading. This shift in power has made him feel as though he is better than the rest of the boys. The name change shows a more authoritative tone, and the fact that he wants to be called chief 100% of the time is questionable because there was no logical reason for him to do so. This situation is almost mirrored by Kanye’s. After consistent critical acclaim as a producer, songwriter, and activist, he almost ruins his career at the 2009 VMA’s. That year, Taylor Swift won an award for Video of the Year for her song, “You Belong With Me”. As she was giving her speech, Kanye ran up on the stage and said, “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” This lead to him becoming a social pariah, and he left the limelight for a couple of months. This stunt led to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which, fortunately for him, is thought of by many to be the best albums made by him to date. From here, he began to shift as a person. After MBDTF, he released Yeezus, in which he repeatedly states that he only wants to be called Yeezus, because he feels as though he is a god and should be treated as such.

By the end of the book, Jack had become a heartless leader. This was visible with the deaths of Simon and Piggy. He made excuses about them dying, felt no guilt, and convinced the boys to do the same because of his power over them. This is a significant shift in Jack’s character. On the other hand, Kanye has also shifted into a completely different person than who he was before. More recently, he has endorsed Donald Trump, which completely conflicts anything that he’s fought for/wanted before. For those who don’t know, Trump is constantly in the news for being a racist, a sexist, and extremely xenophobic, something that Kanye constantly spoke about as a issue in society constantly on previous occasions.  

Seeing these examples of the change of both Kanye and Jack should be more than enough evidence that the way that people think about themselves are almost always changed when they are made to feel better or more superior than someone else. When people are are made to feel that they are better than the next guy, they begin to believe it. It is easy to let that get to one’s head and transform the way that one thinks about themselves and others. In order to avoid this from happening, our society would have to remind people of what we all are: a set of flesh and bones. One set of flesh and bones is not better than another.


Home Network-Charna Kirkland

Posted by Charnay Kirkland on
1. In my LAN, there are plenty of devices. It is connected to many, many devices in my home, such as my family computer, my family laptop, my school laptop, all of our tv’s, my printer, and everyone’s phone (there are 4).

2. I learned a lot about my home network while doing this project. I learned that my internet at home is surprisingly faster than most people's internet in my stream and around the world. I also learned that I have a combination modem/router, which is also not very common with people in my class. In general, my house is fairly technologically advanced. This was an OMG moment because I realized that I am blessed to have the life that I have, and I learned that I shouldn't take it for granted.

3. ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. Most of the time, your internet service provider is also your cable provider, but not always. For example, my internet service provider is Verizon Fios, but my cable provider is Directv. An easy way to see who your ISP is to look at your modem. This can be anywhere in your house, so you have to find it and it should be right on the top/side.
RSS