Dreaming in Cuban Essay Example for Free

Dreaming in Cuban Essay All summer she has lived in her memories . . .. Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present. In Celias life, it always has. Celia is caught in the folds of time. Her central memory is that of Gustavo Sierra de Armas, the married Spaniard with whom Celia, when she was a very young department store clerk in Havana, had an intense love affair that was truncated by his unannounced departure. For twenty-five years, until the triumph of the revolution, Celia writes to Gustavo on the eleventh day of each month, keeping the un-mailed letters in a satin lined box. I watch the sun rise, burning its collection of memories, she writes to Gustavo and later, Memory is a skilled seducer who hover around the mid-century of life recall the rumors of multiple seductions by the dictator at the presidential palace. For Celia, these rumors become present reality, with Celia as one of the seduced. He does not age, nor does she. In Celias reveries, memory is most often sensualized and is always infused and injected with imagination. Memory is scripted, the script becoming more real than fact. As Celias daughter Felicia will tell her son Ivanito, Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths . . . . The matriarch of the novels dreamers, Celia seems engaged in an eternal wait that is never concluded, never satisfied. Her life, like her time, is arrested, moving then in long, elliptical swirls like patterns drawn on the sand by her beloved sea, whose waters envelop her again and again at critical junctures, cleansing and caressing her, then depositing her once again on shore, amid the folds of time. Three generations of Cuban women dominate this marvelously told story of a family divided by politics and the Castro revolution in Cuba. Celia del Pino is the effective head of the family. She is a loyal follower of Castro who watches the beaches near her small home to protect from a surprise attack from the assumed enemies of the regime. Her daughter Felicia also remains in Cuba, but has no interest in politics and has recurring bouts of insanity but finally dies when she succumbs to a fanatical version of Cuban Santeria religion. Her sister Lourdes immigrates to the United States and exalts in her own version of the American dream becoming a successful owner of a small bakery chain. Lourdes is as bitterly anti-Castro as her mother is pro. Finally we have Pilar, daughter of Lourdes and born the very year that Castro took power. Raised in Brooklyn, but with strong feelings of her Cuban roots, Pillar is a punk artist and later musician. She is caught with a foot in both words, nostalgic for Cuba and her grandmother, but fully rooted in the cultural scene of New York City. There are other members of the del Pino family who play lesser roles and Celia’s late husband, Jorge, plays the most curious role, a bit of magic realism as he spends several years in conversation with Lourdes after he has died. Only gradually does he fade away leaving Lourdes in a position where she can finally pay a visit to her aging and dying mother in Cuba. Dreaming in Cuban is told in segments related by numerous narrative consciousnesses, usually in the third person, from time planes that move backward and forward but follow a general linear chronological direction. What we learn of Lourdes comes primarily from the third-person narrative segments devoted to her and, secondarily, from the reflections of her daughter and her mother in the sequences narrated by or devoted to them. Lourdes has passed into exile, like so many of her contemporaries in 1961, with her husband Rufino Puente and their two-year-old daughter, Pilar. Lourdes has tried to force roots into the northern soil of Brooklyn, and genuinely believes that she has done so. In fact, when they leave Miami in a secondhand Chevy, unable to bear the endless brooding over their wealth, the competition for dishwasher jobs of Rufinos family, which has been ostentatiously prominent in Havana society, it is Lourdes who insists that they move ever northward, in search of the cold. New York City, finally, is cold enough. As enterprising and dynamic as Maria de los Angeles Mina Lopez in Roberto Fernandezs much praised 1988 novel Raining Backwards, Lourdes has founded the Yankee Doodle Bakery, and in time opens a second one. A fighter and a survivor, she has prospered. Lourdes takes pride in her love of order, her practicality. A take charge person who sees right and wrong in uncomplicatedly absolute terms, Lourdes becomes a volunteer auxiliary policewoman on a neighborhood beat, slapping her nightstick over and over into her palm before she goes out on patrol. Always estranged from her distant mother, Celia, who has been sent away to Havana by her own mother, never to see her again, Lourdes feels her parental affinity is with her father, Jorge del Pino, who railed over the years in Cuba at what he termed tropical squalor and who comes to New York to die of cancer. In Cristina Garcias 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban, Cuba is a pivotal presence. The work examines, through a wealth of female and male characters, with emphasis upon the matrilineal chain, the intense experience of Cuban ness. The island country of Cuba is portrayed from within and without, and the distance from it is measured through the fictive evocation of exile, exile once removed, and inner exile. Different views of Cuba both inspire and result from divergent exiles. I have chosen to approach the topic of Cuba as text and context in the novel through an analysis of three female characters: Lourdes del Pino Puente, a Cuban exile living in Brooklyn; her daughter Pilar, age 13 when the novel opens; and Lourdess mother, Celia del Pino, who has by choice indee insistence remained behind in Cuba, in her seaside home. In Cuba, Lourdes sister Felicia feels this unleapable distance even from her adored son Ivanito, with whom she has a powerful spiritual bond. What is he saying? his mother wonders about him. Each word is a code she must decipher, a foreign language, a streak of gunshot. Even with her boy, to whom she is more closely bound than to any other being save her mother, Felicia is unwillingly but undeniably alone. Between Ivanito and his older twin sistersstiff, unbending adherents to the regimethere is also estrangement based on language as vital posture, the sum and expression of ones stance in the world she inhabits. He will never speak his sisters language, account for his movements like a cow with a dull bell. The novels title, Dreaming in Cuban, suggests an idiom of belonging, a collective, ever imperfect antidote to isolation and estrangement. What Celia terms the morphology of survival† must always take into account the grammar of this culture specific language, Cuban. Lourdes believes herself impervious to any such considerations. Yet the sight of a lone elm set in concrete causes her to wonder if this individual is Dutch elm disease set the last of the dying species. Is it a metaphor for her own exile and separation? There are other signs as well. The New York City rivers along which Lourdes walks and patrols flow gray, absorbing the light, usually unable to return it as reflection, their color and coldness evocative of metal. Breezes from the sluggish river seem to inscribe [Lourdes] skin with metal tips. Gray is also the color of ash. Felicias third husband, falling onto the wires of a carnival ride in Cuba, turns to ash and blows northward, where he had wanted to go. For Lourdess mother, gray is also the color of memory: Memory cannot be confined . . .. Its slate gray, the color of undeveloped film. That memory has been free to follow Lourdes northward, and that she would permit it to do so is a thought she would surely deny. In her daughter Pilars memories, her mothers toucans and cockatoos, released when the revolutionaries took over the Puente hacienda, also flew north in confusiona confusion, which Lourdes emphatically rejects; she abhors all ambiguity. Yet the northern clime has inspired in her inordinate hungers. The first is an erotic appetite for Rufino, which leads her husband to install a bell in his workshop so as to be always available to her and which finally leaves him spent and weary, and the second is a concomitant craving for pecan sticky buns, which brings about a weight gain of 118 pounds. In Rufino, Lourdes is reaching for something beyond him, something he cannot give her; she may well seek in this physical union a reintegration she cannot attain, a reconnection with her remembered life left behind, with the Cuba she knew. The sticky buns, with their impossible forbidden sweetness, may be the closest Lourdes can come in exile to the sensorial bombardment, richly evoked in the pages of Dreaming in Cuban, of her island home. In Cuba, Lourdes sister Felicia feels this unleapable distance even from her adored son Ivanito, with whom she has a powerful spiritual bond. What is he saying? his mother wonders about him. Each word is a code she must decipher, a foreign language, a streak of gunshot. Even with her boy, to whom she is more closely bound than to any other being save her mother, Felicia is unwillingly but undeniably alone. Between Ivanito and his older twin sistersstiff, unbending adherents to the regimethere is also estrangement based on language as vital posture, the sum and expression of ones stance in the world she inhabits. He will never speak his sisters language, account for his movements like a cow with a dull bell. The novels title, Dreaming in Cuban, suggests an idiom of belonging, a collective, ever imperfect antidote to isolation and estrangement. What Celia terms the morphology of survival† must always take into account the grammar of this culture specific language, Cuban. Lourdes believes herself impervious to any such considerations. Yet the sight of a lone elm set in concrete causes her to wonder if this individual is Dutch elm disease set the last of the dying species. Is it a metaphor for her own exile and separation? There are other signs as well. The New York City rivers along which Lourdes walks and patrols flow gray, absorbing the light, usually unable to return it as reflection, their color and coldness evocative of metal. Breezes from the sluggish river seem to inscribe [Lourdes] skin with metal tips. Gray is also the color of ash. Felicias third husband, falling onto the wires of a carnival ride in Cuba, turns to ash and blows northward, where he had wanted to go. For Lourdess mother, gray is also the color of memory: Memory cannot be confined . . .. Its slate gray, the color of undeveloped film. That memory has been free to follow Lourdes northward, and that she would permit it to do so is a thought she would surely deny. In her daughter This is Cristina Garcia’s first novel. She was born in Havana, Cuba in 1958 but grew up in New York City. She attended Barnard College and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She has been a correspondent for Time magazine and lives in Los Angeles with her husband Scott Brown. Works Cited 1. DREAMING IN CUBAN, By Cristina Garcia, 245 pages New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. ISBN # 0-345-38143-2

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T.Y.W. 1618-1648 The Thirty Years War was a series of conflicts, not-knowingly involving most European countries from 1618 to 1648. The war, which was fought mainly in Germany, was started when Bohemian Protestants furiously attacked the Holy Roman Emperor in terms to impose a restriction on their religious and civil liberties. By understanding the Thirty Years War, you will notice the notable religious, political and social changes. The changes paved the religious and political maps of Europe. Not only did this war affect the religious and political demographic, it caused populations to perish and lose large amounts of their goods. What was known as a religious battle, turned out to be a political feud in competition of which state has the greater power affecting men, women, soldiers and civilians. â€Å"[The bohemians] had no idea that their violent deed would set off a chain reaction of armed conflict that would last thirty years and later be called Europe’s â€Å"first world war† of the modern era.† When the war ended, the lands were defiled and over 5 million people were killed. During the Thirty Years War, men and women had to experience trials and tribulations. Solders and officials, putting fear into the eyes of the countrymen, were testing all their patience, tolerance, and rights. The soldiers thought they could do anything they wanted because they abuse their powers. Citizens were often tortured by water boarding, daggers and hung if they did not satisfy the needs and wants of the officials. Martin Botzinger briefly describes his experience saying, â€Å"they beat me to the ground with daggers†¦ both my feet were bound together, and the other took the rope round my left arm, and they shoved me in water.† Scenes like this caused so ... ... then five more, one after another†¦ they allowed themselves to eat those bodies†¦ They said, ‘it was the great unbearable famine that did it.’† The struggle to find food was real. It was a heavy burden for people to bear. The need to stay a live became a daily struggle many civilian and soldiers. The Thirty Years War, known as a religious war started off as a small debacle between the bohemians and the Roman Catholics. Not knowing this was a beginning to something big. The war that lasted thirty years, allowed for torment and diminishing events to happen. Events that effected men, women and soldiers. While some suffered more than others, there was not much left to do but to deal with what you had. The war defiled the lands of Europe leaving individuals helpless without much to eat or look forward to. All in all, the Thirty years War paved the new European landscape

”Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens and ”Brick Lane” by Monica Ali Essay

Having read both Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and Brick Lane by Monica Ali, I am going to concentrate the city question on Brick Lane. Brick Lane tells the story of Nazneen, an eighteen year old moved to London from her rural upbringing in Bangladesh to Tower Hamlets, a close tight community of Bengali families living in blocks of flats struggling to make their way up in the city to earn sufficient money and a civilised upbringing for their children, yet still yearning to go back to their home land. Nazneen is married to Chanu, twenty years older than her, he is educated yet earns his money working as a taxi driver. This novel has clear descriptions of city life, the diversity of the people within and how Nazneen interprets the city from her point of view. There are many ways in which the material conditions of the city are described in this novel, the different areas of the city of London are described from the block of flats where Nazneen lives to the big office blocks in the city centre. City life in this novel begins with Nazneen describing the ‘Tattoo lady’ who lives in the block of flats opposite her, from here we become familiar with the lack of space and understand the very little room they have in the urban areas of London â€Å"Most of the flats that closed three sides of a square had net curtains and the life behind them was all shapes and shadows. But the tattoo lady had no curtains at all. Morning and afternoon she sat with her thighs spilling over the sides of her chair†¦.† By reading this, it is already forming an idea of the main settings of the novel which are the block of flats, very cramped and close, very little sense of privacy. We also get an idea of the type of people living around the area as well, the tattoo lady is frequently mentioned in the novel, informing us that â€Å"at least two thirds of the flesh on show was covered in ink.† Another material condition of the city we come across in this novel is when Nazneen actually considers visiting the tattoo lady at the flat opposite hers, however such is city life that Nazneen reconsiders this â€Å"The tattoo lady might be angry at an unwanted interruption.† Although this is not an actual object described in the city, from Nazneen’s thought we get an idea of the type of people she would come across whilst living in the city, it forms the surroundings of the narrative by mentioning Nazneen’s neighbours. Monica Ali also describes the smell of the surroundings where Nazneen lives â€Å"The breeze on Nazneen’s face was thick with the smell from the overflowing communal bins.† This material condition most definitely helps to form the surroundings of the novel shaping the condition of the area where Nazneen lives. Although Monica Ali has focused on forming the surroundings of the city where Nazneen lives with the smell and the neighbours, she has also formed the novel with the material conditions of inside the flat where Nazneen lives, in the novel Nazneen spends most of her time inside the flat â€Å"to sit day after day inside this large box with the furniture to dust, and the muffled sound of private lives sealed away above, below and around her.† By giving brief descriptions like this it shapes the scene of the narrative from the beginning of the novel, we are informed of the furniture inside the flat, Nazneen mentions that she has never seen more furniture inside one room, with all this, we are already shaping the narrative with the material conditions inside of Nazneen’s flat. Whilst living in the city, Nazneen mentions outdoor surroundings quite often, although she spends most of her time inside her flat or at Razia’s, whenever Nazneen has gone outside the boundaries of her area, we as the are given more description of the actual city conditions â€Å"There were more cars than people out here; a roaring metal army tearing up the town.† By describing the cars as an army tearing up the town, we can immediately shape the city life of the narrative with the pollution and the noise of the cars. We can imagine the dirt and the hustle of the city. â€Å"The people who passed walked, looked ahead at nothing or looked down at the pavement to negotiate puddles, litter and excrement.† This was the material conditions of the city life which helped form the narrative, which helped give the reader an idea of the city life and scenes to which we can imagine Nazneen and her husband walking across. The social life in this novel also helps to form the material conditions of city life and the novel, Nazneen’s social life throughout the novel consisted of Mrs Islam and Razia gossiping about fellow women, she would often visit Razia at her flat, whilst going to Razia’s flat we are given descriptions of the surroundings within Nazneen’s boundary of her estate, we are informed of the â€Å"group of young Bengali men who stood in the bottom of the stairwell, combing their hair and smoking or making loud, sudden hoots†¦Ã¢â‚¬  this was the social life the young men had in the city, they would hang around in gangs not achieving much, Nazneen stayed within her boundaries as well, so it gives the reader an impression that social life within a city should be kept in the boundaries that you live in, like a safety barrier. We are also informed of the material conditions of the corridors and stairwells where Nazneen lives, the front doors are mentioned to be the sam e across the corridors â€Å"peeling red paint showing splinters of pale wood, a rectangular panel of glass with wire meshing suspended inside, gold rimmed keyholes and stern black knockers.† On the wall â€Å"someone had drawn a pair of buttocks in thick black pen†¦Ã¢â‚¬  this helps the reader to form a picture in their minds of the state of city life where Nazneen lives, â€Å"The stairs gave off a tang of urine† Although Nazneen is told to stay within the boundaries of the estate because if she went out people would talk and gossip about her, Nazneen did go out. This was when she got lost, and we as the readers gained more knowledge of the material conditions of city life which formed the narrative, we are told that â€Å"to get to the other side of the street without being hit by a car was like walking out in the monsoon and hoping to dodge the raindrops.† Immediately we can imagine the fast movement of the city, cars going past like buzzing bees, to cross the road, Nazneen â€Å"waited next to a woman and stepped out with her, like a calf with its mother† short descriptions like this form the material conditions of the city life in this novel so skilfully. Throughout the novel, we are not only informed of the material conditions of the city where Nazneen lives or around the area of Bethnal Green, we are also informed of the streets buildings past Brick Lane. â€Å"She looked up at a building as she passed. It was constructed almost entirely of glass, with a few thin rivets of steel holding it together.† â€Å"The building was without end, above somewhere it crushed the clouds.† The material conditions mentioned here are most entirely opposite to the towers described of Tower Hamlets. Although both scenes have very large buildings, the towers in the city centre are described as â€Å"palaces†, with â€Å"entrances and colonnades across the front† this was the diversity of the material conditions of city life which helped form the narrative, because the reader is informed that the city is not the same throughout, every area has its own distinctive features, some parts of the city are very well looked after whe reas others such as where Nazneen lives are forgotten about. The material conditions of city life in the novel are mentioned to the reader in many ways, we are told of the people that Nazneen walks past when she goes to the city centre â€Å"every back she saw, was on a private, urgent mission to execute a precise and demanding plan†¦.† â€Å"They could not see her anymore than she could see God† from this, we acknowledge the independency of the people in the city. Soon Nazneen realises that she does not fit in with these working people, they are dressed smart, they have coats and handbags whereas Nazneen has a cardigan and a sari, although Nazneen was dressed differently, only one woman noticed she was there and smiled at her. By giving details such as this, Monica Ali has formed and shaped the narrative according to city life, every person with its own mission. So far, throughout the novel, only roads and streets, people and buildings have been mentioned. However when Nazneen does come across some greenery, she says â€Å"in this city, a bit of grass was something to be guarded, fenced about, as if there were a sprinkling of emeralds sown in among the blades.† This, yet again is another material condition of city life, although it is not unpleasant like the conditions in Nazneen’s area, green grass has not yet been mentioned up until now, and when it has the grass is guarded with fence, so from this, we can imagine the very few places in the city to relax and enjoy the scenery. We also get the indication that in this novel, for Nazneen there is no place for her to get away from everything, the city â€Å"would not pause even to shrug.† Throughout the novel, the descriptions of the city and the buildings given to us by Nazneen have been described just as Nazneen saw them, however, later on in the novel, when Nazneen’s son becomes ill, whilst in the ambulance van, and with her fear for her son, she mentions â€Å"The city shattered. Everything was in pieces. She knew it straight away, glimpsed it from the painful white insides of the ambulance.† Just as Nazneen’s heart shattered in pieces, the city did too with her, so she is relating the material conditions of the city with her emotions and giving the reader an image of doom and gloom within the city. Although the material conditions described to us previously in the novel have been mostly doom and gloom anyway, Nazneen has only just implied the greyness and dullness of it along with her emotions. â€Å"Frantic neon signs. Headlights chasing the dark. An office block, cracked with light. These shards of the broken city.† Up until now the city was not mentioned as broken, it was just described as how Nazneen saw it, but now, we get the real image of the city, the material conditions which helped form the narrative † The crystal towers and red bricked tombs. The bare-legged girls shivering at the bus stop.† Up until now, Nazneen had simply described the different dress code of non Asian females, now that she saw they were at the bus stop bare legged in the early hours of the morning, Nazneen is ridiculed by them, she talks about them along with the broken city. She is giving the reader material conditions of the city which make it so grim. â€Å"The well fed dogs and bloated pigeons.† This is something Nazneen would never see in her homeland Bangladesh, dogs are of no importance and pigeons always a pest. So now, we get to witness Nazneen’s interpretations of the material conditions of the city life, how she feels it is all wrong compared to her land. â€Å"The cars that had screamed alongside the ambulance, urging it on, parting in waves.† The cars that had previously been described as an army now screaming, this clearly shows the rage within Nazneen and the material city conditions which she so hates. Throughout the novel, London is not the only city mentioned, with Nazneen’s sister living in the city in Bangladesh, Dhaka, she often receives letters from Hasina talking about her home, and the surroundings â€Å"Street is wide and nice. But plastic bag blowing everywhere. Walk in street for five ten minute and by finish you cover in bag on legs and arm and stomach.† From this we realise, that city conditions throughout the world are the same. The little things which give the city its status, the material conditions such as bags on the floor is what makes living in a city so different to other places. â€Å"A wind blew in over the courtyard and fetched up a crisp packet at her feet.† Nazneen although she was in a different country to her sister, they were both in the same situation, both living in a city with material conditions such as rubbish on the pavements and non stopping people. To conclude, the material conditions of city life in Brick Lane are mentioned with such metaphors and descriptions which inform the narrative of the surroundings, the people, the scenery and the atmosphere within. The buildings described in so many ways, the smallest details found on the floors to the stairwells of the block of flats.

Two Basketball Players; Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade Essay

Two Basketball Players; Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade There are many basketball players in the world. Throughout the history, some players became more known than other players. Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade are very well known in this world. Although their awards are similar, Kobe Bryant is a better basketball player than Dwyane Wade because of his statistics and records. To begin with, Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade have some awards in common. Both of them have been in the NBA All-Defensive First Team. Kobe and Dwyane have met five times in the NBA All Star Game. They both have been to the NBA All Second Team twice. Also, Kobe and Dwyane have been named the NBA Finals MVP, too. They have won the NBA Championship title with both of their†¦show more content†¦In playoffs, Kobe’s percentage for field-goal is.447 %, 3 point field-goal .329 %, and free-throw .811% per game in playoffs. Kobe gets 5.1 rebounds , 4.7 assists, 1.4 steals, and .7 blocks per game in playoffs. Kobe has played in 11 NBA All Star games, started in all 11 of those games, played 27.1 minutes, and scored 18.8 points per game. In NBA All Star games, Kobe’s percentage for field-goal is .503%, 3 point field-goal .354 %, and free-throw .778%. Kobe gets 4.5 rebounds , 4.6 assists, 2.7 steals, and .4 blocks per game in NBA All Star Games. On the other hand, in playoffs Dwyane has played 61 games, started in 61 games, played 40.8 minutes, and scored 23.4 points per game. In playoffs, Dwyane’s percentage for field-goal is .454 %, 3 point field-goal .327%, and free-throw .801%. Dwyane gets 5 rebounds , 4.5 assists, 1.2 steals, and .4 blocks per game in playoffs. Dwyane has been to the NBA All Star game 5 times, started in 4 games, played 25.4 minutes, and scored 15.2 points per game. In NBA All Star games, Dwyane’s percentage for field-goal was .489%, 3 point field-goal .250 %, and free-throw .615%. Dwyane gets 2.6 rebounds , 3 assists, 2.6 steals, and .4 blocks per game in NBA All Star Games. Furthermore, Kobe Bryant has more records than Dwyane Wade. Kobe Bryant currently holds nine records and shares two NBA records with Donyell Marshall, Michael Jordan, and Wilt Chamberlain. Most three-point field goals made in a game record are held byShow MoreRelatedThe Legendary Lebron James1641 Words   |  7 Pagesmost kids can’t even imagine. Lebron grew up without a father and moved from house to house, but now he is one of the most successful men in the world. On April 4, 2014 Lebron is the youngest player ever to reach 23,000 career points in the National Basketball Association (NBA), beating Michael, Kareem, and Kobe to this amazing achievement Lebron still thanks his mother for what she fought through to get him to where he is at now. Gloria James was only 16 at the time she had Lebron, and LebronsRead MoreComparison of Nike and Adidas4839 Words   |  20 PagesExecutive summary This report provides an analysis and evaluation of two of the biggest companies Nike and Adidas in athletic footwear industry. One of the most popular products is selected from each of the company to investigate. The report is conducted by analysing detail into the athletic footwear industry and both companies’ background, macro and micro environment forces, market segmentation, target markets, targeting strategies and position strategies. Many secondary researches which will be