Friday, August 27, 2010

Why I am taking African American Literature.

I was first exposed to a lengthy piece of African American writing in my eleventh grade honors English course. My teacher, Olivia Macaluso, gave all of her honors English classes a long list of authors about halfway through the school year, from which they would choose one and select a novel on which they were expected to write an extended paper weaving literary criticism with their own writing on a topic of their choice by the end of the school year. I was a little late to the game, so by the time I asked Mrs. Macaluso for recommendations on whom she supposed I would enjoy, Ralph Ellison was already taken. She then offered a few others, of which Ishmael Reed was the only one that I had a mild interest in. She warned me about students from previous years having trouble with his work, but I would not back down. I traveled about a half hour away until I finally found a bookstore that had a copy of Mumbo Jumbo available for my taking. Reed's surreal, hyper-attentive style appealed to me, and made me want to do research to understand some of the allusions he was making that I was unfamiliar with.

On October 3rd, the day I was born, of 1998, I received Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a present from my mother. Mind you, she did not read my mind, or anything of the sort, she just got what I had asked for a while back. I put off reading it, because I had also received two or three novels and had a difficult course load for my honors English class that year, until the summer after I graduated. That summer I took an Introduction to Cinema course at Hunter, and since I live in New Jersey I commuted four days a week, taking the bus and then the train. I remember, quite vividly, being so absorbed within the world that Ellison had constructed that I frequently forgot I was even on a train at all. I did not want it to end, and after I had finished it I thought... I wish I could be someone's boo'ful. But then I discovered, I probably was, and I just didn't know it yet.

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