MULATTO / MESTIZO LITERATURE CLASS (Spring 2000 – University Park) Students’ Written Comments  

ERICA ALVAREZ

   

• This course was a surprise to me. I chose this class not only because it is a requirement for English majors but also for the different topics that will be discussed in a course such as this... Being of Cuban descent, I am constantly exposed to mulatto people. Different cultures are also very prominent in Miami.

• The extreme difference between Fanny's character in Marie N'Diaye's Among Family and Bessie Head's in A Woman Alone is their personality...Fanny's determination to be a part of her family results in her death... It is foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel when she "squeezed her chest between the two bars and shouted towards the house for someone to open for her." (9) This is the symbol of her family locking her out of their lives and Fanny desperately attempting to get in.

• Thank you for your class. The journey was a great one!

 

JASON CRESPO

 

• The mulatto in America became "the canary in the coal mine"(see Danzy Senna’s Caucasia). The toxicity of America’s cultural atmosphere began to be measured and tested by the general experience of the mulatto..
• So often in history, the mulatto has been marginalized so that some people just refuse to believe they even exist.
• In his short story "Passing," Langston Hughes describes the effects of a mulatto’s choice to pass as white. ..showing readers how the character’s choice to pass has affected his family relationships.
• In her novel Passing, Nella Larsen wrote about the momentary decisions mulattos make in order to benefit from any situation.
• It seems as though the mulatto in America should have a unique and fulfilling experience in living with two histories.
• The history of the mulatto, specifically in this country (America), goes back hundreds of years and it has not been a good one by any stretch of the imagination

 

RICHARD WILLIAMS

 

• I read Passing by Nella Larsen and I found it very interesting and at times upsetting.
• In Among Family by Marie N'Diaye, Fanny’s elusive aunt (Aunt Leda) is her redemption.
• Fanny tries hard to be accepted by her family. Yet, she ends up dying and being completely forgotten by them. Similarly, in A Woman Alone, Bessie Head writes about being left alone without friends or family. She adamantly defends equality and civil rights for her people.Yet, she dies in 1986, not being able to see her people live after apartheid.

 

KAREN MOYA

 

• In Among Family by Marie N'Diaye, Fanny is explicitly rejected by Aunt Colette who clearly tells her that she wants her out of her life and that of the rest of the family.
• Very quietly, passive and almost sickening, Fanny takes every insult and rejection from her aunt and mother as if she deserves it.
• The trouble caused by their biracial origins shaped different attitudes among mulattos when faced with rejection.

 

EDUARDO NUNEZ

  

•  At the beginning of Among Family by Marie N'Diaye, Fanny, a mulatto girl, tries to be accepted by her white European family. The family rejects her "for being different" but this difference is not simply a personality trait. They reject her because she is a mulatto. She was born light-skinned and, with age, she grows darker.One example of her family's rejection is when she visits her family as a young adult. She notices that the dogs she used to play with as a child, are now barking at her furiously. She is upset that they do not recognize her and she sees it as a sign of serious failure on her part.

• A Woman Alone by Bessie Head opens with the disturbing line: "There must be many people like me in South Africa whose birth or beginning are filled with calamity and disaster" (Head, 3).

 

SAUDI PENA

 

 

• As a result of being rejected by their white families, both the character of Fanny in Marie N'Diaye's Among Family and Bessie Head in A Woman Alone experience emotional and psychological trauma.
• When Fanny is rejected, she develops a sort of obsession to regain her family's approval and to prove to herself that she does belong.
• When Bessie Head arrives in Botswana, she experiences the suffering of exile when she states: ..".Nothing can take away the fact that I have never had a country; not in South Africa or in Botswana where I now live as a stateless person."