English Learning Portfolio

One thing done well:

“The third, one line stanza, emphasises the contrast of his connection to home against his lived experiences – and just as the lengths of the stanzas are contrasted, the “weeks of hesitating” are matched against the “seconds” of the phone call.”

Citation of text as well as explanation done smoothly – covering structure as well as the words used.

One thing done not so well:

“In the transition to the last stanza, we see the migrant consider the difference in seasons in giving him clothes “weighed down by wool” – a move once again from the macro scale details of his memories to the small details of his present reality”

Awkwardly explained, missed some of the key ideas of unfamiliarity of clothes/weather, didn’t mention structural ideas like alliteration.

In the late evening they take flight.

Wings silvered with the dew of a midmorning past, shimmering with the faint memory of an infinitely still river.

In the purpled sky, spread as pixies flitting around Eliot’s patient.

Carrying with them the memory of history. Of prehistory. Of rainforests and ponds, of the life giving heat of the world.

They ride the humidity cleanly – single minded pilots, overwhelmed with the perception of a world so much larger than them.

Eyes that see time flow with the stillness of each wingbeat, each their own torrent of rushing air as the life giving sun cedes the stage to her gentle brother, leaving us with a defiant, etherising glow.

Through monolithic pantheons of stone and steel, mired with small scars of greenery that to each is in itself a forest, though it is but a child compared to the forests of ages past.

They approach.

And then they fucking bite me.

God I hate mosquitoes.

In the context of its intended audience, the people of Ancient Greece, the Odyssey (and the rest of the epic cycle as set out by Homer and his contemporaries) is a lesson; a parable. It’s Aesop’s fables, if you replace the cutesy talking animals with pillagers, rapists, and war criminals. The phenomenon of the Greek hero cult is well documented, worship being afforded to them due to their divine nature – since traditionally, heroes were all in some way descended from one god (or goddess, but usually god) or another deciding to have their way with some mortal before booking it early the next rosy-fingered dawn. Just as the ever popular hero characters in modern media act as role models for contemporaneous lessons*, any tale involving one of the many characters from the Greek epic cyclic universe (or GECU, if you will) can therefore be interpreted as teaching something – some more overtly than others, as in the example of the Oresteia, which has a law-and-order-esque detailed trial scene to help codify the Athenian legal system in a piece of literature. What then, is the lesson of the Odyssey?

Well, like the man of many turns, this is indeed the epic of many themes and motifs, which will form the subject of the next few pieces published here, hopefully in a somewhat timely fashion.

*This is almost completely beside the point, but note the example of Captain America – originally a symbol of patriotism and all the ideals of a dutiful soldier written post World War II, now turned idealistic freedom fighter in the modern era. Coincidence? I think not.

Question: why does one of the central figures in the Odyssey, the protagonist of its first four books, the son of a great hero, and a (not quite) man favoured by Athena act like a whining child?

Answer: because he is, and under the circumstances, you would be too.

The Odyssey is about fathers and sons, and so we open on four books describing a son. A son, who is in fact defined by his lack of a father. His name refers to the far off war, the circumstances that took his father away from him. He grows to the age of a man without a father, living in a house with no male role model. Instead, he has his mother’s suitors to contend with, and is thus, in every sense of the word, emasculated. And it shows.

Book Two of the Odyssey sees Telemachus deliver a speech to a council of elders, ostensibly to ask for their aid with his circumstance, but with the narrative purpose of establishing just how childish he is at this point. Compare the average hero elsewhere in Homer and Greek mythology in general. We see them fight and kill, and speak with great eloquence. But Telemachus delivers a disjointed, unpolished speech, in which he says that he “cannot fight against them” and would be “useless” (as translated by Wilson), followed soon by his breaking down into tears. He points out that he has “had no training” – and therein lies the heart of the issue. He is a child without a father, and therefore without the qualifications and training he needs to take up his role not just within the story to banish the suitors from his home, but within the established social constructs of the Odyssey and Greek society as a whole as a strong ruler.

The Telemachy, then, is the story of Telemachus’ journey not so much to find Odysseus – we see later in the narrative that it achieved nothing in this regard – but to find himself, or rather, the man he is supposed to be. Athena, the female goddess of the traditionally male domain of war as well as of wisdom disguises herself very intentionally as the male Mentor (the name being the source of the modern usage of the word mentor) and becomes the missing father figure to Telemachus. The journey offers various “teaching moments” – Telemachus learns to make the proper offerings and libations to the gods with Nestor in sandy Pylos, and he sees xenia, or hospitality, in both the halls of Nestor and Menalaus, among other things. The Telemachy is the crash course, the Rocky training montage that Telemachus takes before returning with his father, finally becoming a man and joining the grand tradition of Homeric heroism by violently slaughtering those who wronged him.

The larger context of the Odyssey is about a man’s winding, difficult journey to return from a war he did not care for, back to his wife and son. How hollow, then, would the resolution have been without the Telemachy? What if Odysseus had returned to the same whining child as his heir to the throne of Ithaka? Telemachus did not find his father – in the end, his father found him, but he had in the meantime grown as a man, and perhaps that is the point.

Of the many behaviours and coping mechanisms humans employ in times of struggle, gallows humour is perhaps one of the strangest. At the best of times, it feels incongruous and dissonant, and at the worst of times it becomes inappropriate and offensive. Yet there is a strange draw people feel toward it in times of trouble – making light of situations that were circumstances different would seem horrifying. The play Jesus Hopped the “A” Train” by Stephen Adly Guirgis is an example of this – almost literally, given that one of the characters, Lucius Jenkins, is placed on death row and executed before the conclusion of the play. With its irreverent style and heavy use of seemingly sloppy (but in truth, carefully chosen) slang, there are very few extracts that don’t contain even a little humour. If one were to flip to a random page, one could almost be forgiven for regarding this as some sort of prison comedy, where all we see are the incarcerated swearing at each other, at their lawyers, and at prison guards. But taken as a whole, the play is a poignant commentary on various serious issues – the American legal system, the death penalty, religious redemption for the evil, amongst others.

With this in mind, what then is the function of this humour? How does it contribute to discourse on a serious issue? Perhaps the levity serves to help our processing of these ideas. There is a limit to the human ability to deal with trauma. Once it is reached, some people go into shock, regressing brain function to a more basic, animal fight-or-flight style of thinking. Others may sink into a depressive spiral, the sadness cascading onward. Another response may be to simply halt empathy and emotional connection, meaning it is difficult to regard further tragedy as more sad or more worthy of contemplation, meaning it has essentially no effect. A single piece of literature may be hard pressed to elicit the first two responses, but the third response is definitely possible – as a text piles on more and more tragedy, there is an inflation of tragedies, and each one becomes less meaningful than the last. Humour and levity can reign this effect in by keeping the audience grounded, allowing them to process more of the play’s message.

This is a reading log tracker for the books that I will be reading in SL Literature.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gDqhmI6Zbd1aVUWfzgpf7LV4BAety4EAzzJkrZQ2T2Y/edit#gid=0

Link to Google Doc Version

Transcript of Ad:

E-PAY,

THE EASY WAY

TAP OR SCAN, ALL ALSO CAN

Meal times should be convenient and hassle-free. With a wide range of e-payments, there are easier ways to pay for your food. Try it now in selected coffee shops, hawker centres and industrial canteens.

Screenshot sourced from Channel News Asia: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/nets-apologises-e-pay-ad-campaign-race-11771224

In today’s diverse age, countries all across the world love to brand themselves as “cultural melting-pots”. Some countries will take every opportunity they can to point out the wide varieties of local culture and custom present, like peacocks baring their multi-coloured feathers. One country in particular that arguably has a stronger claim to diversity than most is Singapore. On Singapore’s streets, in Singapore’s hawker centres, road names, schools, religious buildings – the evidence of cultural diversity can be clearly seen. Singapore’s racial diversity is so often discussed, it is summarised by the handy (if problematic) Colonial-era initialism of CMIO – referring to the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other populations present on the island. However, with racial diversity and a celebration of difference also comes the looming issue of racial tensions. As Singapore grows more diverse, tensions also increase, and the Singaporean government has attempted to stymie this issue with political speeches, racial harmony days and all sorts of racial events – meagre bandaids slapped on wounds to placate growing dissent. Singapore’s cultural sensitivity issues run deeper than can be solved by these meaningless platitudes – what’s needed is an honest discussion and breakdown of the long held assumptions and stereotypes present across the various peoples of Singapore. Whilst this mere thinkpiece could not hope to even begin approaching a solution to the deep seated racial issues in Singapore, perhaps it can bring about at least a small conversation around these larger issues through an exploration of a text that is in some ways a microcosm of the racial environment in Singapore.

To begin with: an investigation of the text. On the surface, studying only the text part of the text (its words) it is an innocent, maybe even gently humorous take on encouraging more Singaporeans to use an E-Pay system as an alternative payment option. The main tagline of the ad, with it’s fun little rhymes, is intended to reflect the colloquial accent and grammatical habits of Singaporeans speaking English. “ALL ALSO CAN” appears like bad English to the Western reader, but to those speaking English within Singapore with other Singaporeans, it is simply the local vernacular, or “Singlish”. The rest of the ad addresses the use of E-Pay within the context of paying for a meal. Food is of paramount importance to Singaporean culture as a whole, and “coffee shops, hawker centres and industrial canteens” are all rather local places to get food – the preferred eateries of the Singaporean everyman. This ad immediately reads like an appeal to the regular citizen of Singapore. With this in mind, let us now turn to the problem child of this ad – the image. If you don’t look to closely, it appears to be a portrayal of three of the four CMIO race groups in Singapore – an Indian man, a Malay woman, a Chinese man and a Chinese woman. The controversy is of course that if one inspects the piece further, it becomes apparent that these four people are portrayed by one man – a local Chinese actor by the name of Dennis Chew.

Ah.

When one has recovered from the shock of seeing an ad so potentially fraught with issues (that was somehow approved by the large PR firms presumably under the employ of NETS and its associated banks), one may begin to attempt to placate those angry. Yes, perhaps this was less than ideal, and a little insulting, but this was simply a dumb mistake by a company. It’s not as big a deal as it’s being made out to be. This view is unfortunately ignorant of the deeper issues in play with this portrayal. It is not merely an insensitive decision, but an uncovering of the deeper racial issues in Singapore. Portraying the other races with a Chinese man communicates the inherent bias towards the Chinese race present in Singapore in two ways. One, it treats the Chinese race as the “blank canvas” of races in Singapore – on which the fun, extraneous cultures of the other races are painted on. The default race is Chinese, and the other races are simply add ons. Nice to have, but ultimately unnecessary as parts of Singapore. Two, in this ad so clearly addressed to the regular people of Singapore, the Chinese man alone is present – thus implying that the regular citizen of Singapore is, on average, a Chinese man, and all others are deviations from the norm, even second class citizens. More problematic inferences can be made from this image if one chooses to look for them – for example, that the Chinese man is dressed for a white collar job, whereas the Indian man appears to be dressed for blue collar work; that the hijab can apparently be worn by just about anyone, downgrading its status from important religious symbol to a fun costume; that an expatriate is missing because they are rich, elitist and therefore not in any way sympathetic towards the regular Singaporean citizen.

Of course, one can claim that in reading so far into this ad, we’ve already put infinitely more thought into this ad than the firm that produced it clearly did, and that unnecessarily probing so far into it is equivalent to simply searching for reasons to be offended. And if one was to consider this ad in a vacuum, away from Singapore, this might be a valid viewpoint. But these inferences arise not from the ad on its own, but from the ad being placed in the context of Singapore’s cultural background and racial tensions. On its own, the ad is perhaps a little degrading. But in the context of majority Chinese Singapore, this ad is less creating an issue than it is voicing the underlying attitudes and assumptions made in Singapore – Chinese is default and normal, all else is deviation from the norm. Earlier in this piece, I noted that this ad would appear as a microcosm of the larger race issues of Singapore, and here we can see that clearly. The issue is not the ad, or the brownface, or the man wearing a hijab. The issue is that the fact that the firm considered those actions as tantamount to the norm in Singapore is revelatory of the racial attitudes in Singapore that need to be changed.

Transcript:

E-PAY,

THE EASY WAY

TAP OR SCAN, ALL ALSO CAN

Meal times should be convenient and hassle-free. With a wide range of e-payments, there are easier ways to pay for your food. Try it now in selected coffee shops, hawker centres and industrial canteens.

Style: an advertisement, supposed to be relatively benign, perhaps intended as humorous? colloquial language

Audience: largely Chinese Singaporean population, perhaps to older people who are less inclined to use E-Pay to begin with

Purpose: to advertise an E-Pay service

Context: within Singapore’s unbalanced environment of racial harmony (CIMO issues), Chinese are seen as the “oppressors”, context of relatively large, conservative, establishmentarian company

Stylistic Features: colloquial language, casual composition, local food – to attempt to appear relatable

Ads: Finnish McDonalds Ad and Chinese McDonalds Ad (images would not upload on this well designed platform)

These two ads convey the contrasting values of Finnish and Chinese societies. Northern European societies such as Finland tend to be less conservative and have more open values than in other countries. In Finland, the image of the two cow udders spraying milk would not cause as much shock as it may in another country, and the potentially phallic nature of the image would not cause a problem. Instead, it would be viewed humorously and thus positively increase McDonalds’ brand image. With regards to the Chinese ad, Beef is portrayed in a way that appears “cool” and “hip”, as Beef is not commonly consumed in China. The values conveyed here are that of a sort of safe progressiveness, in that the way the Beef is made to look cool is still very conservative. Another potential value could be that of physical fitness, as evidenced by the cow’s activity and the caption of the ad.

The Chinese ad in particular does play on a few stereotypes to achieve its goals. The way the Beef is dressed is reminiscent of an eastern view of stereotypically “cool” western teenaged figure, derived from various media. This stereotype acts as a way of immediately communicating the ideas of western society straight to the younger target audience in Chinese society, many of whom consume the media from which this stereotype is derived.

Representation as an issue is deeply problematic because of the ease in which one’s sensitivities can be easily insulted or offended in many ways. Whether through a lack of representation or through misrepresentation, authors attempting to make commentary or even incorporate any amount of culture into their piece walk through a minefield of potential issues. In this piece, I hope to address my thoughts on some of them.

The first issue is whether a text can ever truly be representative of groups of people. Can a writing, no matter how nuanced, really encompass the multi-faceted, nuanced and layered aspects of a culture? Whilst I think most issues of representation fall in a grey area, I think this question in particular has a very clear answer – no. No text, no medium of communication, can ever really replicate experience fully, simply as a fault of language. Language being unable to fully represent ideas is a common theme in philosophy – for example, that of Wittgenstein – and it is an idea that makes sense if one considers that language is not a strict set of rules that one can apply in communication, rather, language more closely resembles a set of conventions built upon through human use and experience. Therefore, in any communication, and cultural communication in particular, the words we use are coloured by our experience of them, and here we reach an impasse. To communicate the experiences of groups of people, one must rely on language, but to fully comprehend the language used, one must understand the experience of that group. If language itself is built out of experience, then it cannot fully communicate certain experiences, and thus, all texts, no matter how close to the mark they may hit, will never be able to represent a group of people in a completely accurate manner.

Next is the issue of who gets to represent what. Can any author, belonging to any culture and having any set of experiences choose to represent a group they do not identify within? Well, after tackling the previous issue, it may seem there is an obvious answer once again – if a text cannot fully represent a culture without the relevant experiences backing it up, then clearly an author without that experience can not produce a text to represent that culture. However, this is a hard line view. Why must all representation be 100% true to life and accurate? Why must we be able to tackle every single aspect in a single text? The argument that an author can only represent their own group is pointlessly limiting on texts, and is a rule in search of an ideal textual representation that does not exist and never can. If we accept that textual representation cannot be fully accurate, then we can accept as well that any author can attempt to represent any group, since there is no way they will be able to represent every facet of the group anyway.

One last issue relevant to the other two is the question of whether representation is problematic. Many argue that representation has caused many problems for texts – forced diversity has ruined casting and contradicted details of source material in films, for example. Representation can also cause problems when not done well – misrepresentation can create and reinforce harmful stereotypes. But I believe the problems arising from such representation aren’t inherently the fault of the act of representation, but simply arising as a consequence of bad writing. Representation is not inherently problematic; it is simply a tool authors can employ in their texts for a multitude of reasons. When used badly, as with any other tool, problems will be faced.