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webquest + corrigé

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refusing an Oscar in the 70s

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acheen Littlefeather begins by announcing that this will be one of her last interviews: "I'm very, very ill. I have metastasised breast cancer - terminal - to my right lung. And I've been on chemotherapy for quite some time, and daily antibiotics. As a result, my memory is not as good as it used to be ... I'm very tired all the time because cancer is a full-time job: the CT scans, MRIs, laboratory blood work, medical visits, chemotherapy, infectious disease control doctors, etc, etc. If you're lazy, you need not apply for cancer."

For the next couple of hours, speaking over Zoom from her home in northern California, as she trips down memory lane her solemn demeanour gives way to chattiness and laughter. At 74, she has lived a full, eventful life, though she will be for ever remembered for an event that took up little more than one minute of it, on the night of 27 March 1973. This was when she took the stage at the 45th Academy Awards to speak on behalf of Marlon Brando, who had been awarded best actor for his performance in The Godfather. It is still a striking scene to watch. Amid the gaudy 70s evening wear, 26-year-old Littlefeather's tasselled buckskin dress, moccasins, long, straight black hair and handsome face set in an expression of almost sorrowful composure, make a jarring contrast.

When the presenter, Roger Moore, attempts to hand Littlefeather Brando's Oscar she holds out her hand as if to push it away. She explains that Brando cannot accept the award because of "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry". The crowd interrupts her, half-applauding, half-booing. "Excuse me," she says calmly, then continues: "And on television and movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee." At the time, Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, was the site of a month-long standoff between Native American activists and US authorities, sparked by the murder of a Lakota man. Littlefeather ends her speech begging that "in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity".

At the time, nobody knew what to make of it. Not the audience, the press or the 85 million people watching on television (this was the first year the Oscars were broadcast internationally via satellite). Was it a prank? A surrealist performance piece? Littlefeather was rumoured to be a hired actor, a Mexican impostor, a stripper. "It was not a performance, it was a real presentation," she says. "I think that's what took people by surprise: that it was so real. It really touches people's hearts to this day."

It was hastily planned, says Littlefeather. Half an hour before her speech, she had been at Brando's house on Mulholland Drive waiting for him to finish typing an eight-page speech. She arrived at the ceremony with Brando's assistant, just minutes before best actor was announced. Howard Koch, the producer of the Academy Awards show, immediately informed her she could not read it - and she would be removed from the stage after 60 seconds. "And then it all happened so fast when it was announced that he had won. I had promised Marlon that I would not touch that statue if he won. And I had promised Koch that I would not go over 60 seconds. So there were two promises I had to keep." As a result, she improvised her speech.

However valid Brando's charge of the way Hollywood stereotyped Native Americans, it did not go down well that night. John Wayne, serial slaughterer of Native Americans on-screen and self-professed white supremacist off it, just happened to be in the wings during Littlefeather's speech. "During my presentation, he was coming towards me to forcibly take me off the stage, and he had to be restrained by six security men to prevent him from doing so." Presenting best picture soon after (also for The Godfather), Clint Eastwood quipped: "I don't know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford westerns over the years." When Littlefeather got backstage, she says, there were people making stereotypical Native American war cries at her and miming chopping with a tomahawk. After talking to the press, she went straight back to Brando's house where they sat together and watched the reactions to the event on television.

But Littlefeather is proud of the trail she blazed. She was the first woman of colour, and the first indigenous woman, to use the Academy Awards platform to make a political statement. Today they are almost expected, but in 1973 it was radical. "I didn't use my fist [she clenches her fist]. I didn't use swearwords. I didn't raise my voice. But I prayed that my ancestors would help me. I went up there like a warrior woman. I went up there with the grace and the beauty and the courage and the humility of my people. I spoke from my heart."

Littlefeather's life up to that point had been difficult. Her father was Native American, a mix of Apache and Yaqui, and her mother was white. They met in Arizona - where mixed-race couples were still illegal - so moved to Salinas, California, working as saddle-makers and leather-stampers. "My biological parents were both mentally ill and unable to raise me," she says. "I was a child who was abused and neglected. I was taken away from them at age three, suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs. I lived in an oxygen tent at the hospital, which kept me alive." She was raised by her maternal grandparents, but saw her parents regularly. She recalls a time as a small child when she interrupted her father beating her mother - by hitting him with a broom. "I think that's when I really became an activist." Her father chased after her. "I escaped through a doorway and I ran with all my might down the road. And he got in the pickup truck, and he tried to run me over. There was a grove of trees. And it was near dark. I ran up a tree, and he couldn't find me. I stayed up in the tree and I cried myself to sleep."

Littlefeather was between two worlds. Since the late 19th century, there had been a concerted project in the US to "make Indian people white", she explains, spearheaded by federal government and Christian schools for Native American children. "They wanted to make us something else. And this leads us into terrible pain, into suicide, into alcoholism, into jails." She did not fit in at the white, Catholic school her grandparents sent her to. "There was a lot of racism. I was called the N-word." When she was 12, she and her grandfather visited the historic Roman Catholic church Carmel Mission, where she was horrified to see the bones of a Native American person on display in the museum. "I said: 'This is wrong. This is not an object; this is a human being.' So I went to the priest and I told him God would never approve of this, and he called me heretic. I had no idea what that was." In her teens, Littlefeather had a breakdown and was hospitalised for a year. She attempted suicide. "I was so confused about my own identity, and I was suffering," she says. "I could not tell the difference between me and my pain."

Fortunately, in the late 1960s and early 70s Native Americans were beginning to reclaim their identities and reassert their rights. After her father died, when she was 17, Littlefeather began visiting reservations in Arizona, New Mexico and California. She visited Alcatraz when it was occupied by Native American activists in the early 1970s. She travelled around the country, between camp-outs and pow-wows, learning traditions and dances, making outfits. "I really had a breakthrough, with other urban Indian people, getting back into our traditions, our heritage. The old people who came from different reservations taught us young people how to be Indian again. It was wonderful."

By her early 20s Littlefeather was working as public service director at a San Francisco radio station, and head of the local affirmative action committee for Native Americans, studying representation in film, television and sports (they successfully campaigned for Stanford University to remove their offensive "Indian" sports team symbol). One of her neighbours was Francis Ford Coppola. "I used to hike the hills of San Francisco every day," she says. "He'd be sitting on his porch, drinking iced tea." She got to know him to say hello to. At the time, many celebrities were expressing interest in Native American affairs, including Jane Fonda, Anthony Quinn and Burt Lancaster. Sometimes it was sincere, at others more self-interested, she says. So, when she heard Marlon Brando speaking about Native American rights, "I wanted to know if he was for real". She wrote a letter to him and, walking past Coppola's house one day, said: "Hey! You directed Marlon Brando in The Godfather." She asked him for Brando's address. Eventually, Coppola gave it to her.

She heard nothing for months, but one night a man phoned her at the radio station. "He said: 'I bet you don't know who this is.' And I said: 'Sure I do.' And he said: 'Well, who is it?' I said: 'It's Marlon Brando. It sure as hell took you long enough to call. You beat "Indian time" all to hell.' And we started to laugh as if we'd known each other for ever."

They talked for about an hour, she says, then called each other regularly. Before long he was inviting her to visit. She stayed with him several times. They became good friends, but were never lovers or romantically involved. "No, no, he was far too old for me. He was my mother's age, for God's sake! He was extremely intelligent, and always entertaining. He had a great sense of humour. He would put on tons of different voices. We used to have a great time, laughing till tears were coming out of our eyes."

The Brando household was a busy and often heated place - with children, ex-wives and girlfriends. Brando sent her and his girlfriend Jill Banner to go and see his latest movie, Last Tango in Paris - Bernardo Bertolucci's controversially graphic erotic drama (which would earn Brando another Oscar nomination). Littlefeather was not shocked, she says. "I just thought that it was about a man who had a very difficult relationship with women. I thought about Marlon in his early days with his mother. It was as though his life was being played out in that film." Brando, too, had had difficult parents: his father was disapproving and unloving; his mother an alcoholic. "When he was young, they didn't have therapy. Maybe that was why he was such a great actor - because he worked it out in his acting. He was able to share those real emotions with an audience. And maybe that was the love-hate relationship that he had with acting."

Littlefeather's Oscar speech drew international attention to Wounded Knee, where the US authorities had essentially imposed a media blackout. It was a key moment in the struggle for Native American rights and may well have saved lives, she suggests. It did little for her own career, however. She had had a few small roles in movies, including Freebie and the Bean and The Trial of Billy Jack. After the Oscars, she believes she was blacklisted by Hollywood. "I couldn't get a job to save my life. I knew that J Edgar Hoover had gone around and told people in the industry not to hire me, because he would shut their talkshow or their production down. I got the word from people in the industry that that would happen to them." She is not sure it helped Brando's career, either. "I was a hotbed of controversy. And for any actor, I don't know how safe that is for them, box office-wise." They stayed in contact for a little while, but their lives naturally went separate ways. "We had our time together. We made history together."

A few years later, when she was 29, Littlefeather's lungs collapsed - a consequence of her childhood tuberculosis - and she became very ill. She found taking a holistic approach to her health helped and did a degree in holistic health and nutrition. She became a health consultant to Native American communities across the country, combining her knowledge with traditional medicine. She also reconnected with the Catholic faith, working with Mother Teresa caring for Aids patients in hospices, and led the San Francisco Kateri Circle, a Catholic group named after Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint. Their religious practice is a synthesis of both traditions, she explains. "For example, we have our buffalo dances in the middle of the mass." It has helped her resolve her identity. "This is how I saved my life, by blending the two together. The acceptance of my dominant culture's ways and my Indian ways together, living peacefully side by side."

Now she is one of the elders transmitting knowledge down generations. Littlefeather gestures behind her to the sofa, where she mentors young Native American people. This is the real fulfilment in her life, she says. "When I go to the spirit world, I'm going to take all these stories with me. But hopefully I can share some of these things while I'm here." Littlefeather talks about the end of life with the same composure and dignity she exhibited that night in 1973. "I'm going to another place," she says. "I'm going to the world of my ancestors. I'm saying goodbye to you ... I've earned the right to be my true self."

For more information on the documentary Sacheen: Breaking the Silence, visit onebowlproductions.com/sacheen

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'I promised Brando I would not touch his Oscar': the secret life of Sacheen Littlefeather

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acheen Littlefeather begins by announcing that this will be one of her last interviews: "I'm very, very ill. I have metastasised breast cancer - terminal - to my right lung. And I've been on chemotherapy for quite some time, and daily antibiotics. As a result, my memory is not as good as it used to be ...

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Akwaeke Emezi, American / Nigerian writer

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Akwaeke Emezi, American / Nigerian writer

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on writing / belonging when you are Bla
ck / Queer / Trans

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Akwaeke Emezi has taken off their masks-the ones we all wear that grin and lie, as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote. The ones that hide and shade more than our cheeks and eyes, camouflaging the traumas we've triumphed over. The masks we don to survive a white-supremacist world that simply can't hold our Black, queer, trans and godly brilliance.

The Nigeria-born, best-selling author of the critically acclaimed Freshwater, PET and The Death of Vivek Oji is simply no longer interested in projecting false versions of themself-even if disengaging with such a survival mechanism comes with costs. After all, true liberation is priceless.

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"Just to be able to talk to my own people is freedom," Emezi says on a recent morning via Zoom, describing the ways writing for white audiences, or rather a publishing industry that centers white readers, is the exact opposite. As a Black author who's always expressly desired to write for Black people, they're at a moment in their career where being their most unapologetic and authentic self is not only possible, but also paramount. "I understand all the limitations that are put on us just by existing in this world, by trying to create work in this world, and I'm saying: To hell with that."

That's where their latest book, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, comes in. The viscerally intimate chronicling of Emezi's lived experience, out June 8, serves as a manifesto marking a shift in their career away from the all-consuming white gaze toward a perspective that is Blacker and more beautiful.

"I'm going to write this as if it's just us," they recall telling themself about the memoir, "because in my reality, in my world and in a world where we are free, it is just us."

Emezi, who turns 34 on June 6, has been world-building since childhood. Growing up in Aba, a commercial town in the south of Nigeria, they were a voracious reader and writer from an early age. They credit such an appetite to the piles of books they had access to, some purchased secondhand at the local post office, some shipped from cousins in London and others found on their parents' bookshelves. "While the town was burning from the riots," they write in Dear Senthuran about life under military dictatorship in the '90s, "my sister and I believed in invisible fairies, pixies hiding in our backyard."

When they moved to the U.S. at 16, having read everyone from Chinua Achebe to Daphne du Maurier, Emezi was treated as exceptional by white folks. "The white dean of my school kept introducing me as the 16-year-old freshman from West Africa who'd already read Dickens and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as if any of that was surprising or special," they write. But going from a town in Nigeria, where they knew only two or three white people during their entire childhood, to Appalachia, where white people are decidedly the majority, they learned to wear one of their first masks.

"I learned really fast, especially because we were in the South, how to be adorable, how to smile and be really charming [so] that the white people will give you everything," they say.

Experiencing that in adolescence primed them, somewhat, for the earlier stages of their literary career. Take their 2018 debut, Freshwater, a meditation on metaphysical identity inspired by Emezi's own life. About a Nigerian girl who, having been born with one foot in the spiritual realm, develops separate selves as she matures, the novel is an accounting of a contemporary ogbanje, a traditional Igbo term that describes a type of trickster spirit born into a human body. Described by Emezi as "technically a memoir" that reflects their own life as an ogbanje, Freshwater was marketed as an "autobiographical novel," a genre then rising in popularity that Emezi used to make their life more palatable to publishers and readers unfamiliar with Igbo ontology. They figured, as a writer unpublished in the U.S. (they were previously published in the U.K.), that the book would sell easier if readers weren't asked to accept its story as truth. "I'll put a mask on this one," they remember thinking. "And it worked."

Freshwater was an instant hit, going into its third printing before its publication date because of early buzz, and becoming a New York Times Notable Book for 2018 and a finalist for many honors. Its success made possible the deals Emezi later signed for 2019's PET, a young-adult novel that centers a Black trans girl and that became a National Book Award finalist, and last year's The Death of Vivek Oji, an immediate New York Times best seller that details what it means for a family to lose a child they never really knew.

By almost every measure, Emezi has been living a life other writers only dream of. With Dear Senthuran, however, they're setting the record straight, revealing the depths of depression and anxiety that led to attempts to end their life that happened alongside what they also describe as the "brilliant" blossoming of their career.

Frank and flat-footed, like a soul singer who commands attention without backup dancers and light shows, Dear Senthuran builds upon the narrative of life as an ogbanje first introduced in Freshwater. This time, however, there are no masks. Emezi is refreshingly uninhibited in laying bare the truth of their life as an embodied spirit. They recount everything from their Nigerian upbringing and ongoing issues with their parents to discovering and accepting their innate divinity; from the "bridge across realities" of their gender journey to specifics of their publishing career, including the advances they got for each book and what they stand to make from FX's series adaptation of Freshwater. The memoir, the first draft of which they finished in December 2019, reflects, as Emezi writes, "the unfolding of a self," one that once binded, tucked and doubled over into itself to be more legible to others, into the glorious beast they were called to be. Dear Senthuran is a brutally honest and vulnerable testimony of survival, of the rejuvenating variety that inspires and activates; if it had a soundtrack, the timeless Clara Ward gospel hymn "How I Got Over" might be on loop.

"The first words that come to mind are terrifying and lonely, " Emezi responds when asked about the process of unfolding into, or standing in, their power, because "unfolding comes with costs." Such sacrifices might include falling out of one's relationship with family or becoming a pariah when one starts taking up for themselves. They use a saying popular in Trinidadian communities that recognizes the sacrifices necessary for liberation: "Yuh cyah play mas if yuh fraid powder."

"That's something that I try to remind myself of a lot, that there are costs to unfolding and everyone decides for themselves, is the cost worth it?" they say. The more Emezi unfolds into the truest parts of themself, the more they'll have to lose and the greater hurt they'll have to process. Eventually, though, the greater gains they'll enjoy, too.

Central to Emezi's standing in their power has been reifying a mantra writer Toni Morrison once espoused. While discussing the massive audience her literary works had attracted in a 1998 interview with journalist Jana Wendt, Morrison said, "I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central, claimed it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where I was." Dear Senthuran is Emezi standing at their center.

The book's subtitle, A Black Spirit Memoir, was their attempt to ensure that it would not be sold as anything other than what it was. Each chapter is a letter, written to members of Emezi's chosen family. "I wanted the letters to hold me accountable," they say, referring to their goal of writing for a Black audience. "I am speaking in the most intimate language I have," which helps them avoid the code switching and explanatory commas they might've once used to ensure "outsiders" could understand.

In writing the book, Emezi says, they wanted to do the opposite of what they learned many years ago in order to traverse white spaces they find themself in. "It was like a survival mask that I put on, where if I seemed harmless then I wouldn't be hurt or be crushed by the innate white supremacy in all these people," they say they once thought. But one can't ever charm their way out of the consequences of white supremacy; the system itself must be dismantled.

Since Emezi's debut, words like visionary, radical and innovative have been used to describe their work. Perhaps all of these descriptors are true, but Emezi doesn't see themself necessarily as a leader. Rather, they say they're a conduit for a collective imagination they make tangible.

"My work is just channeling something that other people gifted me," they say. For example, they credit the setting for their novel PET-a world without prisons and police-to social-justice organizers and prison abolitionists. "My job in the revolution is as a storyteller, to take those possibilities and shape them into stories [that] disseminate."

Amplifier, then, is a more apt label for their brilliance, Emezi says, one that requires them "to climb as high as possible and be as bright as possible" so the realities and possibilities they're amplifying can reach the masses. And they're set to continue doing this work for the foreseeable future, with two other books slated for release in 2022: a poetry collection titled Content Warning: Everything and a romance novel titled You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, the screen rights of which went for a reported seven figures to Amazon Studios with Michael B. Jordan 's production company, Outlier Society, attached.

"It's like a spell of possibility we spread," they say-the possibility of a world better than the one we have. "The more people that believe, the stronger that reality becomes. And our goal is to make that a reality that holds as many people as possible, because the realities we're living in now, they're not holding us. They're trying to kill us." Emezi's taking off their mask, then, is also a fight for life, a foreshadowing of a promised land on the horizon.

Anderson is a freelance entertainment and culture journalist and co-host of the podcast FANTI
If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

Buy a print of TIME's Next Generation Leaders cover, featuring Akwaeke Emezi Cover styled by Akwaeke Emezi ; h air by Anastasia Ebel at Baby Bangz; make-up by Tamara Camille Soublet

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Author Akwaeke Emezi Is Writing New Possibilities Into Being

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Akwaeke Emezi has taken off their masks-the ones we all wear that grin and lie, as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote. The ones that hide and shade more than our cheeks and eyes, camouflaging the traumas we've triumphed over. The masks we don to survive a white-supremacist world that simply can't hold our Black, queer, trans and godly brilliance.

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wikipedia

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Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s.

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text audio

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séances pour se préparer, ou en es-tu?

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animated movie based on a poem by Charles Bukowski

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Bluebird animation based on Charles Bukowski's poem

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Native Americans

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118 minutes long

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video

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Hair: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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NY TIMES

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article N-Word politically correct NY Times

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New York Times article

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Dr. McWhorter is a linguist who has written extensively about both race and language. He is the author, most recently, of "Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter," from which this guest essay is adapted.

This article contains obscenities and racial slurs, fully spelled out. Ezekiel Kweku, the Opinion politics editor, and Kathleen Kingsbury, the Opinion editor, wrote about how and why we came to the decision to publish these words in Friday's edition of the Opinion Today newsletter.
In 1934, Allen Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, laid out the history of the word that, then, had "the deepest stigma of any in the language." In the entire article, in line with the strength of the taboo he was referring to, he never actually wrote the word itself. The obscenity to which he referred, "fuck," though not used in polite company (or, typically, in this newspaper), is no longer verboten. These days, there are two other words that an American writer would treat as Mr. Read did. One is "cunt," and the other is "nigger." The latter, though, has become more than a slur. It has become taboo.

Just writing the word here, I sense myself as pushing the envelope, even though I am Black - and feel a need to state that for the sake of clarity and concision, I will be writing the word freely, rather than "the N-word." I will not use the word gratuitously, but that will nevertheless leave a great many times I do spell it out, love it though I shall not.

"Nigger" began as a neutral descriptor, although it was quickly freighted with the casual contempt that Europeans had for African and, later, African-descended people. Its evolution from slur to unspeakable obscenity was part of a gradual prohibition on avowed racism and the slurring of groups. It is also part of a larger cultural shift: Time was that it was body parts and what they do that Americans were taught not to mention by name - do you actually do much resting in a restroom?

That kind of concern has been transferred from the sexual and scatological to the sociological, and changes in the use of the word "nigger" tell part of that story. What a society considers profane reveals what it believes to be sacrosanct: The emerging taboo on slurs reveals the value our culture places - if not consistently - on respect for subgroups of people. (I should also note that I am concerned here with "nigger" as a slur rather than its adoption, as "nigga," as a term of affection by Black people, like "buddy.")

For all of its potency, in terms of etymology, "nigger" is actually on the dull side, like "damn" and "hell." It just goes back to Latin's word for "black," "niger," which not surprisingly could refer to Africans, although Latin actually preferred other words like "aethiops" - a singular, not plural, word - which was borrowed from Greek, in which it meant (surprise again) "burn face."

English got the word more directly from Spaniards' rendition of "niger," "negro," which they applied to Africans amid their "explorations." "Nigger" seems more like Latin's "niger" than Spanish's "negro," but that's an accident; few English sailors and tradesmen were spending much time reading their Cicero. "Nigger" is how an Englishman less concerned than we often are today with making a stab at foreign words would say "negro."

For Mandarin's "feng shui," we today say "fung shway," as the Chinese do, but if the term had caught on in the 1500s or even the early 1900s, we would be saying something more like "funk shoe-y," just as we call something "chop suey" that is actually pronounced in Cantonese "tsopp suh-ew." In the same way, "negro" to "nigger" is as "fellow" is to "feller" or "Old Yellow" is to "Old Yeller"; "nigger" feels more natural in an Anglophone mouth than "negro."

"Nigger" first appeared in English writings in the 1500s. As it happens, the first reference involved "aethiops," as it had come to refer to Ethiopia, or at least that term as applied sloppily to Africa. We heard of "The Nigers of Aethiop" in 1577, and that spelling was but one of many from then on. With spelling as yet unconventionalized, there were "neger," "nigur," "niger," "nigor" and "nigre" - take your pick.

It was, as late as the 1700s, sometimes presented as a novelty item. The Scottish poet Robert Burns dutifully taught, referring to "niger," that it rhymes with "vigour, rigour, tiger." Note, we might, that last word. If "tiger" rhymes with "vigor" and "rigor," that means that "tiger" could once be pronounced "tigger," which then sheds light on the rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
Catch a tigger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eeeny, meeny, miny, moe.

"Tigger," then, was a polite substitute for the original "nigger." After all, do we really imagine a tiger hollering in protest? So, for one, we gain insight into why the Winnie-the-Pooh character is called "Tigger" and the books are so vague on why it's pronounced that way. That was an available alternate pronunciation to A.A. Milne. But more to the point, the original version of the "Eeny, meeny" doggerel is a window into how brutally casual the usage of "nigger" once was, happily trilled even by children at play. For eons, it was ordinary white people's equivalent of today's "African-American."

Someone wrote in passing in 1656 that woolly hair is "very short as Nigers have," with the term meant as a bland clinical reference. "Jethro, his Niger, was then taken," someone breezily wrote in a diary 20 years later. And this sort of thing went on through the 1700s and 1800s. Just as "cunt" was a casual anatomical term in medieval textbooks, "nigger," however spelled, was simply the way one said "Black person," with the pitiless dismissiveness of the kind we moderns use in discussing hamsters, unquestioned by anyone. After a while, the current spelling settled in, which makes the contrast with today especially stark.

Its use straddling the 19th and 20th centuries is especially interesting: While America was becoming recognizable as its modern self, its denizens said "nigger" as casually as today we do "boomer" or "soccer mom." Frank Norris's anthropological realism is an example. In his "Vandover and the Brute," set at the end of the 1800s, the white protagonist in San Francisco squires a gal about town who has been doing some teaching and tells him

about the funny little nigger girl, and about the games and songs and how they played birds and hopped around and cried, "Twit, twit," and the game of the butterflies visiting the flowers.

Annals of popular dancing shortly after this era gaily chronicled dances such as the bunny hug, turkey trot and grizzly bear but discreetly left out that a girl like the one in "Vandover" was equally fond of one called the nigger wiggle, named as if Black people were just one more kind of amusing animal. (This dance entailed, for the record, a couple putting their hips together and holding each other's rear ends.)

Of course, the word was also used in pure contempt. Not long after "Vandover," William Jennings Bryan, the iconic populist orator, as secretary of state, remarked about Haitians, "Dear me, think of it, niggers speaking French." Meanwhile, the Marine in charge of Haiti on the behalf of our great nation at the time, L.W.T. Waller, made sure all knew that whatever their linguistic aptitudes, the Haitians were "real nigs beneath the surface."

There was a transitional period between the breeziness of "real nigs beneath the surface" and the word becoming unsayable. In the 20th century, with Black figures of authority insisting that Black Americans be treated with dignity, especially after serving in World War I, "nigger" began a move from neutral to impolite. Most Black thinkers favored "colored" or "Negro." But "nigger" was not yet profane.

Film is, as always, illuminating. We have been told that early talkies were splendidly vulgar because, for instance, Barbara Stanwyck's character openly sleeps her way to the top in "Baby Face." But linguistically, these films are post-Victorian. That character never says "fuck," "ass" or "shit" as the real-life version would, and in films of this genre, that reticence includes "nigger." It is, despite the heartless racism of the era, almost absent from American cinema until the 1960s. Rather, we today can glean it in the shadows: There it reigned with an appalling vigor.

So in the film "Gone With the Wind" no one utters it, but in the book it was based on, which almost everyone had read, Scarlett O'Hara hauls off with, "You're a fool nigger, and the worst day's work Pa ever did was to buy you." And she then thinks, "I've said 'nigger' and Mother wouldn't like that at all." As in, there was now a veil coming down, such that one was supposed to be polite - approximately in the book, conclusively in the movie. But still, it was always just under the same surface that our Marine saw "nig"-ness through.

Same period, 1937: a Looney Tunes cartoon ( "Porky's Railroad") has Porky Pig as the engineer in a race between trains. Porky's rival zooms past a pile of logs and blows them away to reveal a Black man sitting, perplexed. Today we wonder why this person was sitting under a pile of logs. The reason is that this was a joke referring to the expression "nigger in the woodpile," an old equivalent of "the elephant in the room." No Looney Tunes characters ever utter "nigger," but this joke reveals that their creators were quite familiar with the word being used with joy.

Even into the 1970s, the word's usage in the media was different from today's. "The Jeffersons," a television sitcom portraying a Black family that moves from working-class Queens to affluence in a Manhattan apartment tower, was considered a brash, modern and even thoughtful statement at the time. Here was the era when television shows took a jump into a realism unknown before, except in flashes: The contrast between the goofy vaudeville of "Here's Lucy" and the salty shout-fests on "The Jeffersons" is stark. So it was almost a defining element of a show like "The Jeffersons" that loudmouthed, streety George Jefferson would use "nigger" to refer to Black people with (and without) affection.

George freely hurled it while playing the Dozens in an early episode. ("Take this elite nigga, wolfin' at my door / With your yellow behind, I'm gonna mop up the entire floor!") On the show the character began in, "All in the Family," while bigoted Archie Bunker does not use the word, as his real-life counterpart would, George uses it, such as when he rages about the possibility of having (white) Edith Bunker help out at his dry-cleaning location. ("The niggers will think she owns the store, and the honkies will think we bleached the help!")

Nor are only Black people shown using it; the writers air the "real" "nigger " as well. White men use it a few times on an episode in which George meets modern Klansmen. But white people aren't limited to it only in very special episode cases like this. George calls his white neighbor Tom Willis "honky," and Tom petulantly fires back, "How would you like it if I called you 'nigger'?" Then, that read as perfectly OK (I saw it and remember); he was just talking about it, not using it. But today, for Tom to even mention the word at all would be considered beyond the pale - so to speak.

The outright taboo status of "nigger " began only at the end of the 20th century; 2002 was about the last year that a mainstream publisher would allow a book to be titled "Nigger," as Randall Kennedy 's was. As I write this, nearly 20 years later, the notion of a book like it with that title sounds like science fiction. In fact, only a year after that, when a medical school employee of the University of Virginia reportedly said, "I can't believe in this day and age that there's a sports team in our nation's capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to Blacks," the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Julian Bond, suggested this person get mandatory sensitivity training, saying that his gut instinct was that the person deserved to simply be fired. The idea, by then, was that the word was unutterable, regardless of context. Today's equivalent of that employee would not use the word that way.

Rather, the modern American uses "the N-word." This tradition settled in after the O.J. Simpson trial, in which it was famously revealed that Detective Mark Fuhrman had frequently used "nigger" in the past. Christopher Darden, a Black prosecutor, refused to utter the actual word, and with the high profile of the case and in his seeming to deliberately salute Mr. Read's take, by designating "nigger" "the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language," Mr. Darden in his way heralded a new era.

That was in 1995, and in the fall of that year I did a radio interview on the word, in which the guests and I were free to use it when referring to it, with nary a bleep. That had been normal until then but would not be for much longer, such that the interview is now a period piece.

It's safe to say that the transition to "the N-word" wasn't driven by the linguistic coarseness of a Los Angeles detective or something a prosecutor said one day during a monthslong trial. Rather, Mr. Darden's reticence was a symptom of something already in the air by 1995: the larger shift in sensibility that rendered slurs, in general, the new profanity.

This occurred as Generation X, born from about 1965 to 1980, came of age. These were the first Americans raised in post-civil-rights-era America. To Generation X, legalized segregation was a bygone barbarism in black-and-white photos and film clips. Also, Generation X grew up when overt racist attitudes came to be ridiculed and socially punished in general society. Racism continued to exist in endless manifestations. However, it became complicated - something to hide, to dissemble about and, among at least an enlightened cohort, something to check oneself for and call out in others, to a degree unknown in perhaps any society until then.

For Americans of this postcountercultural cohort, the pox on matters of God and the body seemed quaint beyond discussion, while a pox on matters of slurring groups seemed urgent beyond discussion. The N-word euphemism was an organic outcome, as was an increasing consensus that "nigger" itself is forbidden not only in use as a slur but even when referred to. Our spontaneous sense is that profanity consists of the classic four-letter words, while slurs are something separate. However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of " The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language"and, most recently, " Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter - Then, Now, and Forever," from which this guest essay is adapted.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | How the N-Word Became Unsayable

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Dr. McWhorter is a linguist who has written extensively about both race and language. He is the author, most recently, of "Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter," from which this guest essay is adapted. This article contains obscenities and racial slurs, fully spelled out.

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Black people's hair : heritage. Watch the video the sound off!

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registre de langue

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tips 1 : sujet et problématique

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Le Grand O #3, Sujet et problématique au Grand Oral

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A poem by Jaiza & Margot, guest star : Djoumana

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méthodologie

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PART 1 : tips

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astuces pour réussir / organisation / préparation ...

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1 Mise en oeuvre et évaluation (grille de critères)

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1Mettre en œuvre et évaluer le grand oral

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corrigé

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Sarfraz Manzoor & the Boss

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trailer

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Song & blog DOC 2

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DOC 1 song & questions

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about self-love, self-worth & colorism

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Chika Okoro is a speaker, women of color champion, and self-love advocate. Passionate about race and gender issues, she is excited to help women of color develop their inner confidence and combat the negative messages that society often throws at them.

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Guardian article

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"I came to poetry by accident, through a workshop at Camden's Roundhouse. I was 18 at the time, had no money, and was living alone in London. Poetry had not been in my life before. I was awful when I started. But I was so thirsty to get better.

I'm working on my first collection now. I lost my mum at a young age, so a lot of the collection looks at how that might impact a young woman. And I lost my older brother to suicide in 2012. He had a long battle with addiction, and also his sexuality, and I was a carer for him for a really long time. A lot of the poems in the book that I'm working on are looking at his life. I've always used writing as a way to figure things out: not necessarily to find answers, more to ask questions about them.

When young people see a poem or film on YouTube or social media, it gets rid of that preconception that poetry has to be this isolated, solitary act of opening a book and reading something old fashioned. I love reading poetry myself, and I believe that young people can, too, but they can also love spoken word or performance poetry, poetry on film or poetry with music.

I've worked with young people for almost a decade now, and I've experienced first-hand the impact poetry can have on them - something happens when you let yourself be free and creative, it is magic. It's really empowering for young people to be told that what they have to say is important and valid. We need young voices contributing to the canon, because they usually reflect what's really going on in the world a lot of the time.

Someone who I use as a springboard for young people is Danez Smith, a non-binary African American poet who talks a lot about race, class, sexuality and gender in their collections Don't Call Us Dead and .

Roger Robinson's book A Portable Paradise responded so amazingly to the injustice of Grenfell, as did Jay Bernard's book . There are so many amazing writers at the moment."

Theresa Lola (2019)

"I always loved writing, I just wanted to tell stories. Then when I was about 13, living in Nigeria, I went on a school trip to a poetry festival and it became poetry that I wanted to write.

The laureateship was one of those emails you get that you're like, "what?" I knew my focus was going to be wellbeing. The epidemic has exacerbated this, but at the time there was a lot of focus on the mental health crisis among young people and I wanted to address that - and to write about our joys, too: the things that bring us happiness. I did teaching residencies, including ones on hope at St Paul's Cathedral, and one aimed at young women about mental health and body image at Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham.

Poetry has this wonderful gift of allowing us to be imaginative and allowing us to articulate even the most complex feelings. And there's a power in that, especially when you're writing about things that make you feel powerless. There is a power in having your own voice, and having some sort of control of how you share that story.

To have poetry make national headlines after Joe Biden's inauguration was just so exciting. Let's be honest, that particular inauguration was one like no other, so to have Amanda Gorman's poem being able to articulate everyone's feelings, the feelings of the past, the present and the future - that was just the perfect example of what poetry can do."

Caleb Femi (2016)

When I was offered the laureateship, I had just left teaching and had no idea what I was going to do for work. I just knew that I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to engage with young people in a way that was a lot freer than the confines of the curriculum. When the gig was offered to me, I was ecstatic.

Sometimes when you mention poetry to the general public they wince, because people haven't had the best experience in school, whether it was the way that it was taught, or the content not being widely reflective of the human experience. So I wanted to contribute to a rehabilitation of poetry. It was also about putting young people at the forefront of everything. I was particularly interested in looking at the outer boroughs of London, because I feel, in terms of engagement with the arts, those are the areas that are usually the most disenfranchised and overlooked. So I went to many schools and asked young people: What do you want? Then we were able to set up workshops, programmes, spaces where they could perform and gather, all while knowing ultimately that it was what they wanted, not something we were bringing in as a cavalry that thinks they know how to do everything.

For me, what poetry affords you is a chance to interrogate how you feel about yourself, your insecurities, fears, wonders, happiness. It allows you to articulate that, and by doing so, you're able to fully understand it. This is very important as a young person, as you can find your tribe that way. It also allows you to empathise and understand somebody else's experience. I think it really enriches you as a human being."

Selina Nwulu (2015)

"A lot of what I do within the poetry world is thinking about the role of art and poetry within conversations around social change. It's no coincidence that the popularity of poetry has risen in recent years, with the way things have been going politically.

I'm the youngest in a large family, so I was often encouraged to write poetry as a way to distract me for a bit. In school I didn't really gravitate towards it, and my writing was almost like a diary entry, never anything I imagined that I would share, just a way of processing things.

I started doing open mics, and it grew from there. It was never anything I would have expected, but once I was there I rode the wave.

As laureate, I wanted to be an ambassador for what poetry could be. Part of what I was doing was encouraging young people to write about what they care about, but also it was me doing that by example.

I write to understand the sweet spot between the personal and the political, how to talk about something difficult in a way that is engaging. My motivation is to talk about politics, race, climate change, the social injustices that surround us, but in a way that is beautiful and personal. That's how you disarm the reader.

When I started, it was very important for me to be known as a political poet. Now I'm seeing the politics in everything. Amanda Gorman is an incredible example of the power of both poetry and activism. Seeing her standing on one of the highest, most prestigious stages showing what poetry can do was really interesting to see. She is a poet, but she's also using poetry as a message to talk about bigger issues."

Aisling Fahey (2014)

"I've had a very enriching experience with poetry over the years. But my breakthrough moment came when I was 13, when I entered a competition via school. Through that, I was really lucky to meet poets like Jacob Sam-La Rose, Malika Booker and Nick Makoha. For the first time, I was listening to living, breathing poets telling their stories. I saw the effect they had on their audiences. Poetry became something with power and purpose. That was it for me.

It was so exciting to be asked to be a laureate. There were lots of pinch-yourself moments. I was able to travel. I went to literature festivals. I ran workshops for people across the globe. I wanted to challenge people's perceptions of poetry. Everyone has different connotations of who poetry is for, and how they should approach it. I wanted to broaden people's idea of what a poem is, can be and can do. One thing that struck me was how every single person, old or young, had a story to share, but so many had never been asked to before.

Amanda Gorman's performance was completely mesmerising. I watched it live and she transported me with her words. She really connected with people across the world - she shone! People turn to poetry in moments of high emotion: a birth, a celebration, a tragedy. We often see poems go viral because they have captured people's thoughts. But any viral poem is just the tip of the iceberg. In the UK, we have so many great young poets just coming up, and so many poets who have been working for years. I devoured Rachel Long's My Darling from the Lions, and am currently reading The Air Year by Caroline Bird. I often return to Eavan Boland, including Outside History and A Woman Without A Country. It's wonderful when you see signs that more collections are being sold or getting published, that there's a need for poetry from the public. The talent is there - it's just up to people to discover it."

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'She showed what poetry can do': young London laureates feel the Amanda Gorman effect

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"I came to poetry by accident, through a workshop at Camden's Roundhouse. I was 18 at the time, had no money, and was living alone in London. Poetry had not been in my life before. I was awful when I started. But I was so thirsty to get better.

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The artwork, located in the pit owned by owned by Grit Development between the Palm Springs Art Museum and the Kimpton Rowan Palm Springs Hotel, also includes butterflies and the world "Unity" in the background.

MisterAlek described Gorman, a Harvard graduate and the country's first National Youth Poet Laureate, as an "amazing person" based on her accomplishments at a young age.

"She's been working hard toward this goal her whole life," MisterAlek said. "Her whole life has been achieving goals. I think she's a prime example of what perseverance and dedication can do to any person."

The mural will include a QR code, essentially a barcode, on the fence that visitors can scan with their phone to be taken to a video of Gorman's poem at Biden's inauguration.

For the artist, the biggest challenge on this latest Gorman mural was the texture of the wall. The raw brick soaks up the paint and has to be layered on. Also, there wasn't a lift system available and he had to do all the work with a ladder.

"Being on a ladder takes a toll on you after the second day," MisterAlek said. "Your legs start hurting going up and down and moving the ladders."

The mural is a temporary installation and will be on display through December, according to Russell Pritchard of the Palm Springs Art Commission. It was commissioned for $5,000 through the City of Palm Springs Arts Fund.

Pritchard said it was important to celebrate Gorman because she is not only a Los Angeles born-and-raised poet laureate but also "the superstar of the inauguration."

"We just needed to showcase her and show her off to the world that comes to Palm Springs," Pritchard said. "I'm happy that it's ending up in the pit because it's more visible."

Michael Braun, the president of Grit Development, said the company wants to bring artwork onto the Palm Springs property that "triggers or sparks conversations."

"Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change," Gorman told Obama. "If we look to the Black Lives Matter protests, you see banners that say, 'They buried us but they didn't know we were seeds.' That's poetry being marshaled to speak of racial justice. If you analyze Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech, it's a great document of rhetoric that's also a great document of poetry, of imagery, of song. Never underestimate the power of art as the language of the people."

Gorman also reflected on her inauguration poem's call for unity: "To me, unity without a sense of justice, equality and fairness is just toxic mob mentality. Unity that actually moves us toward the future means that we accept our differences - we embrace them and we lean into that diversity. It's not linking arms without questioning what we're linking arms for. It's unity with purpose."

Gorman has three works scheduled to be published this year: the printed copy of her Inauguration Day poem, out April 27; plus a children's book titled "Change Sings: A Children's Anthem," and poetry collection, "The Hill We Climb and Other Poems," both due Sept. 21.

All three have already become Amazon bestsellers, even though they won't be released for several more months.
Previous reporting by USA Today staff writer Hannah Yasharoff was used in this report. Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or on Twitter at @bblueskye. Support local news, subscribe to The Desert Sun.
The artwork, located in the pit owned by owned by Grit Development between the Palm Springs Art Museum and the Kimpton Rowan Palm Springs Hotel, also includes butterflies and the world "Unity" in the background.

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Amanda Gorman mural pops up in Palm Springs, honoring viral inaugural poet

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The artwork, located in the pit owned by owned by Grit Development between the Palm Springs Art Museum and the Kimpton Rowan Palm Springs Hotel, also includes butterflies and the world "Unity" in the background. MisterAlek described Gorman, a Harvard graduate and the country's first National Youth Poet Laureate, as an "amazing person" based on her accomplishments at a young age.

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about writing

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Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist Leonard Cohen (b. September 21, 1934) is among the most exhilarating creative spirits of the past century. Recipient of the prestigious Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and countless other accolades, and an ordained Rinzai Buddhist monk, his music has extended popular song into the realm of poetry, even philosophy. By the time Bob Dylan rose to fame, Cohen already had several volumes of poetry and two novels under his belt, including the critically acclaimed Beautiful Losers, which famously led Allen Ginsberg to remark that "Dylan blew everybody's mind, except Leonard's." Once he turned to songwriting in the late 1960s, the world of music was forever changed.

From Paul Zollo's impressive interview compendium Songwriters on Songwriting (public library) - which also gave us Pete Seeger on originality, Bob Dylan on sacrifice and the unconscious mind, and Carole King on perspiration vs. inspiration - comes a spectacular and wide-ranging 1992 conversation with Cohen, who begins by considering the purpose of music in human life:

There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There's always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That's what dignifies the song. Songs don't dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

Cohen approaches his work with extraordinary doggedness reflecting the notion that work ethic supersedes what we call "inspiration" - something articulated by such acclaimed and diverse creators as the celebrated composer Tchaikovsky ("A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood."), novelist Isabel Allende ("Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too."), painter Chuck Close (Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work."), beloved author E.B. White ("A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."), Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope ("My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best."), and designer Massimo Vignelli ("There is no design without discipline."). Cohen tells Zollo:

I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is. So I'm working most of the time.

[...]

To find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my disinterest in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency.

To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering.

[...]

My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV... So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interests. Otherwise I nod off in one way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat.

But why shouldn't my work be hard? Almost everybody's work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload.

He later adds:

Freedom and restriction are just luxurious terms to one who is locked in a dungeon in the tower of song. These are just ... ideas. I don't have the sense of restriction or freedom. I just have the sense of work. I have the sense of hard labor.

When asked whether he ever finds that "hard labor" enjoyable, Cohen echoes Lewis Hyde's distinction between work and creative labor and considers what fulfilling work actually means:

It has a certain nourishment. The mental physique is muscular. That gives you a certain stride as you walk along the dismal landscape of your inner thoughts. You have a certain kind of tone to your activity. But most of the time it doesn't help. It's just hard work.

But I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed. I can say, happily and gratefully, that I am fully employed. Maybe all hard work means is fully employed.

Cohen further illustrates the point that ideas don't simply appear to him with a charming anecdote, citing a writer friend of his who once said that Cohen's mind "is unpolluted by a single idea," which he took as a great compliment. Instead, he stresses the value of iteration and notes that his work consists of "just versions." When Zollo asks whether each song begins with a lyrical idea, Cohen answers with lyrical defiance:

[Writing] begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite.

Cohen addresses the question of where good ideas come from with charming irreverence, producing the now-legendary line that Paul Holdengräber quoted in his conversation with David Lynch on creativity. Cohen echoes T.S. Eliot's thoughts on the mystical quality of creativity and tells Zollo:

If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often. It's a mysterious condition. It's much like the life of a Catholic nun. You're married to a mystery.

But Cohen's most moving insights on songwriting transcend the specificity of the craft and extend to the universals of life. Addressing Zollo's astonishment at the fact that Cohen has discarded entire finished song verses, he reflects on the necessary stick-to-itiveness of the creative process - this notion that before we quit, we have to have invested all of ourselves in order for the full picture to reveal itself and justify the quitting, which applies equally to everything from work to love:

Before I can discard the verse, I have to write it... I can't discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

Cohen returns to the notion of hard work almost as an existential imperative:

I always used to work hard. But I had no idea what hard work was until something changed in my mind... I don't really know what it was. Maybe some sense that this whole enterprise is limited, that there was an end in sight... That you were really truly mortal.

Considering his ongoing interest in the process itself rather than the outcome, Cohen makes a beautiful case for the art of self-renewal by exploring the deeper rewards and gratifications that have kept him going for half a century:

It [has] to do with two things. One is economic urgency. I just never made enough money to say, "Oh, man, I think I'm gonna get a yacht now and scuba-dive." I never had those kinds of funds available to me to make radical decisions about what I might do in life. Besides that, I was trained in what later became known as the Montreal School of Poetry. Before there were prizes, before there were grants, before there were even girls who cared about what I did. We would meet, a loosely defined group of people. There were no prizes, as I said, no rewards other than the work itself. We would read each other poems. We were passionately involved with poems and our lives were involved with this occupation...

We had in our minds the examples of poets who continued to work their whole lives. There was never any sense of a raid on the marketplace, that you should come up with a hit and get out. That kind of sensibility simply did not take root in my mind until very recently...

So I always had the sense of being in this for keeps, if your health lasts you. And you're fortunate enough to have the days at your disposal so you can keep on doing this. I never had the sense that there was an end. That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.

What a beautiful testament to the creative spirit and its true motives, to creative contribution coming from a place of purpose rather than a hunger for profit.

Songwriters on Songwriting is a treasure trove of wisdom from cover to cover, featuring Zollo's conversations with such icons as Suzanne Vega, k.d. lang, David Byrne, and Neil Young.

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Leonard Cohen on Creativity, Hard Work, and Why You Should Never Quit Before You Know What It Is You're Quitting

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Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist Leonard Cohen (b. September 21, 1934) is among the most exhilarating creative spirits of the past century. Recipient of the prestigious Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and countless other accolades, and an ordained Rinzai Buddhist monk, his music has extended popular song into the realm of poetry, even philosophy.

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about writing poetry

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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10' video on COLORISM and internalised racism

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Confessions of a D Girl: Colorism and Global Standards of Beauty | Chika Okoro | TEDxStanford

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awesome video! ;-)

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(funky music)

I am Native American.

I am African American.

I am Puerto Rican and black.

I'm Indian.

I am Jamaican and Haitian.

I'm Japanese.

I am black, Chinese, Irish, and Greek Indian.

[All Girls] And this is my culture.

(laughs) I think there are a lot of stereotypes.

Everyone just looked at me

like I was some type of human zoo thing.

Oh my gosh, who is she?

Like, Is she some type of witch doctor or something?

She's wearing this dark lipstick.

Oh, so do you wear footwear back home?

People ask me, how do I wash my hair?

And I just look like,

Come on, the same way you wash your hair.

I wish the world knew that we do still exist.

I wish that the world knew that not all Native Americans

live in teepees, we don't still live in teepees.

You have something in your hair.

And I'm like, What are you talkin' about?

And she's like,

Yeah someone put like a piece of paper in your afro.

People were tellin' me how much weaves

and hair extensions, and braids and stuff like that

was kind of hood, or ghetto.

Baby hairs were called ghetto or ratchet.

I bumped into this blonde haired girl,

and she had her baby hair.

And it's just so cool

that everyone's embracing the culture now.

Japanese culture is actually so creative.

This is why we have so many different,

regional makeup styles, including this.

When I see people wearing Native American accessories,

and they don't know the meaning of it, I feel disrespected.

We have to understand that it's not an accessory,

you know?

It's not something that we put on our arms

and walk around with because it's just beautiful.

It is literally us.

It doesn't just fall off an eagle

and, Oh here, it's yours, I found it.

You have to earn it.

[Natasha] It shows what a beautiful country

and culture you come from.

I see it as a way to attach myself back to my roots.

Being comfortable in your skin,

and not caring what other people will say.

Being Afro-Latina, you have a lot of hair.

So when I was growing up,

I was always embarrassed of my sideburns,

my mustache, my eyebrows.

[Kyemah] I found it very difficult to be myself.

Because I was comparing myself to others

who had straight hair.

[Brandi] Straightening my hair,

putting all these chemicals in it,

so I decided to go natural.

[Sashamoni] Because I want to be different.

I don't wanna be like anybody else.

Embracing my heritage

was embracing all the hair on my body,

from the hair on my head, to the hair on my toes.

[Daunette] I feel more connected to my ethnicity

with this feather.

[Natasha] And I feel really proud

because I represent my home and my culture.

[Brandi] And now it's my identity and my culture.

I wouldn't change that about myself and I hope anyone else

wouldn't change that about themselves,

even if they don't have an afro.

Whatever grows out of their scalp,

or whatever skin color they are,

you know, just be beautiful who ever you are.

And I think that's something that all young girls

should do, embrace their beauty.

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Watch Cultural Appreciation: 7 Women on Embracing Their Heritage Through Their Beauty | Teen Vogue Video | CNE | Teenvogue.com

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(funky music) I am Native American. I am African American. I am Puerto Rican and black. I'm Indian. I am Jamaican and Haitian. I'm Japanese. I am black, Chinese, Irish, and Greek Indian. [All Girls] And this is my culture. (laughs) I think there are a lot of stereotypes.

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DOC C in the commentary (dans le sujet de synthèse)

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the difference between cultural appreciation & appropriation

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Respect our roots, a brief history of our braids

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blog article

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125th anniversary of The New York Times book reviews

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125th anniversary of The New York Times book reviews

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travel in time with books!

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This year, the Book Review turns 125.

It's an institution that was born under the watchful eye of Adolph S. Ochs, who established the standalone supplement shortly after he became publisher of the paper in 1896. It has been known variously as "the Saturday Review of Books and Art," "the Sunday Book Review,""the NYTBR" or, mostly internally, simply "TBR" (not to be confused with "to be read," though you can understand the confusion).

Yet as the Book Review has evolved, our country and world have evolved with it. Our pages reflect and reinterpret the happenings of the day, offering insight - and often, levity - through reviews, essays and news items. On occasion, we'll miss something - T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" went unreviewed - but very often, history was made in our pages. We highlight here just a few of these moments, from landmark reviews to author scandals to moments of protest and recognition.

London At A Dog Dinner "'Call of the Wild's' Author Attends Birthday Party of Fluffy Ruffles."

1911 When Jack London attended the "elaborately decorated" birthday party of "a diminutive dog named Fluffy Ruffles" in Carmel-by-the-Sea, it was Page 2 news. "The table was covered with a white cloth of real damask, and London, the dog and other guests consumed lady fingers and lemonade with apparent relish," the paper reported.

1912 In April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, killing around 1,500 people. A little over a month later, Thomas Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain - Lines on the Loss of the Titanic" appeared on the front page of The Times.In the days that followed, readers began sending in their own poems, forcing the paper to issue a knuckle-rapping editorial: "If the hundreds and hundreds of people who have sent us verses about the loss of the Titanic will read with care those which THOMAS HARDY has written about it they may be moved to share our own wonder at the audacity they showed in attempting to deal with such a subject."

1925 When the American classic "The Great Gatsby" was published, our reviewer called F. Scott Fitzgerald "the philosopher of the flapper" and said the book was "a mystical, glamorous story of today."

"Son, 6, Plans Revenge Poems on Milne When He Grows Up"

1926 Shortly after A. A. Milne introduced Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin to the world, one young reader was not so happy: his son, the original Christopher Robin, who threatened "to take revenge upon his dad by writing poems about him."

1939 Steinbeck's Depression-era tale, "The Grapes of Wrath," captured the desperate plight of migrant farm workers and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. "Californians are not going to like this angry novel," our reviewer wrote. "The beauty and fertility of California conceal human fear, hatred and violence."

1968 "Because the summer of 1968 promises - or threatens - to be a critical one in American life," wrote the Book Review on June 2 of that year, "prominent novelists and critics were asked to address themselves once more to the old but lively question of 'engagement.' Given the current divisions and dilemmas in our country, did they, as individuals or as craftsmen, expect to be spending the summer in any unusual (engaged) way?"

Many writers responded, including Malcolm Cowley, Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates. James Baldwin opened his note with this resounding message: "The black man's continuing situation here is not an act of God. It has been willed into existence, and is perpetuated, by men."

He closed it with another: "I have not talked about how this summer is likely to affect my writing life, because all of the summers I have spent in this country - or, for that matter, all of the winters - have been long and hazardous. I'm used to it. I intend to survive the summer because I am working on the screen version of 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' and hope to be shooting it, come the long, hard winter. When that's done, we'll see. For me, work is an act of love and an act of faith. And perhaps I hope, by working, to help save that country for which Thomas Jefferson trembled when he remembered that God was just."

1977 "Welcome to the sexually liberated '70s," Rosalyn Drexler wrote in the Book Review. "Leave your clothes at the door and be prepared to have the time of your life; no role playing here, no jealousy, no boredom, no disease; if it feels good it is good!"

Alongside groundbreaking feminist texts such as Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics," Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch" and Shere Hite's report on women's sexual habits, "sexual liberation became big business." Drexler added, "The 'how to' book, the 'stroke' book, the survey, and the vibrator are a direct result of the sexual revolution."

The Year of the Whopper: "In David Foster Wallace's huge new novel, the calendar is sold to the highest corporate bidder."

1996 Jay McInerney found David Foster Wallace's novel " Infinite Jest " - which is more than 1,000 pages long - to be "alternately tedious and effulgent."

2010 Mark Twain's autobiography was released 100 years after his death, just as he requested.

2020 At a moment of profound national protest - shaped by the coronavirus pandemic and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis - the poets Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown wrote poems for the Book Review.

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125 Years of The New York Times Book Review

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This year, the Book Review turns 125. It's an institution that was born under the watchful eye of Adolph S. Ochs, who established the standalone supplement shortly after he became publisher of the paper in 1896.

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about zoora

Zoora Shah served nearly fourteen years of a life sentence for killing a man who violently controlled her.

Southall Black Sisters led Zoora's campaign, with support from Justice for Women. Zoora was sentenced to life for the killing of Mohammed Azam, a man from Bradford's criminal underworld. Azam sexually, physically and economically abused and exploited Zoora for a period of twelve years. She killed Azam with a fatal dose of arsenic in 1993. She was convicted of murder at Leeds Crown Court in December 1993. Zoora was given a tariff of 20 years.

At her original trial, Zoora did not mention the abuse she had suffered, as she did not want to bring shame onto her family. During her appeal against conviction, which was lost, Zoora admitted poisoning Azam because of his abuse of her. In April 2000, then Home Secretary Jack Straw reduced her 20 year tariff to twelve years. Zoora's daughters, Naseem and Fozia Shah, continued to campaign for her release. Justice for Women in Leeds visited and supported Zoora regularly, working closely with Southall Black Sisters, as she was serving her life sentence in Yorkshire. Zoora was finally released in 2006, having served two years longer than her reduced tariff.
For media coverage of Zoora's case, please visit our press coverage page.

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Zoora Shah served nearly fourteen years of a life sentence for killing a man who violently controlled her. Southall Black Sisters led Zoora's campaign, with support from Justice for Women. Zoora was sentenced to life for the killing of Mohammed Azam, a man from Bradford's criminal underworld.

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About Zoora Shah

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A scream a shout far in the distance
Maybe the first or second floor
Curtains colouring the windows
Never see behind closed doors
A silent siege behind politeness
Domestic harmony for show
Lost in the mirage of a marriage
Outside a world she'll never know

And as I see through the real you
I'm falling straight into
A thousand broken Mirrors
I can't hide
And outside the bright lights
Can't hide the pain inside
And I've broken a thousand mirrors
Now it's time
Now it's time
Now it's time
Now it's time

Loving her children with a passion
Protecting them at any cost
Taking the only course of action
There's no more bridges left to cross
Who are the ones that are the guilty
Who are the ones that bear the scar
We must not leave our sisters bleeding
We sing this song for Tsoora Shah
And as I see through the real you
I'm falling Straight into
A thousand broken Mirrors
I can't hide
And outside the bright lights
Can't hide the pain inside
And I've broken a thousand mirrors
Now it's time
Now it's time
Now it's time
Now it's time

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Asian Dub Foundation (Ft. Sinéad O'Connor) - 1000 Mirrors

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A scream a shout far in the distance Maybe the first or second floor Curtains colouring the windows Never see behind closed doors A silent siege behind politeness Domestic harmony for show Lost in the mirage of a marriage Outside a world she'll never know And as I see through

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exceptional film-maker!
Check the trailer of The Grand Budapest Hotel below:

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THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL - Official Wolrdwide Trailer HD

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fiche type à remplir

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discrimination at airports

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Riz Ahmed Could Start a Boy Band with Guys He Met During an Airport Security Search

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list of key questions

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audio

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Search For My Tongue [www.youtubeconverter.one]

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short film

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Riz Ahmed - The Long Goodbye (Best Live Action Short - Oscars 2022)

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01/03/21 activity 1 pages 1 & 2

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who acted before Rosa Parks

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The Lunchbox, trailer 2

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The Lunchbox | Official Trailer HD (2013)

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Trailer 1 : The Hundred-Foot Journey 2014

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worksheet

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Pride 1 prejudice understanding the text

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Pride 1 prejudice understanding the text

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Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen chapter 34 Mr Darcy's Declaration

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Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen chapter 34 Mr Darcy's Declaration

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Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Mr Darcy's declaration

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Pride and Prejudice: Mr Darcy Proposing Elizabeth

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Denzel Washington motivational speech 2020

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Denzel Washington motivational speech 2020

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''Dreams without goals are just dreams!''

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WATCH THIS EVERYDAY AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE - Denzel Washington Motivational Speech

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HIGH SCHOOL YEARS, by Romane, Prune, Noa and Jules

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''Old Jim Crow Got To Go'' poem

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There is a national poet laureate, but you might be surprised to learn there is a national youth poet laureate as well. Amanda Gorman, 19, who is the first to hold the lofty title, is a native of Los Angeles and a sophomore at Harvard.

"I feel in many ways like a unicorn," she has said. But it's only her work that is born out of imagination. The Times's Race/Related newsletter asked her for original poetry for Black History Month, which we then animated. You can watch her poems below. After each selection, we've included her back story to the poem.

She also shared her story with us here.

Video

Amanda Gorman

"People ask me to say something 'new' about race. No pressure. Yet sometimes the experience of hearing something anew can be more enlightening than hearing something new itself: Imagine the revelation to be found when we re-examine the poetics of a shared past. I created this poem entirely from textual protest media (protesters, fliers, buttons, headlines) from the mid- to late-20th century, inspired heavily by the National Museum of African American History and Culture's digital archives. Phrases remain in their original form with amended punctuation and line breaks." - Amanda Gorman

" This poem sprouted from my consideration of the fragmented ties many African-Americans have in relation to the African continent, due in part to a multigenerational, historical and systemic trauma. However, in the face of this pain, the extensive joy and beauty of the African diaspora exists all around us. The poem draws in particular on the symbolism of the Drinking Gourd, or the North Star. In times of doubt, the Drinking Gourd reminds me that I come from a people of storytellers constantly seeking freedom, not only for themselves, but also for others, and that is a history and future I actively choose to celebrate every single day." - Amanda Gorman

Produced by Antonio De Luca and Jason Fujikuni

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A Coda to Black History Month (Published 2018)

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There is a national poet laureate, but you might be surprised to learn there is a national youth poet laureate as well. Amanda Gorman, 19, who is the first to hold the lofty title, is a native of Los Angeles and a sophomore at Harvard.

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vice-president elect speech

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22/01 distance learning class

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Mind-blowing TedTalk!

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Using your voice is a political choice | Amanda Gorman

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Thank you Youtube!

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extract 1 of The Great Debaters

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Trailer : listen and note down the words related to debating

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The Great Debaters - Full Trailer (HD)  ***New

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The Hill We climb, poem

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inauguration day

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Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman delivers a poem at Joe Biden's inauguration

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worksheet

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questions 1 /2 / 3/ 4

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(2013) Obama responds to hecklers at speech

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understanding the scene : quizlet (from Ms Diard's padlet)

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The security system for this website has been triggered. Completing the challenge below proves you are a human and gives you temporary access.

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The Great War

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Chapter 1 : 1692

The night just start, and some screams already break the silence of the city since the recent accusations.

Everybody start to close their shutters by fear. Blood will flow tonight.

And in all this terror, I, become someone.

I’m born. In a crazy world full of danger and anger, by all these fools. I, personally, would not choose this time to born, maybe because of the misery that reigns on this country. I could talking about how my life   be taken by things that I didn´t choose, like my real nature, but I won´t, maybe because I don´t want to scare anyone. There is a name for that, but, in my opinion it doesn’t really define the thing like people see it. People see that, what I am, as a satanic, bloody and blasphemous thing, but in fact, the only blasphemous thing it’s what they did. But whatever, let me tell you what really happened.

It was near of Samhain, Halloween for the British education, the celebration of the  dead, the night of the death, also called the night of the witches.I'd always lived in Salem, in the Massachusetts. And I’d never leaved my home sweet home.

Anyway,  the stars brights and the moon is full. Since some weeks, citizens seems nervous. Apparently, a sort of darkness invades the town and grows more and more, a sort of curse as they said, like a black rave of darkness. Perhaps, it was probably  a sign by the way. All magic comes with a price. By the way of black and voluptuous form, I am the black sheep of this story. I am Abigail Williams, and I am going to narrate you, my curse, my story

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learn them ! love them! use them!

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Question 2

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QUESTION 1

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answer the questions

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useful expressions

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Beatrice and Benedick
act 1 scene 1

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DOC 3 the art of contradiction and agreement

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DOC 3 the art of contradiction and agreement

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short answers : corrigé

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style LAB

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What is 'debating'?

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The Monty Python

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FLEABAG VIDEO

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Fleabag Ending Explained | The Takeaway | Prime Video

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presentation & questions

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https://we.tl/t-xMfNaiQOpO

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WeTransfer - Send Large Files & Share Photos Online - Up to 2GB Free

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WeTransfer is the simplest way to send your files around the world. Share large files and photos. Transfer up to 2GB free. File sharing made easy!

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"That will never do."

- Offred, The Handmaid's Tale

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986), the heroine Offred often thinks to herself, "Context is all." She constantly reminds the reader-directly acknowledged as "you"-that we exist in a wide social and political reality that shapes and contains our world (Atwood 40). Through Offred, Atwood asserts her own claim that, though the novel may be fictional, it was penned with the context of "4,000 years because that's how much of women's history I was drawing on, and that's how many generations of storytellers stood behind me," says Atwood . She labels it a speculative fiction, making it the hypothesis that if we continue to silence and mistreat women, the dystopian Republic of Gilead could be our future reality. Offred's words evoke the second-wave feminist phrase, "The personal is political." Offred seeks to understand and critique the system of misogyny she inhabits, though often confined to her small sphere of living. The novel shines a light on both the persisting issues in feminism and its parallels to women in today's world.

Although Atwood wrote the novel in the eighties at the end of second-wave feminism, reading it in late 2018 as I did for the first time, is particularly jarring during the rise of female voices in the media. We are currently in the midst of fourth-wave feminism, a period marked by social media, justice against sexual assault, and the push for gender equality. The tale mainly follows Offred, yet many female voices shine through her first-person narrative. The structure of stitched-together narratives resembles that of early slave narratives as well as contemporary online movements, particularly the #MeToo movement, a hashtag created by Tarana Burke that started a vital conversation to " de-stigmatize the act of surviving by highlighting the breadth and impact of a sexual violence worldwide ." Many voices come together to form the movement, creating a "women's culture" like the one Offred's mother wanted - "It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies" (Atwood 127).

We see this in today's culture as well with women sharing their own stories across platforms and inspiring others to share their own, forming a bond of resistance through their narratives: a connecting culture that we need but never asked for, allowing us to find a sort of sisterhood in the midst of pain, strength within systems that restrict. A patchwork of accusations against powerful men stretching across the globe. Out of the many collective voices comes the individual's. The novel begins with a "We" but is followed by Offred's "I" and the exchange of separate names, something that is taken from the handmaids in Gilead.

Although each character has a deeply personal story to tell, the cultural connection of womanhood is formed throughout the text. In dystopian Gilead, there is still a focus on the woman's body-they are rooted in primitivity and nature, shown through the collectiveness of women (both a thing that strengthens and dehumanizes them). The body plays a central role and even defines the handmaids: despite everything, "we still had our bodies" (Atwood 4). Their bodies are exploited and objectified as something that is entirely theirs but also the Commanders' and the state's, forming a complicated relationship with their figures that I, as a woman living in the age of Instagram, can relate to. Offred avoids looking at her nakedness, "not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to... look at something that determines me so completely" (Atwood 63).

I think of my summer at a Christian summer camp. Young and innocent, I thought nothing of my athletic shorts until I was told that their length and the subsequently unconcealed skin of my 14-year-old thighs would distract the male campers from God's message. The boys were shirtless and unruly, but it was never their fault. I love my body, the way it provides both pain and pleasure, but the voyeur renders it something dark and self-betraying. That's why The Handmaid's Tale reads so troubling to me in 2019 when there is widespread and broadcasted objectification of feminine bodies; greater awareness of rape culture; and victim-blaming. We become defined by the flesh on our bones and the nature of our anatomy.

There are times when I've wanted to dress in the handmaid garb, my body covered in the blood-red cloak, free from the gaze of others. The dress code is enforced to denote the purpose of the handmaids, trivializing all other traits of theirs, yet it provides a sort of strength in their fight back against the patriarchy. It is reminiscent of contemporary collective movements, like "Time's Up" in which celebrities wore pins or all black at events in solidarity with people who have suffered from sexual harassment. The television version adds a voiceover of Offred's: "They should never have given us uniforms if they didn't want us to be an army" (""). This togetherness under an enforced rule uses systemic patriarchal oppression against itself, fostering solidarity amongst the disenfranchised.

Another fact of the Gileadean system enmeshed with our twenty-first-century one is the commodification of women. We see that intimacy is a transaction in which the woman is compared to a material good for sale. Handmaids are valued for their ability to reproduce, losing value as each Ceremony - their ritual intercourse with the Commander in hopes of becoming impregnated - passes with them childess. I think of my class in high school, as pubescent volunteers stood up in front of the class, passing a piece of tape down a row of arms: "Having multiple sex partners is almost like tape that loses its stickiness after being applied and removed multiple times. So the more you have the harder it is to bond to the next," reads one Christian sex-ed pamphlet . Sexuality became something I was supposed to deny, suppress, and be ashamed about. It was purely for reproduction within a marriage, as I was taught in school, and the biblical authority of Gilead enforces this mindset as well. Women should be the autocratic leaders of their bodies, but men in both Gilead and today's world assert their belief that female sexuality is a democracy in which they can decide what's best. Gilead is a system void of women's choice, something we see being taken away in the Trump era of today.

Lessons like the one I was taught in sex ed, similar ones like comparing a woman's sexuality to a piece of chewed up gum, and even lessons taught by Aunts in the Red Center slut-shame women. We see this in the scene of victim-shaming, where Janine is told that her sexual assault was " her fault, her fault, her fault" (Atwood 72). We see the rape culture and diminished choice portrayed in the novel, in which Aunt Lydia believes that "We were a society dying... of too much choice" (Atwood 25). That choice and privacy allocated to women through cases like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey is at stake in the Trump era today.

A sign of the times is the vetting and swearing in of Brett Kavanaugh, accused of sexual assault last year by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. I think of myself lying on the couch before class, weeping for this woman and all other women that have experienced or feared this crime. My roommate texted me later with words of support. I had skipped class that day, drafting emails I never sent of excuses regarding the hearings that made me feel weak, even in the face of such strength. With the controversial hearings, we saw the strength in Ford choosing to come forward with sexual violence allegations against a man in power, but we also see the pressure put on this woman who feels obligated under the law to report a past crime that has haunted her for decades. That "choice" to testify or not presented to her is one that comes with death threats and doxxings; just like when Janine comes clean and is faced with shame and punishment. It is a new form of trauma that women who have survived such a disturbing experience have to undergo years later.

This type of thinking that supporters of abusers like Kavanaugh have perpetuates a rape culture in which it is believed to be the woman's fault and responsibility in protecting herself. "There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on the lights. These things you did were like prayers," Offred thinks of the things she did in the past to keep herself from being another headline in the news (Atwood 226). It is almost a crime to be a woman, the body a mere implication of such guilt.

The body is conflated with the narrative itself when Offred apologizes: "I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force" (Atwood 267). It becomes a messy, Frankenstein's-monster-like story steeped in femininity, much like this article I write, an all-over-the-place disarray with no sense of chronology or order. I don't want to tell this story, I don't want to consider how close we are to a world like Gilead or find similarities between Offred and women of today. But the book demands us to in the way it creates a commonality between all women and in the way it tells a story that needs to be told.

Throughout the text, Offred constantly ponders the meaning of words and the power they hold; through this, she conflates language and flesh: "I feel like the word shatter" (Atwood 103). We as readers understand what she means, despite the arbitrary nature of words, similar to the arbitrary subservience of women and distribution of power. Offred pens her narrative, giving voice to the enslaved handmaids and undermining the new biblical discourse in political power with her own pleasure through the resistance narrative. "The pen between my finder is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains," Offred thinks as she writes the resistance motto Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (Atwood 186). Offred is aware of the power of words: she gets strength from the corrupted Latin etched onto her wall, subverting the educated man's phrase for her own use, and she hopes to resist and give voice to others through her own narrative. Just as we've always done and will always continue to do.

In the era of #MeToo and social media, where women can find power in sharing their experiences, context truly is all. An individual's story of maltreatment, while carrying the weight of a unique and personal burden, is not an anomaly but rather a part of a broader context. Each post and headline comes together to create a fabric of the time we live in now and desire to change. Language becomes a means for power. The revolution against the patriarchy through storytelling is both personal and political. There is a metaphor in the novel of Serena Joy's "subversive" garden, "a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly into the light, as if to... say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently" (Atwood 153). This tension between silence and noise refers to the difficulty in voicing one's trauma in a system that silences them. They use the very things that silence them - their bodies, their sexuality, their collectiveness, the discourse of power - to resist through language and show that "There is an us then, there's a we" (Atwood 169).

The normalizing and destigmatizing, and thus demanding change, of real female experiences within the patriarchal system via online platforms today gives voice to "the people who were not in the papers," who were previously not justified to tell their tales that define a women's culture: "We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print... We lived in the gaps between the stories" (Atwood 57). Context is both the circumstances of the greater world we live in, as well as the words that shape our narratives. This double meaning fuses the narrative with resistance. Just as the scrawled Nolite te bastardes carborundorum and fellow handmaid's tales inspire the narrating Offred to pen her account, so too Offred inspires her reader to make change and spread their own stories; just as Atwood inspires millions of women reading her novel to spread their own stories, so too the people who share their experiences encourage the next person to tell theirs as well.

I think of the Women's March in DC, of "women's voices [rising] around me, a soft chant that is still too loud for me, after days and days of silence," of roaring protests and noiseless signs from all types of people using their words to fight against a new leadership (Atwood 123). The millions of people coming together, a product of the times and a constancy of the human race, do so to alter the context that affects so much, to rewrite our future. Because I resist and make my voice heard, and because you are reading this article, someone will tell my story, and their story, and someone else theirs, and so on. And in numbers, the silence is drowned out.

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"Context is All": The Handmaid's Tale in the Era of #MeToo - The Thirlby

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Because I resist and make my voice heard, and because you are reading this article, someone will tell my story, and their story, and someone else theirs, and so on. And in numbers, the silence is drowned out * Photo ℅ Elly Dassas/Hulu

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Prune's & Jules' diary

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PARTS 1 & 2

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table of contents odt (modifiable)

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table of contents pdf