I’m going to have to agree with everyone else and say that I
really had a difficult time with this week’s reading. I truly have never read
anything like Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now. At times I was 100%
lost and found it really difficult to grasp what she was trying to say, but
then I began rereading certain passages…and then rereading them again! I would
say around read 3 or 4 of a passage I was finally able to catch on to the
general topic of the section. After much confusion, I think that the best way
to describe the novel is to say that Juliana Spahr is exploring. She is exploring
the nature around her, the imposing western influence over Hawaii, and the changes in herself. After
Rob pointed out the “Acknowledgements and Other Information” section of the
book, I found it really interesting to track down where each section took
place. Now, I may be wrong about this, but isn’t this the first novel we’ve
read that has discussed land other than Hawaii?
The vast majority of the book is based in Hawaii
but Spahr does address her upbringing in Ohio.
Maybe that is why I feel like Spahr is exploring so much. She is a woman in Hawaii trying not to be
the cliché westerner. Spahr is able to recognize the many unjust topics in Hawaii (like the beach
public access debate and the Western named streets) but, like global warming
and the endangered species she talks about, she is incapable of sparking a
change.
Vanessa -
ReplyDeleteI can appreciate your frustration with the text, you aren't alone among your peers, but I am glad to see you put in an effort and were able to draw some substantive conclusions from the text as well. I made these remarks in response to a prior post on Spahr:
"Spahr's poetry resists easy reading, she intends it, to slow you down, trip you, force you to think about the individual elements of her language, and eventually conjure a decipherable whole out of her diasporic images. . ."
- Trey