Mrs Dalloway

Some MRS! Some life!http://youtu.be/O1AEj1-Eqjo

You and I

You and I

Only one I in the whole wide world
And millions and millions of you,
But every you is an I to itself
And I am a you to you, too!
But if I am a you and you are an I
And the opposite also is true,
It makes us both the same somehow
Yet splits us each in two.
It's more and more mysterious,
The more I think it through:
Every you everywhere in the world is an I;
Every I in the world is a you!
From: MY SONG IS BEAUTIFUL (Little, Brown and Co., 1994)

food for thought

"Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time."
Hebrew proverb


I categorize teachers into three types:
1) Neomethodomaniacs (those who blindly follow new methods)
2) Neomethodophobes (those who are allergic to new methods)
3) Neomethodophiles (those who find new methods meaningful and useful and try them)
A successful trainer should be a neomethodophile. To put it differently, a neomethodophobe cannot be a successful trainer.

Reading Groups at Encompass Culture
I´m the local coordinator for the reading groups at Encompass Culture. Argentina and other parts of the World such as : Kenya, India, Macedonia, Pakistan, Kyrgystan, England, Peru,Mexico,Bahrain and Tunisia form part of this discussion group. Our students at the ISFD y T Nº5 are involved in the reading of literary texts and their discussion online. The innovation is that this time our students, trainees at the teacher training course will have their say in literary matters, so , this time the voices of the students will be read in the forum.
The ELT e-Reading Group was created by a collective of English language educators from all over the world with the support of the British Council. It aims at encouraging ELT professionals to read literature in English, helping to build bridges between cultures and contributing to build tolerance and intercultural competence through the discussion of literature .

Pilar Martínez

Project Coordinators:
Chris Lima - Plymouth, UK.
Sanghita Sen - Kolkata, India.

Local Coordinators:
Hildaura Rosario Conejo - Peru
María del Pilar Matínez - Argentina . Pergamino
Ruben Mazzei – Argentina. La Plata
Emmanuel Flores Flores - Mexico
Pushpa Nagini - India
Murali Nair - India
Partha Sarathi Misra - India
Rama Meganathan - India
Ronita Roy Basu - India
N.V.Bose - India
Kalyani Samantray - India
Nayyer Chandella - Pakistan
Ali Ahmad Al-Rabai - Bahrain
Anzhela Nikolovska - Macedonia
Tashmatov Abdimitalip - Kyrgyztan
Ahmed Mekki Elatrach - Tunisia
John Otieno Okach – Kenya


Students who participate actively in the discussions:

Florencia Paciaroni, Eugenia Laguía, Ana Maino, Maricel Bamonde, Natalia Torchelli, María Elena Gómez, Florencia Mugica, María Gastaldo, Florencia Deminicis, María Belén García, Marian Fartado Lomellino.

Heterotopias in Garcías´s Dreaming in Cuban

Michel Foucault describes heterotopia as a disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite…in such a state, things are laid, placed, arranged, in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them. In this sense Dreaming in Cuban is a novel that deals with heterotopias. The Del Pino family, around whom the novel spins and unfolds, is a family divided politically and geographically by the Cuban revolution. This family clings to the illusion of an utopian life and fails to recognize that they create and live in heterotopia
Foucault distinguishes two forms of heterotopias, the first is reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis, from this point of view, Celia del Pino, the woman on whom the novel Dreaming in Cuban centres, her two daughters Lourdes and Felicia, her son Javier and her grandchildren live in heterotopia. This heterotopia is critical as regards their relations with society and to the human environment in which they live. There is a feeling of in-betweeness about them all that makes them experience the awkward realization that they are half Cuban, half American, torn, split between two worlds and the feelings these two worlds evoke. The need to relocate themselves is what individuals sense they must do, because of this they create a place, in the hope of putting “the orders together”. This created place of conflict according to Foucault constitutes a place of nowhere without geographical markers, for it is a place that is borne from the figurative. Celia Del Pino builds one of her heterotopias out of the memories of her first lover Gustavo Sierra de Armas who leaves her to return to Spain. The fact that she writes letters to him for a period of twenty five years and the evidence that she removes her drop pearl earrings that he gave her, only nine times in all her life to clean them, is the hint that leads the reader to conclude that she construes a secret forbidden place for her and her lover. This allocation of memories that belong to an unresolved past, that has no location in her actual world, this imaginary conversations that she keeps with Gustavo through the letters she writes, is the strategy that gives her the strength to go on. “Mi querido Gustavo, A fish swims in my lung. Without you, what is there to celebrate? I am yours always, Celia.”(37). Another place of nowhere is constituted by the Hotel Inglaterra, this is the very place where she and Gustavo used to secretly meet, the place where the manifestation of their love took place. This hotel is an heterotopia because it represents the place of elsewhere in relation to home. In this sense, Soroa, the place where she honeymoons with her husband Jorge del Pino, also becomes a critical heterotopia, a no-place, far and away from home, a site where all memories can get accumulated and distorted. “Querido Gustavo, I’m writing to you from my honeymoon. We’re in Soroa…[Jorge] brushes my forehead with moist petals to wipe away memory. His kindness makes me cry. I’m still yours, Celia.”(50)
The most important events in Celia’s life are arranged in sites very different from one another, Celia finds it impossible to build a place of residence for them. She lives in a state of heterotopia that constantly calls for redefining her territories, redefining herself, by way of her past memories with her family in Cuba and her imagined pictures of the lives of her family in the United States. She is the split version of a woman that lives in two worlds. Through her memories of seen territories she lived in, and her imagination about the unseen places she will never know, she incessantly tries to put together the pieces of her past and the bits of the future she could have lived had she dared to leave Cuba. It is because of the birth of her daughters that she never leaves. Daughters, not sons anchored her to Cuba. The cultural ordeal is too heavy to be broken. “…If it’s a boy, I’ll leave him. I’ll sail to Spain, to Granada, to your kiss, Gustavo. I love you, Celia.”(50)
Being away from her family who decide to migrate to the United States, she senses that she can not tell which is worse, separation or death. “Separation is familiar, too familiar, but Celia is uncertain she can reconcile it with permanence”. (66)
The second form of heterotopias is deviation, it has to do with “individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm”.(Foucault, M.p4). Hugo Villaverde, Celia’s son in law, Felicia’s husband, becomes the example of deviation, a man who batters his wife and does little for a living, in a seemingly way Felicia’s actions also become exemplary of deviated behaviour: she leaves her daughters to build a too much we-depend-on-each-other relation with her son Ivanito. “Ivanito senses even then that something has come between them. He will never speak his sisters language, account for his moments like a cow with a dull bell. He is convinced, although he couldn’t say why, that they are united against his happiness with mama.”(86). “Ivanito thinks we are cruel to Mamá but he never saw what we saw, he never heard what we heard. We try to protect him but he doesn’t want to be protected. He is a gullible rag doll”. (121) Ivanito becomes a “gullible rag doll” for life thanks to this deviant way of possessing his mother imposes on him and thanks to his readiness for accepting the leisure that a life lead by a woman brings about.
According to Foucault the second principle that describes heterotopias is that society as history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion. An example of this heterotopia is the cemetery, a space connected to all the sites. These very sites are connected to each individual since each individual has relatives in there. This heterotopia takes place at two levels, one is physical, the other is mental. The physical place, however, gets blurred by the mental representations of the thinker, in this case, namely Celia. “…Celia thinks, her husband will be buried in stiff, foreign earth.” (6-7). The foreign place represents the Promised Land for Celia’s relatives; yet for her the foreign land is nothing more than a cemetery, the place that borders her next of kin, the place that prevents her relatives from coming back. “She imagines her granddaughter pale, gliding through paleness, malnourished and cold without the food of scarlets and greens.”(7).
The native language of Cuban immigrants is also related to cemeteries, García refers to it in a way that makes readers relate it to something buried. The native language then, becomes a heteropia in itself: another kind of cemetery. “She ponders the transmigrations from the southern latitudes, the millions moving north. What happens to their language? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?”(73) The heterotopia, the placement of the native language indifferent sites makes it impossible for immigrants to find a place of residence for their language. Immigrants become at the same time foreigners for the Americans and foreigners for the Cubans who opted for staying in Cuba. There are other immigrants; however, who build the heterotopia of their native language. This is the case of Lourdes, Celia’s daughter who chooses to bury her language in order to assimilate to the foreign culture.” The desire to learn the language of others is often coupled with a desire to behave and think like them in order to ultimately be recognized and validated by them.”(Kramsch,C. 1998). For people like Lourdes the native language bears the mark of shame for it represents the border, the very thing that makes them feel and be seen as outcasts. Lourdes considers that immigration has redefined her and she is grateful to the fact that she left Cuba. Unlike her husband, she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention. “…She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which Lourdes claims never possessed her.”(73)The process of dislocation( from Cuba) and relocation ( in the United States) is apparently simple for her. She chooses to reinvent her life in the United States, to be all American and to bury her Cuban roots. Yet, in spite of her willingness to dispel a feeling of double consciousness she can not forget Cuba. “Lourdes misses the birds she had in Cuba.”(131).
Pilar, Lourdes’ daughter is a different case, the heterotopia Pilar lives in happens to be her memories. She lives an inner war. The constant fight between her Cuban past and her American present misplaces her both, in her family circle, with her mother and in her daily life with herself “Everyday Cuba fades a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside me. And there is only my imagination where our history should be.”(138) In order to relocate herself she resorts to painting. She finds in painting a universal language. “Who needs words when colors and lines conjure up their own language? Thats what I want to do with my paintings, find a unique language, obliterate the clichés.”(139) Pilar feels torn apart, she feels she is two women in one. Her in-betweeness finds a kind of solace in painting, it is thanks to this artistic endeavour that she experiences the possibility of being able to try to find her own identity.
The third principle that describes heterotopias is that they are capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible.” (Foucault,M. 5). Javier, Celia’s son, becomes a professor of Biochemistry at the university of Prague, lecturing in Russian, German and Czech and he speaks Spanish to his little girl. He is the very example of the juxtaposing of cultures.
The fourth principle that describes heterotopias is linked to “slices of time”, to heterochronies. Heterochronies represent a break with the continuity of time. Heterotopias and heterochronies feed on each other. There are heterotopias of accumulating time that have to do with the intent of creating an imaginary archive to enclose in a place all times, a place of all times becomes then, a place outside of time. Pilar´s diary which she keeps hidden from her mother´s eyes is an example of this type of heterotopia. Pilar records everything in her diary, in her intent to keep her life and memories intact and safe.
“I was only two years old when I left Cuba but I remember everything that’s happened to me since I was a baby, even word-for-word conversations. I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap playing with her drop pearl earrings when my mother told her we were leaving the country.”(26)
The routine of keeping a diary has to do with Pilar’s desire to pack her past in a safe place so as to then be able to move on into assimilation. The life of Pilar is sliced by time, the time she remembers she lived in Cuba and her present time in the United States.
“Most of what I’ve learned that’s important I’ve learned on my own, or from my grandmother Abuela Celia and I write and I write to each other sometimes, but mostly I hear her speaking to me at night just before I fall asleep. She tells me stories about her life and what the sea was like that day.”(p29)
Pilar’s heterotopia constitutes a heterochronia, a break with time that she tries to ignore by adopting an all-too-for assimilation attitude. Yet, her memories do not let her alone. Her dreams keep on intruding in her life.
The fifth principle describes heterotopias as a system of opening and closing that both penetrates and isolates the immigrant. Lourdes thinks that by giving immigrants from Russia or Pakistan a job, she is doing them a favour, she believes that she is breaking them in to the American life. She pictures herself as a door that opens new worlds and closes old lives for other people. These immigrants live in a state of constant re-definition that gradually deterritorializes them and because of this they become penetrable, vulnerable. The in-betweenness they live in makes them feel the impossibility of getting rid from a sense of unhomelessness. They feel trapped by memories.
“When Lourdes finally danced with her nephew, she felt beholden to the congas, to a powerful longing to dance. Her body remembered what her mind had forgotten. Suddenly, she wanted to show her daughter the artistry of true dancing.”(p224)
The sixth and last principle is about heterotopias and their function in relation to all space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion or to create a space that is other, another real space as perfect. This latter type is the heterotopia of compensation. The place of illusion is construed when the burden of coping with life as it is becomes too heavy to be borne, when the realization that there is no way out calls for activating a defence mechanism to fight back the actual misery these characters are immersed in.
“Our house is on a cement plot near the East River. At night, especially in the summer when the sound carries, I hear the low whistles of the ships as they leave New York harbour. They travel south past the Wall Street skyscrapers, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Bay Ridge Channel and under the Verrazano Bridge. Then they make a left at Coney Island and head out to the Atlantic. When I hear those whistles, I want to go with them.”(31)
The heterotopia of compensation occurs when the need to evaluate the life they live as perfect springs out. “We used to go to Cinelandia every Friday after work. I remember seeing Mujeres de Fuego with Bette Davies, Ann Dvorak and Joan Blondell”(100)
This type of heterotopia allows them to live in many places at the same time and to compensate for lost time, for lost choice and for los lives. “Imagination, like memory can transform lies to truths.”(88)
All the heterotopias in Dreaming in Cuban are held together very firmly by the dreams of an utopian future always too ideal to be fulfilled, because of this the deterritorialization the characters feel becomes a too familiar no-place. “I belong-not instead of here, but more than here.”(236). All characters considered, Celia is the only one who finally achieves a permanent state of location, she finds a real place where she can allocate all the disorder, all her lives: the sea, and in doing so she fulfils her fate. “There’s a wet landscape in [her] palm.”(7)

María del Pilar Martínez

readers

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader. Terry Eagleton

Change your thinking

Motivational Poem - By Changing Your Thinking By Author Unknown
By Changing Your Thinking, You change your beliefs;
When you change your beliefs, You change your expectations;
When you change your expectations, You change your attitude;
When you change your attitude, You change your behavior;
When you change your behavior, You change your performance;
When you change your performance; You Change Your Life!