My life is more about me than this blog makes it seem.

Sua Culpa

I've been reading a few of my recent, sporadic posts here and if you didn't know me, you'd think I live to complain about the government.  State and federal.  But little else.  That's not true.  I also like to complain about what a ludicrous exercise comprehensive exams are.  In my struggle to think of things that are worse than comps, I started looking up various torture mechanisms on the interweb, and then I found this.  A short catalog!  Hooray!  Worse than comps? Being stabbed to death by boys with their writing styles.  Maybe.

The Limits of Book Learning

I do believe I've hit the overload stage with all the reading, however.  Late last week and through the weekend, I had terrible congestion and sneezing attacks that I blamed on the tropical depression's foisting oily Gulf air upon us.  I couldn't hear due to the stuffiness in my head, and breathing was agonizing, and at the same time I tried to march on with reading for these damn exams.  I don't remember anything that I read, and it wasn't until Monday that I realized that, but perhaps I don't care.  If I'm meant to remember key points from Said's Culture and Imperialism when I'm writing my exam answers, surely it'll come back to me.

Over the weekend, I was also blessed with a visit from Jenny who was in town with two Haitian compatriots to participate in a community development conference.  They're presenting their panel today at the conference and they're in my thoughts.  The earthquake there disrupted a country that has little chance of handling such disruption well.  Being able to meet people and understand even a little of their struggle has changed my perspective in spite of the fact that our meeting was brief and mediated by linguistic difference.  Because I don't speak Creole, and because they had a lot of questions about New Orleans, I didn't get to ask as much about their lives as I would have otherwise.  Jenny was interpreting and it seemed like a lot of work even to have the questions going one way.  But their questions were instructive.  At one point Dieusibon asked how I would define the average kind of poverty in New Orleans and in the US.  It was a hard question to answer because poverty is so diverse in its manifestations, but I explained that the poorest people that I encounter are undereducated single parents of multiple children with questionable access to what's left of the social welfare safety net.  I could see from Dieusibon's face that that definition would not even cut the surface of poverty in Haiti and though our conversation moved on to other things, my mind is still imprinted with his expression, for which I lack words. 

I may have retained little about Said's discussion of culture and imperialism, but I've retained a great deal about Dieusibon's.  A single contextualized expression can, indeed, say more than a book's worth of written words.