Nineteen Thirty-Seven

Nineteen Thirty-Seven is a short story featured in Edwidege Danticat’s Krik? Krak! This story revolves around one young girl’s experience of dealing with her mother’s accusation and arrest for being a witch shortly after the massacre of 1937 in the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. During the story the author mentions the horrible experiences this young girl’s mother went through during the massacre, as well as what both mother and daughter did along with other women in order to remember the sacrifices many did on that night of the massacre. In this analysis I will argue that in story there is a special bond between the generations of women that have inherited the Madonna. When the story begins, it starts off by mentioning that the Madonna had shed a tear as the young girl was on her way to visit her mother at the prison and at that very moment she thought her mother was dead. Then when they young girl gets to see her mother the first thing her mother asks is if the Madonna has cried and when she answers yes Manman starts to cry. By the Madonna crying both the daughter and mother see it as a prediction of what is to come to Manman in the future which is stated when the narrator states: “Now, Manman sat with the Madonna pressed against her chest, her eyes staring ahead, as though she was looking into the future.” (Danticat 40) What this means is that if neither mother nor daughter had a bond, they would never know the meaning of the Madonna crying or the importance of keeping the Madonna close ones self.

Elvira Pulitano

Landscape, Memory and Survival in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat by Elvira Pulitano is an essay written to explore Edwidge Danticat’s writing. The purpose of Pulitano’s essay is to try and persuade other writers to represent the lands and the ocean differently in Francophone writing. As her thesis, the author argues that Danticat uses physical, cultural and linguistic borders with the Caribbean Sea and that her writing “participates in the revisionist process of remapping European discourse on Caribbean island (hetero)topology and writing” (Danticat, pg. 2-3, ). In order to support and prove her argument Pulitano uses Danticat’s short story The Farming of Bones, along with other of Danticat’s writings that focus on the 1937 massacre. In these stories the author points out the physical border as the sea; the sea cannot be part of nor be apart from the Haitian landscape, which is filled with the suffrage of the many faceless people. The linguistic borders that come up in these stories is that that distinguished them as Spanish speakers and French speakers by the simple pronunciation of “perejil” that if mispronounced would lead to their death. Pulitano then interprets the cleansing ritual as a cultural border, which to the Haitians is a way of hope. I believe that the author makes a good point in wanting to make these borders important to the meaning toward Danticat’s writing. This, will make it easier to interpret and understand each of Danticat’s stories in the future.

Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati

        “It wasn’t me, was it?” Plagiarism and the Web is an academic article written by Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati that deals with plagiarism and how the internet has facilitated plagiarizing for students. This article was started off of observations from both authors. These observations were of their very own students and the work they had turned in to be graded. After noticing that many of the students had plagiarized, the authors then wanted to know why the student had come to such dishonesty. As a result they found that many students did not know how to cite their sources, others did not know what to write about based on their topic, and others were just lazy. When a student is not interested in a topic or has no idea what to write about based on a topic many tend to plagiarize by “patch writing” or “kidnapping”. Patch writing as the author states “allows student a place to borrow from text, manipulate it, and work through new concepts by piecing their writing with the original work” and kidnapping is “borrowing, weaving writing as impersonation-writing as experimentation, as mimic.” (DeVoss & Rosati, p.194, 2002) Even though both of these strategies are good to come up with new ideas, it is still plagiarism when you do not cite your source even if a whole sentence was not used, you are still borrowing. Many students are placed in a state of confusion when a teacher asks them to write and original idea with plenty of sources that can back up their new idea, which often leads them to plagiarize. The reason for that is that many students do not understand what is expected of them or simply think: “How can I come up with a NEW idea if there has to be evidence out there that supports my idea?”This will just lead the student to try and get ideas from some other place and try to present it as his or her own which is plagiarizing. When researching many students don’t like putting much time or effort into their research, most students, as the author puts it think that research “was going to Yahoo…doing a simple search, and using the first 10 or 20 hits.” (DeVoss & Rosati, p.194, 2002) By doing so many students end up plagiarizing, because they either don’t have enough evidence or ideas to write what is expected of them or if they do they just simply don’t want to spend time writing and use the “copy” and “paste” function to finish their work. In conclusion the authors suggest that students should view any written piece of work as “intellectual property”. If a student starts thinking like the author suggest it will be less of a chance that he or she will plagiarize, because they will now see the written work as property and stealing someone’s property is not a good thing. This is something that I can agree with, because I’ve been in many situations like the ones above and this will be very handy to me whenever I have to write any paper from now on.