Satire in "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard"

        Kiran Desai uses extensive satire in her book "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard". The satire she uses is more Horatian than Juvenalian. Horatian satire is the more common type, hilariously reflecting stupidity and mistakes. Juvenalian portrays evil and wrong in funny ways, making it significantly more hostile than Horatian satire. In the book, she pokes fun at fortune tellers and psychics by making the main character an ex-post office worker who enjoyed reading all of the letters that came through. He was then fired and became a psychic, where he would merely recall knowledge about these people that he learned from reading the letters. By the townspeople, he is described as having "unfathomable wisdom". They had obviously been tricked by his games. What do you think might happen when word of him leaves the village and attracts visitors from far away?

Indian Literature

        Whilst reading "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," by Kiran Desai, and "Midnight's Children," by Salman Rushdie, I noticed a few aspects of Indian literature that differ from American Literature.
        For one thing, they refer to weather conditions that do not exist here, such as the yearly monsoons. "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" uses vid contrast between the conditions before and after the monsoon arrives. Before it, it is hot, dry, and gloomy. When it arrives, the sky immediately goes dark, and the streets are flooded with cool, clean water. In America, we associate rain with sadness, suffering, or even death, whereas this book clearly displays it as a celebration of life.
        The differences do not end there. In America, we live in a mostly Christian society. That's just how it is. In India, most people are either Hindu or Muslim. That creates a very different culture and atmosphere. At the beginning of "Midnight's Children," the narrator recalls a funny anecdote of a time his grandfather got a bloody nose when he tried to pray on a particularly cold day. He recites the part where he spreads out his prayer mat and begins to pray as if that is nothing out of the ordinary. He recites this as if it were commonplace, and in fact, it is in India.
        These are just a couple of the many cultural aspects of India that influenced its culture, but they take an important role in truly understanding this particular genre of novel.

The Indian Literary Diaspora

        Indian literature is a somewhat underrated genre. While not many Americans have read a significant amount, if any, it is incredible none the less. It shows the culture of India distinctly, which is really a combination of ancient Indian culture, middle eastern culture, and British culture. The way that it goes over and talks about Indian politics and feeding you political views without you really knowing it is astonishing. Like Latin American literature, it has all of these layers of complexity to resist the modern predispositions of Indian culture. After partition was the Indian Literary Diaspora, the explosion and spreading of Indian literature. Salman Rushdie and Pico Iyer are popular Indian authors with both similar and different views on the diaspora. Iyer spent twenty years in Japan, as a Buddhist monk. He continued to write books during this time, and they were heavily influenced by Japanese culture. Salman Rushdie lives in Britain, where a large portion of Indian culture came from. He has written for The New Yorker, in which he talks about how Indian literature is normally written in English, even though Hindi is the national language of India. While Indian literature may not be the most popular genre, it certainly holds a place in the grand scheme of things.

First Muse, By Julia Alvarez

        First Muse is a poem written by Julia Alvarez about how she feels that she can't write due to her ethnicity. She hears an unnamed famous poet say "One can only write poems in the tongue in which one first said mother,". She is damaged by this, claiming that this person is correct and she needs to burn all of her English poems, as Alvarez speaks Spanish natively. She is feeling terrible about how her career has been ruined by this remark. As she is feeling her worst, a commercial comes on television advertising Chiquita Bananas. Alvarez suddenly gains an enormous amount of confidence, as the singing and dancing banana has a Latin American accent but is singing in English. Something clicks inside her and she gains confidence in writing in English because of this banana.
         The fact that the Chiquita Banana is obviously from Latin America, but is representing this company in America shows that Latin America and America can be connected perfectly and in harmony. The Chiquita Banana has shown Alvarez that you can fit in perfectly fine with the people of America.

Comparing "Hope", By Ariel Dorfman to "In the Time of the Butterflies", By Julia Alvarez

SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT READ IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES!

        "Hope", by Ariel Dorfman is an extremely depressing poem that focuses mainly on the fact that the speaker's son has been kidnapped by what can be inferred is the police. He was tortured for five months after he was taken, that the speaker knows for sure. The speaker ponders how much he hopes that his son is still alive. A problem the speaker runs into is that he would have been tortured for eight solid months, making the title verbally ironic in that hope usually conveys something good.
        "In the Time of the Butterflies", by Julia Alvarez is more complex, as it is a novel. It focuses on the Mirabal rebellion as a whole. It follows the journeys of the sisters from different points of views. Two of the sisters, Maria Teresa and Minerva, were put in prison for a long time. This entire time, they were separated from their husbands and children.
        When you think about this aspect of "In the time of the Butterflies", It is very easy to make a connection between the two. Both people lost their children, but know that they are probably still alive somewhere else. They all wonder when and if they will get to see their children again. Both experiences are clearly defined in different ways that make you feel what they are going through as if it were not so bad. Thinking of it this way probably helps them to ignore the terrible feeling of losing a child.

Octavio Paz

        Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet who was born in 1914 in Mexico City. He is very accredited, having won the Miguel de Cervantes award in 1981, the American Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. He helped to found the Mexican, anti-fascist newspaper, The Taller(Workshop). He was an extremely strong believer in anti-fascism. Later, he helped to found two magazines: Plural and Vuelta.
        He did work in Mexico, India, France, Spain, and the U.S.A. This can be seen in his works, as these countries inspired many of his poems and essays. He participated in the second international congress for anti-fascism while in Spain. He was sent to France as a Mexican Diplomat. He was later sent to India as the Mexican Ambassador. He later resigned from diplomatic service due to the fascist treatment of student demonstrations during the Olympic games in Mexico.

In Cuba I was a German Shepherd

Disclaimer: This review is about the short story, not the book as a whole

        Ana Menendez's short story, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd views a meetup between four men in the park of Little Havana in Miami. They are all older men, two of whom lived in Cuba during the revolution. They discuss many reasons why they do not feel quite right in their current home of Miami. Little Havana is an accurate mimic of a neighborhood in Cuba. They feel mostly at home, but there are always the tour buses that come and speak of Cuban culture and how many of these people are Cuban exiles. There is a rather comedic scene where one of the characters runs after the tour bus yelling curses. The title of this story is significant because when they refer to feeling out of place in America, one of the characters tells a story about a dog who comes to Cuba from America and is misunderstood. Overall, this was a great story. The profanity could have been a bit less, but it was not completely overwhelming. It was fun to follow the lives of these men who do not feel that they are correctly understood in America.