Esther's 2018-2019 Playlist

Something I want to talk about after reading Song of Solomon is Milkman’s character development throughout the book. It’s absolutely beautiful. In the beginning, we all knew him as the the little boy who was used by his mother for her own pleasure. He obviously didn’t know any better but he started to develop a reputation that matched his father’s, where he “[tried] to appear more sophisticated than he was” and viewed women simply as objects, “fucking for six years, some of them with the same woman”. Then, he has an identity crisis and decides to go on a journey to find his origin and evaluate himself as a person. As he gains information about his ancestors and his past, he is “as eager and happy as he had ever been in his life”, slowly realizing that he has started to possess the same freedom that Pilate has. At the very end we know that his “enlightenment” completely transforms Milkman into a new person and eventually he “leaps”. Now, the idea of self discovery and self satisfac...

At the beginning of October, I started volunteering at Morse in a kindergarten class every week, and the last time I went, there was a little kindergartener who looked at me for a couple of seconds before asking “Which language are you?” This question definitely threw me off guard (because I didn’t expect her to ask me that out of the blue) and my immediate thought was Oh, it’s because I’m Asian. The five-year-old girl obviously did not mean to question me in any biased way, but that’s what it comes down to. Racism is so ingrained in our society that it becomes a natural thing, even for children. The idea of natural racism presents itself in the book Song of Solomon several times. When Milkman and Guitar are having a casual conversation, the topic of racism is mentioned many times but is never seriously addressed because the people in the book have come to accept it as a natural thing. In class, we talked about how even the narration in the book describes racist happenings as norma...

In the book Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Robert Smith, an insurance agent, leaves a note saying “I will take off from Mercy and fly away with my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.” We assume that this note is a suicide note because later on, it tells us how his intended “flight” turns into a fall instead. To the reader, the fall may look like a complete failure because Robert wasn’t able to legitimately take flight. However, to Robert, the fact that he willingly takes the first step and chooses to be liberated from the all of the societal norms shows that his “mission” of flying was actually somewhat completed. To him, it wasn’t about being physically lifted higher; the significance of the act was more about him being able to escape the cruel conditions of his current life into a haven. It connects to the Gullah Folk Tale about how the wings of the African people brought them back to their homes where it was safe and secure. Morrison alludes to the folk tale to descr...

As I was trying to find something to blog about, I looked up Holocaust survivor stories and found a website that had a collection of them ( http://holocaustlearning.org/survivors ). I read through some of the stories, and at the end, most of the survivors dedicated their post-Holocaust life to educating the youth about the Holocaust and sharing the importance of treating everyone equally. One of the survivors, Liesel Carter, is a member of the HSFA and stresses that the Holocaust should be an unforgettable event that the future generations learn from. Arek Hersh, who was affected by the Holocaust in Poland, wrote a book about his experiences called A Detail of History . Today, Arek goes around to schools and gives speeches to students about building a better world. I found it so heartwarming to see that even after going through such a traumatic time in their life, the survivors decided to use those hardships to educate the youth and create a better foundation for the future so that ot...