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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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December 2020

An Indian Doctor in Covid PPE

By Afresh Frankincense

Indian Doctor in Covid PPE

 

 

 

Afresh Frankincense is twelve years old and in Class 7th. He’s a child art-prodigy and writer from Odisha and lives in Hyderabad in South India.  Though he loves math and science so much, art has a special place in his heart. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Elephant Ladder, Moonchild Magazine, The Celestial Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Kids 4G and elsewhere.

Why Africans Don’t Talk about Race but Blacks Do

By Idowu Odeyemi

Being African is different from being Black. If you are an African, it means you do not get to know anything about your past, except that you know that your grandmother died due to malnutrition or any of those simple propositions your parents tell you to remind you that you are a product of a particular genealogy through ejaculations. Why is this? History has been excluded from your school curriculum, since the beginning of your primary education, because you are expected to see your ancestors as carcass of what seems to be of value and white men as the originator of what and where you are today. So, you just go to the exam hall and tick the box that says Mungo Park discovered the river Niger, even though when he came to the town, women cooked his meals with water from the same river. However, Mungo Park is white and everything a white man sees he names.

You are African and you don’t get to learn history in school because, today political leaders see themselves as failures. Old people don’t want their young ones to know of their failures. Old men can bear no shame. Yakubu Gowon could not imagine his great-grandchildren learning that he orchestrated the pogrom of Igbo people. Obasanjo, too, could not bear the guilt of relearning that he was a commander of the army that attempted a pogrom. Therefore, here we are, living in the shadows of our fathers fear and for that, we do not get to learn history except if it is the history of America, history of Britain or the history of the transatlantic slave trade as explained from a very Eurocentric perspective by a European.

There are many things I do not understand: How somebody like Donald Trump, despite the pinkish color of his body, fits into the race of whites or how Barack Obama exhibited chocolate all over his body and he still counts as black. Human beings, most times, are wrong when it comes to descriptive analysis. An editor after accepting my poem in a UK based online magazine said I cannot substitute pink for white and they have to edit. I asked them not to publish the poem – they get to define me as black, despite the fact that I might be yellow, but I cannot describe them as pink, even though it is a very subjective opinion, because colonialism makes me unworthy of that. If that is not racial, then I must be too sensitive. Western validation should not be a necessary requirement towards authenticity of being African and African academicians do not care. In 2019, the Oxford Dictionary added some vocabularies and calls it Nigerian English. Nigerian and African academicians will reject a research paper that does not italicize such words like danfo until pink people said,” it is okay, and we’ll let the vulgar word count as English.” That is imperialism and African academicians do not care. Most lecturers if not all, are doing the work to feed their families and not because they have a major interest in changing the face of Africa educational system which is majorly westernized.

Being African is quite eccentric. You don’t get to get annoyed with your past because you don’t know it. Africans will not have time for race discussion because there is no time. The little time Africans have, they have a lot to fight already: bad roads, epileptic electricity, no salary, corruption, sex trafficking, climate change, bad leaders, terrorism, the other person at the neighborhood who they don’t like because he/she just bought a car, patriarchy, poor water, poor healthcare… among others. So, talking about racism, with all these problems, is quite subtle. Neglect, therefore, becomes Africans ally when it comes to issues related to race.

The character Ifemelu, in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s sublime novel “Americanah” tells a lot about Africans and race. Ifemelu does not identify as black, but just African, when she is in Nigeria. It is until she gets to the United States of America that she realizes that there are boundaries to one’s personhood. Being African is different from being Black. Being African means that you live in a geographical place marked as Africa or furthermore, you came from the continent but you now live somewhere else, though your grassroots are from Africa. That is what makes you count as African and even though your British accent is fluent and you barely know that in your mother’s town, they speak another language different from English, you count as African. So of course, African is different from being Black. Egyptian, Libyan and Algerian folks will rebuke the attribute of being Black because the Arabs have systematically eradicated the Black community from the social and political scene, albeit retaining them in the economic –labour- scene. Blacks in those countries now serve at the back stage curtain. Chimamanda Adichie emphasized the strangeness of transforming one’s personhood from being African into Black through Ifemelu in one of her blog posts:

Dear non-American Blacks, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican, Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.” 

With those lines above, Adichie systematically appraised the fact that anywhere you come from in Africa, when you get to America or Europe or any country that is dominated by pink (conventionally called white) people, for the pink people you have no longer any heritage that qualifies you as African. You have been initiated into the class of former Negroes, as Adichie stated. Because for white people, it is a privilege that you get to be in their country; to enjoy all the luxuries of their good government, who albeit, corrupt and poke-nose in other countries’ affairs, yet, still take good care of their citizen’s welfare, unlike the government of African countries, that all they do is steal and launder money abroad. African leaders are not concerned about a lot: epileptic electricity is never an issue for them to tackle; bad road is normal since they get to travel in luxury cars. In Nigeria, the country in which I am writing this essay, people no longer buy newspapers; the problem is everywhere for them to see: if you turn your face to the right side, you will see bad-roads, turn it to the left you will see a senator sharing radio for members of his constituency. Despite all these socio-political absurdities, Africans, due to insensitivity, are yet to develop resentments, excluding few who read books out of school curriculums.

The facets of racism in white dominated countries are so large. Providing justification for this assertion, former Nigerian Football Star, Jay Jay Okocha, said, “I do not know I was black until I got to Germany.”

Africans do not talk about race, Blacks do.

It is easy to identify, as an African, and then Black if you live in Africa. One does not get conscious of the self as black until one gets to America or Europe. This is because Africans don’t care about race. Even though Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a negation of another story that attributes Africans as irrational, and Wole Soyinka’s poem Telephone Conversation is another, we opt to know that these writers were not conscious of their Blackness until they came into acquaintance with white supremacy and how it diminishes being Black. In other words, their reaction to racism was not born through intuition but through acquaintance with Race.

This is the simple reason Blacks talk about race but Africans do not: when the p.m. news was reported, and you are in the living room with your white folks drinking beer, and the broadcaster starts reading a report about a crime, you start murmuring prayers that the person is not Black. Because one of the folks in the room, while trekking back from school to your apartment, said most Blacks in America are into drug trafficking and you’d tongue-lash him for not knowing much but saying too much. Now, he might just prove his proposition with just one premise.

Another reason Blacks talk about race is while walking to the first-class section in a plane, white folks are looking at her like hey, girl, you actually don’t know where you are walking to, right?” And when she tells her white friends about it all they say is racism is no more and it is because of too much sensitivity that makes you think people, especially white folks, are watching you when you walk to the first-class section.”

You will think you are just an African, but you will transmit from being African to being black when you travel to a white dominant country who psychologically initiates you to the class of former Negroes. So, please, after transmitting to black, while walking in pedestrian areas, don’t pocket your hands. A cop might have a reason to blow your brain cortex with a pistol. And (s)he will have justifications. Justifications like self-defense. Some white cops may think you were bringing out a gun when they say, show me your hands. Pink people expect every Black person to be a rogue.

 

 

Idowu Odeyemi is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is the winner of the 2019 Merak Magazine Annual Recognition Literary Awards for Poem of the Year. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Nigerian Students Poetry Prize, and the Christopher Okigbo InterUniversity Poetry Prize.

Editor’s Note

By Molly Hill

Editor’s Note
December 2020
Issue 20

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent entrusted to you.
Henri Frederic Amiel

 

Dear Writers and Readers,

Welcoming you to our 20th issue is only partially accurate. While we publish four full numbered issues (March, June, September, December) every year, we also sneak in two poetry-only shorter issues in January and July. Still it seems significant in some way that our 20th issue pops up online at the end of 2020. A quick dive into numerology reveals that the number twenty is powerful and related to the characteristic of unlimited potential. While it’s difficult to explain a lot of things we’ve experienced as a whole in 2020, we do recognize potential and are always impressed with the singularity, power, and originality of the writing voices, and the creative artistic skill in the submissions we receive.

This is our largest issue to date, the most submissions we’ve received, and the largest volume of work we have published online. We’re grateful to all the student writers who submitted work, because while it was a pleasure to select the work for this issue, we also regret having to say no to a lot of good work due to the large volume of submissions.

As with every issue there’s something for every reader. A quick flight to space? Per Aspera Ad Astra, by Freddie Coffey. A poem with an unusual theme? Try— Break-up Letter to Eczema from Evy Shen. Unexpected funeral behavior? — check out Lou Goes to Vermont (Ida Mobini), and Samantha Liu’s Funeral Day.

Don’t miss the strong voices in our non-fiction section—Why Africans Don’t Talk about Race but Blacks Do, from Nigerian writer Idowu Odeyemi, and Natalie Parker’s take on the issues ‘inclusive’ media have with queer women, in Erasure and Fetishization. Our non-fiction essayists also take on travel abroad, loss and lies, what’s in a name, and Sweet Misgivings (Brianne O’ Gorman).

Enjoy the writing, admire the art, and keep sharing your creative work with the world.

Molly Hill
Editor

Brave New World

By Tara Awate

A dystopia wherein all the citizens are forever happy and content, —can it even be called a dystopia?  This is the theme that Huxley plays with throughout the novel Brave New World.  Unlike other totalitarian novels, here, stability is achieved by deluding the citizens from reality and drugging them into happiness.  Promiscuity is the norm, families no longer exist, and children are reared in large factories where they are conditioned by birth to love their drudgery and hate nature and books.

All citizens are satisfied, thanks to Soma– a hallucinatory euphoria inducing drug available on demand.  It is only Bernard Marx, (a brilliantly done anti-hero) who feels ill at ease. And it is through this dissatisfaction that the plot is kickstarted. He has to struggle to not give in to this morally corrupt world and be true to himself.

Huxley paints a vivid portrait of his world, describing it with harrowing detail.  It doesn’t sound so bad, when the governments agenda is only to keep the people happy and be mindless consumers, does it?  It is only as Huxley walks us through what the people lose and are ignorant of, in order to attain that everlasting state of bliss, when we marvel at the sheer brilliance of the premise.

Far away in America the old way of life continues of which John (the main character) is a part.  John, coming from very unique circumstances, is very derisive of the civilized life. He is often extreme in his actions and character, very much in stark contrast to the world, to the point of being unreasonable.

While reading this book, I came face to face with life’s greatest questions of which Huxley does an impeccable job of answering. As I read, my carapace of long held beliefs and accepted norms and values was slowly ripped away in short painful successions. By making bold statements about how a life should be lived (through each character’s point of view) Huxley mercilessly uproots the dormant thoughts of existentialism, musings on the meaning of suffering, traces of nihilism and the subsequent allure of hedonism that reeked in the attic of the mind and brings them to limelight.

Through the fleshed-out characters, all these ideologies struggle against each other and within me,— each character representing a different school of thought.

Though it seems blatant what Huxley himself stands for, he nevertheless presents meritorious arguments both for and against his ‘brave new world’ solely through his characters.  At one point, it had me considering whether I would want to inhabit this world instead of immediately dismissing it as vile.

The society is not a blatant dystopia which is what makes it so compelling and haunts you days after reading it. There are no uprisings, no unrest, all people are happy.

The book had me hooked for the themes it explored more so than the story itself.  But there is still enough suspense and conflict to keep you going.

 

Tara is a senior in high school residing in India. Her favorite form in writing is fiction but she’s currently exploring creative nonfiction and hopes to dive into poetry sometime in the future as well.

Isn’t it Just Like the Sea

By Seo Won Yun

Isn’t it Just Like the Sea

Erasure and Fetishization: The Issues “Inclusive” Media have with Queer Women

By Natalie Parker

Honest, thoughtful, and well-rounded popular representation of historically oppressed groups in the media is a difficult hurdle to overcome. Even women, arguably the most prolific group that has experienced historical inequality, are underrepresented on film and television, so much so that the Bechdel Test has gained popularity as a way to measure whether female characters on-screen do not entirely revolve around men. Dynamic queer characters are even rarer; the LGBTQ+ on-screen demographic is oversaturated with white, gay men who are either brimming with sassy one-liners or are deeply tragic. Many of them also die at the end, a feature that is perpetuated by the legacy of the Hays Code. Unsurprisingly, when the queer and female demographics are combined, numerous problems arise, creating a surplus of poor representation. Transgender women are so underrepresented that they are essentially nonexistent in fictional media. Lesbian and female bi+ characters do exist, but those characters are almost universally fraught with issues, three of which are distressingly pervasive: the “predatory lesbian” trope, bi+ erasure, and oversexualization.

Many queer women can recall a time when a straight woman made a remark insinuating that lesbians are naturally vulturine or greedy, and oftentimes such statements are upsetting to hear. The “predatory lesbian” archetype only bolsters the ideas behind these comments. In a nutshell, the trope consists of a self-assured lesbian “converting” an apparently straight woman. The novel, The Price of Salt, is generally considered the stock example of this plot, along with its movie adaptation, Carol. The cliche can also take the form of a young queer girl exploring her sexuality by kissing her straight friends without their consent, as in the Netflix show Insatiable and its character Nonnie Thompson. Admittedly, both The Price of Salt and the character in Insatiable are considered to be at least slightly more complex than just the trope, but the overtones are still definitely present. Representation in this form is generally detrimental to the status of queer women, because it implicitly adds predatory undertones to their actions in the eyes of straight women.

The representation of bi+ women in cinema and popular culture is also faulty and largely contributes to the erasure of their demographic. There are many characters who are “just experimenting,” or “don’t want to put a label on it.” Alternatively, they can be obviously bisexual and yet never say anything about it at all. Amy Farrah Fowler from The Big Bang Theory is an example of a character that is clearly bisexual but never actually addresses the topic. And although the show Glee is often held up as a paragon of queer representation, the character of Brittany S. Pierce is actually deeply problematic in terms of a well-written female queer character. Not only does she never say that she is bisexual, she plays into the “slutty bisexual” stereotype. The same goes for the show Orange is the New Black. Language like “she used to be gay and now she is straight” permeates the dialogue. The character of Beca Mitchell in the Pitch Perfect trilogy has an ongoing joke about her sexual confusion, but never actually acknowledges the topic head-on and instead treats it as a punch line. Bisexual erasure is a real issue, and it is exacerbated by the existence of characters like these in the mainstream.

One of the most egregious issues when it comes to creating valuable representation of queer women is their oversexualization. “Lesbian” is one of the most popular search terms on porn websites, and there is no shortage of queer women in popular media whose characterization is either the direct product of male fetishization or indirectly stems from it. The popular sitcom Friends falls victim to a litany of jokes about the character Joey’s fetishization of lesbians, and Ross treats his ex-wife Carol as if her being a lesbian is a personal affront to him—a point which the show never fully contends with, thereby centering its female queerness around men.

Here again Glee fails, especially in its early seasons: many aspects of the relationship between Santana Lopez and Brittany S. Pierce are mildly ludicrous. There is a scene in one episode where they share a fateful kiss. And people in same-sex relationships being openly intimate in the same high school corridors where homophobic bullying is rampant is momentous, but that point is completely undercut by the fact that Santana and Brittany kiss from roughly a foot away and pucker up a ridiculous amount. It looks exactly like two straight girls putting on a show for the male gaze. It was almost certainly not intended that way, but the director and the writers clearly did not understand how to depict queer female relationships in any other light, which is indicative of the larger problem of fetishizing lesbians and bi+ women. Poor representation usually begets poor representation if nothing changes, and the writers who grew up with poor representation then begat poor representation.

The television show The L Word, another classic example of a trailblazer in the field of LGBTQ+ representation, also has its own points of contention regarding oversexualization. For instance, many of the scenes are unapologetically sexual. This is not an issue on its own, especially since queer people having healthy sexual lives is a topic that is generally unexplored on film and television.  However, the problem arises when these scenes become oddly numerous and graphic, and appear to cater to a male audience. People disagree about whether this is in fact true, but the issue is still there as long as people can interpret those scenes that way, because that means that dubious undercurrents are present.

Both The L Word and Glee showcase the pervasiveness of the problem of oversexualizing queer women. They are hailed across the board for their levels of inclusivity and pioneering natures, and even they fall prey to the same pitfalls. Incidentally, both also have poor representation when it comes to bi+ people, and the character of Kurt Hummel in Glee displays “predatory gay” behavior early on in the show.

Queer women of color have a particularly difficult time finding themselves onscreen; their characters fall prey to tropes more often and are much rarer. The majority of characters on The L Word are white, and those that are not are often tropes. The character of Bette and other characters of color are generally depicted as more belligerent than their white counterparts. The show Orange Is the New Black also has a limited number of Black lesbians, and there are no bi+ people of color at all. Glee has a Black genderqueer character, Unique Adams, but her identity is handled in such a ham-fisted way that it does not really count as proper representation. Her characterization regarding her gender is muddled and inconsistent; the show conflates gender performance with gender identity and the writers are only ever vaguely sure of obstacles that she should face. One memorable scene involves the bigoted principal being so opposed to making the bathrooms inclusive that she dumps a Porta Potty decorated with a question mark into the center of the choir room of the high school. Such an action, while based in a real issue, is so utterly outlandish that it loses touch with reality. Clearly, the writers have never witnessed a real “bathroom battle,” and Unique’s storyline suffers because of it. Furthermore, treating bigotry in such a lighthearted manner is actively dangerous. Unique constantly faces a mountain of transphobia, but the harm done is often laughed off or ignored. Since her identity is so unclear, and since her roadblocks are so grievous yet treated with so much levity, Unique Adams does not feel like a person with real struggles, meaning that her character does not represent those people.

None of this makes any of these television shows or movies terrible pieces of media, of course. They are flawed, as is everything we consume on a day-to-day basis, and they deserve credit for the ways they did advance representation. You are allowed to enjoy flawed media—that being said, it is important to acknowledge and think critically about those flaws, or you risk internalizing queerphobic messages.

I remember when I discovered my sexuality. I immediately went on a hunt for characters I could watch on screen that would represent my experience as a bi+ girl. For the most part, I was only able to find static, oversexualized characters. There definitely were several gold nuggets: the character of Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Reagan in New Girl, and, more recently, Amy in Booksmart. The landscape is changing, and every year there are more fantastic female LGBTQ+ characters. However, Brittany and Santana in Glee were really considered the premier example of queer female relationships on television when I was exploring, and I ended up internalizing some of the harmful aspects of that depiction. I did not know what well-rounded queer female characters were because there were so few of them and, consequently, I suffered. When I was still in elementary school, I saw the first two Pitch Perfect movies and the lesson they taught me was to treat attraction to the same gender as a joke.

That is why representation is so important. If I had been surrounded by thoughtful and relatable queer characters, especially when I was younger, I would have grown up to be more accepting of myself, and those around me would have been more accepting too. As is, the media has a plethora of issues regarding representation, but, with more care from creators, they can be overcome. Again, the situation is improving. Shows like Sex Education feature a diverse cast of queer characters, even including an asexual girl, and that is a fantastic step in the right direction. Nevertheless, we have room for improvement, especially when you consider that the most inclusive media often cater to the same demographic and thus reach the same audiences again and again. We need more diversity across the board, and, until then, we all have to gauge even champions of inclusivity with a critical eye.

 

Natalie Parker is a longtime literature lover and current high school junior from Long Island, New York. Her writing has been recognized in a contest affiliated with the AAUW and her local library, for which she wrote a prize winning essay. She has also been published in the online literary magazine Inspired Ink. When Natalie is not writing, she enjoys acting in community theatre productions.

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