Image URL: http://www.natureskills.com/ecourse/nature-connect/

Aldo Leopold states of Ethics: (in his The Land Ethic) "We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love or otherwise have faith in" and that "Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct-in-the-making."

I agree that our current societal values depend heavily on economic-self interests with respect to our individual and collective impacts on the environment and land-ownership. If we do not see an immediate benefit of an action base don self-interests - we will not engage in it. To give a simple example, this is why on a warm sunny day, we might decide to throw our wet clothes in the dryer and come back to dry clothes in an hour rather than make use of the sunshine and hang them on the balcony for a few hours (and save energy and offer long term benefits for our clothing fabric material as well). Generally it seems that the choices that we make are based on immediate-self interests and a view of ethics as Leopold puts it, may help us make different choices. Ethics can be seen as more communal values based on ideas and beliefs an interconnected peoples may support. If a communal value was to reduce energy consumption - then perhaps we would choose to dry our clothes outside. I have a funny story to share about this, in fact:

Women’s sexuality is a topic often silenced by society in order to perpetuate an image of the “purity” of a woman that fits traditional gender roles.  Women are expected to keep their sexualities private and, even in private, to withhold any outstanding passions or desires. When women break these gendered silences in regards to their sexuality, a tradition is ruptured and often in order to restore previous order, shame and/or violence are used as valid responses. I saw both of these instances in reading No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston. This text, exemplified the complex ways in which women’s sexualities are often a source of shame in the private and public sphere. It also describes how the outcomes of rupturing these traditions can result in unsafe situations for the women who have broken the norm. Her story, can speak to the difficulty of “breaking free” within a society that does not yet accept women’s sexual freedom and that continues to perpetuate this idea by using the silencing of existence through storytelling as a warning for subsequent generations of women.

up with the wide
end of an August morning
you turned into the

warm sheet of sun
brushing your cheek --

whatever god is

I found it in your 
flushed breath when with
a close-eyed smile you

folded me into your sleep
and I fell deep in the
glow of your collarbone

a ridge of yellow 
rustling birch a susserous 
that murmured dream

in the amber below
the canopy of your hair --

god it was there.

(Venedig, Gerhard RIchter 1986)

Look at us hiding on the roofs!

Atop hotels and restaurants lining
the square looking at
each other's blanched faces 
looking at
the street
below: 

souped crowds 
rickshaws and bikes
bellowing through the smoking
trash that I 
feel is all our fault

and the cows, just
eating it

beside the hawkers' 
cries, 

       a woman
in yellow, a glimmer
hair so neatly
plaited
is weaving in
the thick
throngs
and out
and out
finding no
one's eye 

especially
not mine
on the roof
watching.

While reading Eva’s Man, initially, I did not find her silence troublesome.  She sounded like another sexual assault victim who was too traumatized by the abuse and the act of killing to verbalize the effects of them. It was not until I read Freedom’s Silences by Wendy Brown did I begin to realize the complexities of Eva’s silence—as if the fragmented narratives in the book did not hint at them already. I now realize that Eva’s silence, in both being quiet and omitting vital information about her past and the murder, throughout the book  is not as simple as her choosing to be quiet and choosing when to speak just for the hell of it. Better yet, I find that her silence, or lack thereof, speaks to the dangers, mentioned in Brown’s essay, of codifying someone’s experience when one chooses to break silence….or remain in it. Thus, I wish to explore the consequences of Eva breaking or maintaining silence, in regards to her sexuality, through the lens of Brown in hopes of relating her story to a larger, much more pressing issue in the African-American/Black community.

Mode of address is a concept based out of film and media studies, it is a way for filmmakers to think about who their audience is going to be, a form of analysis on the power relations between the audience and the subject of the film (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 1). It allows for the filmmaker to think about ideas of class, gender sexuality, race and much more while working on their product. This process allows for them to frame their stories so that the viewer can relate or interpret it in a way that plays off of the filmmaker’s assumptions. As analytical readers, we contemplate what the author is trying to tell us and what they want us to take out of their stories. As readers, we can take this concept of mode of address and analyze why we think characters make their decisions and what the author would like us to take out of it. We can interpret their choices, the relationships they are part of or the neighborhood they live in to figure them out. Through this process we, as readers, would be exploring Gayle Jones’ mode of address in context to Eva. We would be thinking about Eva’s choices, what they mean to her and what Jones could also mean by them.

As someone who has grown up in a household of artists, I’ve always had a special reverence for people’s creations. Though my mother was highly critical of her own work, there was a general sense that destroying it was in some way not acceptable. I took that to heart. My sisters’ drawings have all been kept. Old storybooks I made have just resurfaced from basement boxes. Our childhood voices are kept alive through this reverence for creation and imagination. It was for this reason that I struggled to understand an experience Maxine Hong Kingston wrote about in her memoir Woman Warrior (1975).  For three years as a child, she painted over all of her artwork in black and covered up anything she wrote on the blackboard so that it couldn’t be read or seen. I struggled to understand her motives and also her complacency for what I read as a huge loss. Then I began to think of this action as a form of silence. Tillie Olsen touches on the different types of silences that exist in her essay “Silences” (1962) and these silences can be read into Hong Kingston’s blacking out.