Blog #4

I found the author Lois-Ann Yamanaka to be quit interesting in her writing and enjoyed reading about her life. She realized when she was teaching and observing her students write poetry that she too wanted to write creatively. Going back to school, she became “one of the state’s best novelists, as well as a vocal proponent of Hawaiian Creole English.” Her writing I found was controversial and very personal wrapped in emotion. Her first novel entitled Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers was “nominated for the AAAS literature award.” Other pieces of writitng that was nominated for the award, but was considered contriversial was the story called Pahala Theatre and also her second novel Blu’s Hanging. The passages of the stories gave reference to racism and the “award committee decided to issue no prize that year.” In Blu’s Hanging there is a scene where Blu, the young boy of the three children, gets raped by the next door neighbor guy who is Filipino. This controversial and intense emotional scene was too much for some people to read. I thought some of the passages in the book were real and gruesome and violent. The three Ogata children are devastated by the death of their mother and the oldest child, Ivah, tries to keep the family together. Their father withdrawls and secludes himself from the children and goes into a state of unstability. Because of the death of the mother, “Blu is propelled into increasingly insidious relationships by his flamboyant imagination and uncontainable need for love.” Some of the issues that the book dealt with like racism and cruel punishment to animals and children was hard to read. I didn’t like that the dogs were only allowed to go out once a week and kept locked up. The kids had to go over and clean the dirty infested room. Parts of the book was hard to understand because it was written in Pidgin, “which is spoken by many of the islands’ working- class residents.” I had mixed feelings about this novel because I don’t know what it is like to lose a parent and raise your siblings pretty much by yourself, but I can’t imagine it is easy. Ivah is still a child herself at 13 and having to take over and assume responsibility for her younger siblings is difficult. She doesn’t get to live a normal childhood and has to grow up fast. Another part of her life is hurt when her father blames Ivah for Blu getting raped. “The tension between Ivah and her father stemming from the rape is indicative of a thematic preoccupation in Yamanaka’s works with Japanese-American father-daughter relations.” She “explores the emotional distancing, elisions, and reticence.” It must have been hard for Ivah to know that her own father was not there for her and to blame her for soemthing she had no control over. This story is filled with emotion and that’s what kept me reading because the issues were so real. This story was one of the best novel’s I have read and found it to be extroadinary. Dealing with the Hawaiian culture, it was interesting to read something new and different!