Earthbound on Solid Ground - bell hooks

Out of the three stories I chose to read Earthbound on Solid Ground by bell hooks.  It started interesting to me. She described where she grew up as a child, in Kentucky. The way she describes the outside her house using “a wilderness of honeysuckle” really drew me in. The paragraph goes on to talk about how she learned how deal and survive around nature at a young age. The next paragraph goes on to talk about the people she is surrounded by. She is considered a “backwoods” folk. The theme of nature follows her when being called this. Nature is also found in the next paragraph as well. It says that it ultimately rules everything. Nature doesn’t discriminate against anyone and everyone will dies into nature. Also it states that tending to the earth your futures will be bright. Next, it talks about what she learned as a girl. She learned respect, for the nature around her and the people she lives with. The rest of the story takes a different toll when she starts to explain the ancestors in this area.

The next part begins with history. I think that it is very fitting when the stories transitions like it does. She tells us about her grandfather who worked with crops. Nature is still in this part to. Then, the next paragraph describes how the black people were controlled by the white but, when they left the farms they forgot it all. Next, she talks about the skills she herself learned to survive in the real world. She learned the concept of interbeing which is the connectedness of all human life. She goes on to say that this skill isn’t really much used still. The paper ends with making the connection with nature even though life has progressed and everything moves on. I like how she ends with a comparison with home. It brings the paper together. “We create and sustain environments where we can come back ro ourselves, where we can return home.”

The thesis of the paper to me is nature. Not only being in every single paragraph it means something in each. The paper I about how nature shaped her life. She learned as a child that nature is important and how to live with nature surrounding you. Nature rules were also taught to her by her grandfather and her ancestors who worked on the land for a living. Nature has shaped her and made her who she is today.

I think her writing is very easy to connect to even though my background wasn’t the same. First her way of describing certain situations, like Kentucky in the beginning, makes it easy to visualize. Also nature is a common theme in everyone’s childhood that everyone can relate to. The ancestry part was a little difficult to understand since no one in my family has been a slave but, the way she puts family quotes in it, it makes it easier to see where she is coming from.

Becoming Metis

“To learn who I am today, on this land I live on, I’ve had to recover that heritage and realize a multicultural self.” –Melissa Nelson

I think that this statement means that to fully understand who she is and where she came from she will need to research her heritage. She needs to put all of the heritages of the different cultures she is to make herself, a multicultural self. What she does to accomplish this is decolonize her mind. This is where she transcends the self-centered, ethnocentric and exploitive patterns of Western hegemony.  Basically she wants to get rid of all the stereotypes and thoughts about the heritages and focus on herself. For her, she has started to play a Norwegian flute that is mad of birch tree that is also scared for the Ojibwe people too.  She also thinks a lot about the Manifest Destiny that everyone thinks about and she also started to work with other Native American people to save their own land in order for her to decolonize her mind. For her, and most people the best way to learn about their culture is in a way that is easy for them to understand and helpful to their surroundings like she has done. She has also stuck to tradition also. She honors the way of the native people by doing certain things that they have always done. She helped them harvest plants the right way and also world renewal services that were very important to the native Ojibwe people. Little thing you do to find about your heritage can go a long way and ca mean a lot too many people.

In History

I think that Jamaica Kincaid takes history very literally. She doesn’t take about her family’s history at all, only the place where she grew up in. It seems very literally to me because the first part of the story is about Christopher Columbus. She says this is her history, “My history begins: 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World”(Kincaid 16). I would assume she would bring up her family’s history and where they come from and what about that has made her who she is today but, I was totally wrong as I kept reading. More people in history, or at least I think, were talked about. No signs about her grandmothers or her ancestors. With history, it seems like Kincaid thinks that anyone can tell anyone else’s history. It kind of seems like she thinks were all from the same ancestors and history. Anyone can tell history because as the piece goes one she begins to talk about men that seem like no relation to her or to Columbus who we first talked about.

In a way, the ideas of history, landscape and naming were all discussed throughout the story. This is probably one of the only things that I see that keeps the paper flowing and fluid. First, you examine history with Christopher Columbus. History references form the people and the things like the Dutch East India Company show up and keep the idea on history. Ideas that come from the history idea would be the landscape and naming as supporting pieces. “…to have knowledge of things, one must first give them a name”(Kincaid 17). This is the first place where naming comes into place. Columbus had the right to name everything he saw when he introduced us t the New World. Naming also brings us to the other half of the story because she tries to figure out why the plant is named a plant and if it has other names. The way Carl Linaenus, a person in the story, got his last name was from getting the idea from a tree. This leads us to the next point of landscape. Columbus finds a blank landscape that he calls the New World, that leads to the author describing her landscape as “a small lump of insignificance, green, green, green, and green again” ( Kincaid 19). As the story continues the landscapes have more plant life, which means a growing world.

CREATIVE CHALENGE

Besides random thoughts, it doesn’t really connect with her writings. The only thing partially similar is the idea of the world being round like Christopher Columbus. I have a pretty good idea that we grew up in different sides of the earth because my home town is far from being all green, mine is pretty much all concrete streets. The history aspect is also different. I think of my history being more of my little town and my family while she focuses on the much bigger picture. This could very well be because we are firm different cultures and her home may have less history then me, living in the states. If I had to rewrite my history for the world to read, I would start by asking family members questions about my history and looking for information on my lost ancestors. I would certainly not go to the history books and write about Columbus.