Who We Are, Through Where Weve Been

February 7, 2014

Who We Are, Through Where Weve Been

Steve Moore ENGL-108 DeVry University

Who We Are, Through Where Weve Been

February 7, 2014

A secret creek bed that serves as a getaway for neighborhood children; a relatives house, seldom visited on special occasions that gets burned into memory every time; the basement of a persons first kiss. What may seem like an ordinary place to some can hold an enormous sentimental value to someone else. On some occasions so much so that it radically changes the mindset of a person and affects who they grow up to be. In the words of Robert Atwan in his introduction of David Sedaris essay This Old House, Describing ones childhood house is such a commons subject for a personal essay that it has become a clich. After all, what can be a more tangible manifestation of ones relationship to the past than ones memories of the house he or she grew up in? (p. 253). Atwans point is that someones home, although a large contributor, isnt the only thing that has to do with how they develop. I n fact, once a child is of age to start exploring outside of their home it is more likely they are much more receptive to what they find there due to the fact that it is all new and exciting to them. Therefore experiences outside the home most likely have a bigger effect on their psyche.

Through the essays Westbury Court by Edwidge Danticat, They All Just Went Away by Joyce Carol Oates, Silent Dancing by Judith Ortiz Cofer and This Old House by David Sedaris the reader can see how the authors development is not only effected by their home but by how theyre effected by places outside the home as well. To start, In Westbury Court by Edwidge Danticat, the author is a high school age girl. Although one might argue that almost the entirety of her story takes place inside her home and she makes little to no mention of the outside world at all, one must only scratch the surface to see that she was affected by her outside environment more than the story lets on originally. Danticat lives in an apartment in Brooklyn. When she does mention the outside world she makes a note of the piles of trash

Who We Are, Through Where Weve Been

February 7, 2014

on every street corner, the crime, and the state of disrepair of the surrounding neighborhood. She also mentions also that after school she picks up her brother then hurries home to catch her soap operas implying that she is in a hurry to get back to the house and away from the outside world. To sum it up, the horrible state of her environment is what pushed Danticat to stay indoors. Therefore her development was effected by the environment. One could only imagine what her life would be like had she lived in the wide open country with a much lower crime rate. One might speculate that she would spend much more time outside exploring what life there had to offer.

The next author, Joyce Carol Oates with her story They All Just Went Away is in a much different situation than Danticat. Oates Environment is a farm in upstate New York with wide open fields and plenty to explore for miles around. She, unlike Danticat took advantage of her environment and went out and explored almost every day. To her, finding an abandoned house lost in the wilderness was a great reward, she writes, I could not have explained what drew me to the abandoned houses, barns, silos, corncribs. A hike of miles through fields of spikey grass, across outcroppings of shale as steeply as angled stairs, was a lark if the reward was an empty house. To her, her house was hum drum and didnt give her the visceral experiences she craved as a child, but the abandoned houses are just what she needed to have the mental stimulation to grow up into the prized author she is today. Having lived in a different place, without the abandoned properties one might say she would have been a totally different person from who she is today.

Who We Are, Through Where Weve Been

February 7, 2014

This leads to the third story Silent Dancing by Judith Ortiz Cofer. Cofers story is similar to Danticats in that she too grew up in a crowded apartment in a lower class area of New York. Unlike Danticat though, she was much more involved in the community outside her apartment and much more familiar with the spaces outside her house. Cofer was a Puerto Rican immigrant along with her family that was only able to find this apartment because it had already housed many other Puerto Ricans as well. The time was the 1930s and America was still prejudice of other races coming here to live. So throughout the story Cofer grow up in sort of a Spanish bubble so to speak. The smell of rice and beans permeated the hallways; the stores in the area sold food straight from Puerto Rico with no English on the labels; the clothing stores didnt give them a sour look every time a Spanish person entered to buy something. The effect this took on Cofers psyche was that from constantly being immersed in her culture she wanted to get out and not fall into the same old traditions of her relatives and surrounding Puerto Ricans. She wanted to go out and experience the American way of life.

David Sedaris, the focus of Atwans quote earlier about the childhood home being a clich for an essay, writes fondly about an experience living away from his home that affected him more than anything in his story This Old House. In the story, He briefly talks of his childhood home being bland and uninteresting, then goes on to describe the time he spent after high school staying in a boarding house in a college town. To begin, Sedaris himself at the time was already unique. He had a love for the culture of the 1950s era lifestyle. So much so that his father was disappointed in him for acting and dressing so strangely. And fortunately for him the owner of the boarding house was a collector of antiques from that era. There was also another tenant who had schizophrenia, the landlords mother who was a retired fortune teller,

Who We Are, Through Where Weve Been

February 7, 2014

and her daughter who had a mental problem. At this point its obvious to anyone that he had a very unorthodox time living at that house. The effect this had was eventually he got so tired of the lifestyle there that he lost his love of the classic era lifestyle and gave it all up and moved out.

In the end, as Atwan points out, people always talk about their childhood home as the influence for them to turn out the way they do. But in reality its what one goes out and finds for themselves that really defines and shapes them. In each one of these stories its the outs ide environment, not the inside that really gives the reader a, understanding of who the author really is and where they come from. After all as the old saying goes It takes a village to raise a child