One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

In this blog I will be discussing Stephen Lewis’ article entitled “Pandemic: My Country Is On Its Knees”.   This article recounts the time Lewis spent during his early adulthood in Africa.  He speaks of a time before HIV/AIDS in which he spent a great deal of time teaching the impressionable youth and young professionals in various areas of Africa.  He spoke very highly of Africa during this time period, the people had a thirst for knowledge and a burning desire to improve their knowledge and community.  The second portion of the article goes into great detail a series of stories on how AIDS and hunger have ravaged present day Africa.   He uses these anecdotes effectively and purposefully, as he even states his reasoning for this in the article.  “I’ve deliberately chosen anecdotes as the narrative vehicle, in order to give the pandemic an accessible face, rather than relying on the dehumanizing swamp of numbers” (Ackley, Blank, Hume 378).

This is an effective article created to conjure sympathy in the reader.  Instead of inundating the reader with countless numbers, he first tells the reader of how great and proud Africa once was, just 40 years ago.  He then goes on to go into great detail the horror stories that dictate everyday life in Africa.  They are tragic stories that this reader had to put down and pick back up several times throughout reading.   One of the worst, Lewis was visiting a maternity ward where 3 newborn infants “passed’ in 45 minutes.

This article plays out somewhat opposite to those underwater documentaries the Discovery Channel pushes out on a regular basis.   The one’s where they show you a lot of beautiful scenes of undersea life for forty five minutes, telling you about the lives of the species covered in the film.   Then they hit you with the bit about how we’re destroying their habitats and they’ll be extinct soon.   Instead, Lewis chooses to take a different approach.  He first lures you in, telling you all about the Africa you didn’t know about, the one full of promise, the one trying to become the “United States of Africa”.  Then he hits you with the direness of life as Africans know it today.  The life filled with tragedy, 12 year olds acting as mothers and fathers, young women not knowing why they bleed every month because their parents died before they turned ten.  He then hits you the “good news’, he talks about all of the programs going on right now that even he can get behind and feel optimistic about.  These programs such as the Umoyo school, which empower young women to learn and gain self-confidence, empowering them to “never automatically submit to any young man”. 

 
This article is told somewhat like a bad news sandwich, first the good, then the bad, then finishing with a note of positivity.  It encourages the reader to take action and help in any way possible, but mostly to stop being content with the status quo.

THE UNITED STATES of AMERICA – THEN AND….NOW.

In my first blog entry, and subsequently the first blog entry I have ever written, I will be discussing Margaret Atwood’s “Letter to America”.  This is an interesting article in that the writer basically came of age in the U.S.A’s golden age, including the rise of television and movies.  She has deep seeded feelings of sentimentality for literature as well as radio/television/film programming that broadcasted the values of Americans from a time that came from a more wholesome and pure era.  The writer is essentially looking at the current situation the United States is in and attempting to use nostalgia in order to wake up our southern neighbors and remind them of how great they can, and used to be.  If you think about it in the sense that the writer was approximately 16 when the U.S. had just concluded a war that saw to the death of millions of people but prevented the death of millions more.  A war whose veterans returned with a sense of accomplishment and went on to make the United States the richest country in the world during the car manufacturing boom.  Now in her 70s, the country she once regarded so highly now has its military entrenched in a nearly un-winnable war to ensure the supply of oil is safe.  It is no doubt easy to see how the writer would reminisce in her article, and I find it difficult to blame her for doing so.  One example I found to be ineffective was a reference to "Marley's ghost", I felt it was a tad obscure as I had to look up what exactly it meant.  I do, however, enjoy the paragraph where Atwood compares Canadians to “Roman Gauls” in that we try so hard to emulate Americans, yet we fail to do it 100% right.  In the past the United States appeared to be a good yardstick for Canada to measure itself by, have times changed?