The Rum Diary

The film The Rum Diary is based on a book written by Hunter S. Thompson. The movie was directed by Bruce Robinson and was filmed in Puerto Rico. American actor Johnny Depp  interpreted an American journalist called Paul Kemp who hasn't been successful in the United States and started working for the San Juan Star newspaper in our island during the 1960s. 

The Rum Diary is similar to the Jamaica Kincaid's novel A Small Place. Jamaica Kincaid attacked the tourists in a way the reader can assume the tourist's role and felt offended by her writing. Paul Kemp arrived to Puerto Rico without any knowledge about the island. Kincaid said about this: "A tourist is an ugly human being." And why not? At first, he didn't know anything about our culture, the Puerto Rican lifestyle or even the economic status. He was an outsider who was hired to write about horoscopes until he faced the reality of Puerto Rico and started caring about the problems in the island after relating with Sala. Kemp became more interested in the situations of the island: poverty, alcoholism, ignorance, etc. 

Kemp changed throughout the movie. His transition can be defined with two scenes. The first was at the beginning of the movie. The taxi driver asked him something in Spanish and he replied he don't speak Spanish. This is a clear example of his outsider (tourist) view. The second scene is the one at the bowling alley. Kemp asked a tourist: "What you like most of Puerto Rico?"  The tourist replied: “The bowling alley and the casinos." Kemp asked him: "Have you seen a lot of the island?".  The tourist's  wife replied: “We never leave the hotel. It is not safe”.  His last question was: “But you are having fun, right? The woman replied: “Oh yeah, lots of fun! “. Here is Kincaid's voice: "The tourist is an ugly human being." After that, he wanted to write about the issues of Puerto Rico and he can be seen as an insider or partially insider (traveler). 

At the end of the movie, Kemp went back to the United States and became a successful writer. It is also a transition from an unsuccessful to a successful journey. It was a change of his perspective toward Puerto Rico and its locals. Kemp was able to understand the issue's location of the Puerto Ricans and sympathize with them in a good way.

"Teaching" and "Helping" by Jim Cooper

It was assigned to read two chapters from the book Down on the Island by Jim Cooper. In the first one, "Teaching", Cooper expresses his point of view about the syllabus for the English class he was teaching at the Colegio located in Mayagüez. He noticed how much difficult was for the students to learn English because most of them didn't know it very well and therefore they didn't understand the readings they had to do at first. After he visited some public schools, he also noticed some of the teachers were having trouble to speak English. Cooper proposed a syllabus which included strictly language courses to the freshman and short stories and novels to the sophomore students. He would loved to stated that the language program he set up solved the student's language problems, but it didn't at all.

In the second chapter, "Helping", Cooper expresses his point of view about a method implemented by the students from our island. This method consisted of 'helping throughout cheating'. How this can be possible? Puerto Ricans, as Jim Cooper demonstrated, are the most hospitable people in the world and they tend to do whatever they can in order to help others. Many of the students seek for an extra help in their classmates, but this attitude was not only in their everyday work but during the time they were taking exams too. However, students learn how they must behave in the school since they are kids at the primary levels. All I want to say with this statement is that students have been taught since their primary levels to be cooperative with each other.

"When I started asking students why they were looking at another student's paper during an exam, they replied with no embarrassment: because I don't know the answer, and maybe he does. If I asked the other student why he let him look at his paper, I got some such answer as: but I'm just trying to help him. He's my friend."

We all know that this kind of help is actually cheating, but the students didn't realize it. It is also worrying that Cooper stated teachers also promote the cheating attitude. I think we must do everything possible to earn our grade by our own effort; not at the expense of others. Students should help them, but in a good way working on cooperative teaching or learning, but they should not cheat. I'm against it.

Internal Journey: A Reflection on my Journey Journal

As part of our Journey in Literature class, it was assigned a special project that consisted in writing into a journal for eight weeks. At first, I felt scared because I'm not very good in English grammar and vocabulary and I was thinking about  how I was supposed to write in it having this kind of situation. The first reflection took place in the classroom and it was like a challenge for me. First, I must keep my hand moving during ten minutes, but it was  difficult because I had to translate all the thoughts in my mind to the English language and my hand started to hurt at the fifth minute, approximately. Second, to lose control and go for the jugular was a little hard because I think my thoughts weren't really interesting and crazy ones.

After the first week of writing on my journal, I started to feel more comfortable with my writing, but I know I have to continue improving  it. I had also talked about the difficult part of this experience, but I want to let you know the bearable part. The other instructions we had to followed on the journal were that we can't cross out, didn't worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and don't think nor get logical. These instructions were more easy for me because I didn't really worry about how I wrote any word or sentence during the ten minutes. I simply wrote whatever I thought at that moment and most of the times I didn't get logical. Most of my entries are sentences without any logical sense. I like it because it helped me to wrote more fast in a given time. This practice helped me to explore my internal journey after experienced my external journey. I also had the opportunity to wrote about my dreams after I woke up in the morning and I felt more comfortable because I remembered most part of my dreams. The journey journal is a reflection of my inner journey; a journey many people didn't know about and a one from which I had also learned about myself.

Another thing we had to do in our journal was three life compasses per week. These compasses helped me to have a better understanding of my everyday situations inviting me to think about my spiritual or natural, mental, emotional, and physical state. Life compasses were variable as the entries, but I have learned many things from each one of them.  This activity also helped me to being relaxed and satisfied when doing my daily's reflections. I'm looking  forward to keep discovering and working with my internal and external journey throughout my entire life.

Journal Writing: 5 Smart Reasons Why YOU Should Start doing it TODAY

Discovering Yourself Through Dreams

Dreaming is an act of communication between our unconscious mind and our conscious mind. It is a kind of bridge that connects our inner thoughts and expresses them in our external journey. Dreams can be defined as those images, activities, and feelings experienced by the mind during sleep. They are also related to a lot of things including creativity, events throughout our life, and emotions. Clinical psychotherapist, Jeffrey Sumber (2011), states that dreams allow us to process information or events that may be painful or confusing in an environment that is at once emotionally real, but physically unreal. 

Emotionally real, but physically unreal: that's the disadvantage (or advantage?) of dreaming. Dreams have an enormous power to connect us with what we have been thinking during the day or what we want at most and it's very difficult to confront reality when we wake up because most of the times we want to continue with it just to know what would happen next. Where these dreams come from? To where these dreams go to? What would happen if you would love the dream? That's the cruel reality. You will wake up and possibly you will remember some details of it, but not at all. Therefore, it is recommended to follow some tips in order to remember the most of it. These tips are simple and very easy to follow: you just have to wake up and write down everything in your mind. EVERYTHING!

As an activity of the Journey in Literature class, I had the opportunity to follow these tips and I got a great outcome. The weird thing in all of this is that I have a lot of short dreams during sleep. It's insane! Doing a retrospective review of the dreams I can remember nowadays, I notices I have dreamed being chased and falling down a couple of times. I have also see the death in my dreams, the desperation, the nature in its tragic point, and love. I'm sure many people desire their dreams to become reality...and I'm one of them. 

Simple Tips for Recalling & Recording Dreams

30 Common Dream Symbols and Their Mysterious Meanings 

Jeffrey Sumber's Interview  

Reaction to "A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid reveals her experience under the English colonialism and her thoughts about the tourists who visit Antigua. I notices her voice as one mix of feelings: sadness, nostalgia, contempt, and so on. Kincaid talks as an insider of her country; as an expert of it. But from her expert point of view, she classifies the tourists as "an ugly human being". Are the tourists "ugly human beings" just for being tourists? Here is when the author expresses contempt from the tourists.

"An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you [...]"

Roberts (2008) states that the notion of identity in human society is based on two fundamental factors: the perception of sameness/ difference and instinctiveness of man to be a social being. The perception of sameness/difference implies that those who are perceived as different are treated different. Kincaid expresses Roberts statement of this sameness/difference perception when she says:

"[...] that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness (you do not look the way they look); the physical sight of you does not please them; you have bad manners (it is their custom to eat their food with their hands; you try eating their way, you look silly; you try eating the way you always eat, you look silly); they do not like the way you speak (you have an accent); they collapse helpless from laughter, mimicking the way they imagine you must look as you carry out some everyday bodily function."

It's all about culture. As I stated in one of my last posts, culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." (Tylor, 1871). But culture can be also modify throughout the years and be in constant changes since there are countries which are actually colonies from other countries. Kincaid expresses how she felt living under the English colonialism and how the racism and poverty were noticeable.

That political state Kincaid is narrating us from Antigua let me think and compare it with our Puerto Rican history and political state. Puerto Rico have been since under the power of Spain through the American power nowadays. We have been in constant changes and adaptations since the Spanish until the American colonialism. We have incorporated to our culture many American aspects or festivities. We celebrate their holidays as if it were ours. We introduce a lot of English language to our vocabulary as well as we wrongly translate many English words to Spanish...we have created a 'Spanglish' vocabulary. However, instead we can talk English we have an accent. As Peter Roberts says, "language can sharply distinguish between insider and outsider through difference in accent, idiom structure and word". Therefore, we will always be outsiders in another country with a little knowledge of an insider.

"A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid (Section 1 and 2)

"If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see." Jamaica Kincaid, writer and novelist, introduces her book letting know the readers about the topic and place of interest: Antigua. Kincaid starts the first section of A Small Place, 1989, giving thoughts and experiences of the tourists who visit Antigua. She recreates the tourist's point of view as one from comments like "What a beautiful island Antigua is" since the airplane descends to land or "Oh, what a marvelous change these bad roads are from the splendid highways I am used to in North America" while the taxi driver is carrying them to their destination at the island. Kincaid describes the tourists as those who are interested in the natural beauty of the island, the beach, the sunny days or the hot and clear air instead of knowing what is really happening in  Antigua.

Between all these tourists' utopia there is an island filled with problems like corruption, drug dealing, poverty, health services, education, criminality, draught and racism. The author keeps narrating the tour on the island while explaining some of these problems stated before. About the corruption, she states the government encouraged the banks to make loans available for cars. Therefore, most of the people drive expensive Japanese cars, but filling the gas tank with the wrong kind of gasoline. About the drug dealing and criminality, she focuses on a mansion which is the house of the drug smuggler and everybody knows about him and what he does for living. As another example, she states about the health services that there's the Holberton Hospital which is staffed with doctors that any Antiguan trusts including the Minister of Health. On the other hand, Kincaid describes the building of the Pigott's School as one which is full of dust and would be easily confused with some latrines. The author also mentions the damage library which it repairs still waiting from the earthquake of 1974.

On the second section of the book, Kincaid focuses on a retrospective view of her life in the old Antigua ruled by England. She mentions the different circumstances in which racism and poverty were very noticeable. "People can recite the name of the first Antiguan (black person) to eat a sandwich at a clubhouse and the day on which it happened; people can recite the name of the first Antiguan (black person) to play golf on the golf course and the day on which the event took place." Jamaica Kincaid expresses her insider view of her birthplace, but I firmly believe every tourist should became an outsider insider by searching information of the place they will going to visit.

"That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere." - Jamaica Kincaid

Tips to Antigua's tourists

My Island, My Home...

What is home? Roberts (2008) described home as "variable and may be the place of birth, place of residence or may be defined by the popular notion 'where the hearts is'. But I think that home is more than just the place of birth, residence or 'where the heart is'. Home is something that we can identify with. It is not just a place, it is OUR place. 

Our island has its unique enchantment as one of the most beautiful places to go on vacations, but it is also more than this. In the research I have done, I found a lot of comments of tourists who came to our island and talked about some of the realities of Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, other tourists made pointless comments about our country. Outsiders have their own opinion; their own perspective. As a Puerto Rican and insider of my country, I have another perspective of what I called home. Some of my points match with the statements of the tourists; others not. As an example of the pointless comments, one tourist wrote: "No mountains near the beach. Not Hawaii, but cool for what it is." I think this tourist never went to beaches like Playa Escondida in Fajardo nor Flamenco Beach in Culebra. These beaches are surrounded by mountains and they are such really beautiful. However, Puerto Rico is more than its beaches and the Old San Juan. The center of Puerto Rico is full of history, fauna, flora, and many interesting places to visit not only as an outsider but as an insider too. Instead most of the tourists emphasizes at the perfect beaches, great food and weather, the one that caught my attention was the comment about our unique culture. "Culture...that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." (Tylor, 1871). We identify ourselves with our culture and the language is an important part of it. 

Our island is also recognized for its crime, violence and drug problems and a poor economy. It is also important to establish here we have a lot of poverty and many sceneries in which we can easily contrast between the ones who are economically well instead of those who are not.  However, these problems are not only from our country. There are many countries that are equal to or worse than us. Therefore, I recommend Puerto Rico as a place not only to visit, but also to live. Puerto Rico is our home. Puerto Rico is MY HOME!