This semester, I have yet to encounter a personal essay. When first reading “Report from the Bahamas,” I had no idea what I was going to experience. I found myself curious with a little confusion. I was intrigued by the specific interactions and experiences the author chose to highlight. I found myself having to pull away from the world the author had written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I believe I was experiencing immersion<\/strong>. Immersion is defined as “absorbing or engrossing involvement in a story. You might feel as though you’ve been swallowed up by the story”. The way Jordan wrote her personal essay allowed me, as the reader, to truly feel that I was there with her. I was truly moving along with her in the story, meeting the people she had seen on her trip. I was able to discover her thoughts and feelings on those very people. Often needing to remind myself that she is the one describing her experience to me. It is very well that those around her experienced things differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We will jostle along with the other (white) visitors and join them in the ~ June Jordan<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I have had similar experiences to this one, where locals are trying to sell their honest work, while tourists haggle for a good price. Her description of this experience allowed me to recall some of my very own memories. Suddenly, I could see women on the hot concrete floor surrounded by their beautiful hand-woven goods, people yelling out prices, all while I just watched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are not white, after all. The budget is limited. And we are harm- I found it interesting that, throughout the essay, she kept calling out that this is her consciousness as she talks about people she is observing around her. Wondering what they think of her and connecting things she has read and how she is in contradiction to everything she knows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To me, it feels as though she is trying to point out that she is able to be conscious of race and class, and she has this vacation where she is able to think about these things. While others are simply trying to survive and possibly aren’t thinking about their way of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I believe this calling out she is doing is what reminded me to step out of the story. It felt as though Jordan was reminding me that these are her thoughts, and possibly no one else’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It so happens that for truly secular reasons I’ve been fasting for three ~ June Jordan<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This piece of the essay really stood out to me, as this is when I caught myself experiencing immersion. Through Jordan’s words, I felt the heat of the Bahamas as I sat in my frigid kitchen. My stomach began to churn with hunger. I felt the judgment of the black woman making the chicken salad as the radio gospel consumed my ears. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The technology at play in this essay is the I voice<\/strong>. It is described as “a narrator who speaks in the first person”. June Jordan puts us in her own mind, allowing the reader to see the world from her perspective, to understand why she is having these judgments in the environment she is in. The exact thoughts that ran through her mind as to how the experiences played out the way they had. Reading in the first person allows me to become immersed as the world is made digestible through the author. It locks me into a set perspective in which I am playing with the environment as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My Experience This semester, I have yet to encounter a personal essay. When first reading “Report from the Bahamas,” I had no idea what I was going to experience. I found myself curious with a little confusion. I was intrigued by the specific interactions and experiences the author chose to highlight. I found myself having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":931,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-4","missing-thumbnail"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/931"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11186"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11458,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11186\/revisions\/11458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unewhavendh.org\/immigrant-literature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What Caused My Experience<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
tee shirt shops or, laughing together, learn ruthless rules of negotiation
as we, Black Americans as well as white, argue down the price of hand-
woven goods at the nearby straw market while the merchants, frequently
toothless Black women seated on the concrete in their only presentable
dress, humble themselves to our careless games:
“Yes? You like it? Eight dollar.”
“Five.”
“I give it to you. Seven.”
And so it continues, this weird succession ofcrude intruders that,
now, includes me and my brothers and my sisters from the North<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
lessly killing time between the poolside rum punch and “The Native
Show on the Patio” that will play tonight outside the hotel restaurant.
This is my consciousness of race and class and gender identity as
I notice the fixed relations between these other Black women and myself.
They sell and I buy or I don’t. They risk not eating. I risk going broke
on my first vacation afternoon.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n
days. My hunger has now reached nearly violent proportions. In the
hotel sandwich shop, the Black woman handling the counter complains
about the tourists; why isn’t the shop closed and why don’t the tourists
stop eating for once in their lives. I’m famished and I order chicken salad
and cottage cheese and lettuce and tomato and a hard boiled egg and a
hot cross bun and apple juice.
She eyes me with disgust.
To be sure, the timing of my stomach offends her serious religious
practices. Neither one ofus apologizes to the other. She seasons the
chicken salad to the peppery max while I listen to the loud radio gospel
she plays to console herself. It’s a country Black version of “The Old
Rugged Cross.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nTechnologies at Play<\/h2>\n\n\n\n