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In Myriam Gurba’s memoir, Mean, the idea of history comes to play throughout and is used in many different ways. From the first time someone reads this book the reader is able to understand that history is an important concept and that as they continue to read it just becomes clearer. History takes on many different roles within this memoir and they all are able to give us a better understanding of Gurba as she was growing up. 

History makes its first appearance when we are told that it is a memoir, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “records of events or history written from personal knowledge or experience of the writer, or based on special sources of information.” So we already know that this is Myriam Gurba’s life and history, these are the events that happened to her and things that shaped her to be who she is now. We are able to see history through Gurba’s eyes and get a deeper understanding of her life. 

Gurba also uses history to show a bit of irony within her life. Throughout her time in college, Gurba took at least one history class every semester. This is ironic due to the fact that Gurba had been molested in her history class and had nothing but terrible memories from history class. Gurba says “Yeah history class was where I got molested. Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop taking history classes. I really loved history” (150). Even Gurba knows that this is ironic and crazy that she liked these classes considering her past experiences that are associated with history class. But by taking these classes it is as if she’s showing that you can overcome these experiences that change you and then turn them into something that you can make a better outcome from. By overcoming her molestation she was able to turn something that she loved and make it a career.  

Gurba then goes on to tell us that she had graduated with a history degree and then went on to become a history teacher. I find this to be ironic as well considering her past that she has with her history teacher, Mr. Hand. Mr. Hand had known about Gurba being molested in his class but pretended that he hadn’t seen it and chose to do nothing about it. This is shown when she says “Unable to look into a girl’s eyes or soul while she was being molested, something all teachers should be prepared to confront, Mr. Hand snapped his eyes back to the worksheet he’d been grading” (30). Gurba is disappointed in Mr. Hand due to that fact that he couldn’t do something that all teachers should be able to do and that is to stop something from happening when it shouldn’t be. When she states “all teachers should be prepared to confront” she is personally calling him out for being a terrible teacher and showing that what he did should not happen with in any school. Gurba is showing that she can and will be better when she becomes a teacher and that no child should have to go through what she went through.

History is also an important part within the memoir because Gurba goes out of her was to show how history repeats itself. Sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in more subtle, deeper ways. One time we see this is when Gurba is at a strip club in San Francisco and she says “The stripper was me and I was him. I was reenacting the history of the moment after the art museum from a different perspective” (151). The moment that she is talking about in this quote is when she was raped in an alley after she had left the art museum. She says that she is reenacting the event from a different perspective. She sees the interaction between her and the stripper as almost a parallel to the interaction between her and the man that raped her. This is a way of history repeating itself because Gurba is able to make connections between these two different interactions. She sees how it is so similar to something she had previously gone through.

Another way that history repeats itself is when it comes to how other people are seen by the public. After she was raped, Gurba chose not to testify against her attacker due to the fact that “I’d be that girl that got raped by that cholo just like the boys Mr. Osmond fucked are still referred to as the boys Mr. Osmond fucked” (140). She saw what happened to these boys and was afraid that if she was to publicly say that this had happened to her then no one would be able to look at her the same. They would only see the fact that she was raped. This can also connect to Sophia being called a transient in all of the news articles. No one ever called her by her name and this ended up belittling the incident and making her seem like she was less than human. Gurba also didn’t want that, she didn’t want to feel less than human because of what this man had done to her. By not testifying she is not giving history a chance to repeat itself, she is not allowing herself to become what others before her have. 

Discussion Questions:
1. Why do you think Gurba choses to connect history in different ways within her memoir?

2. When reading Mean how did you see the irony behind Gurba’s choice to major and pursue a career in history?

Work Cited

Gurba, Myriam. Mean. Coffee House Press, 2017.

            In Myriam Gruba’s memoir, Mean, there is a similarity in section to another section in the memoir, The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston. In Gruba’s Mean, when she goes to San Francisco to visit the art exhibit of Hannah Wilke, she realizes she is dead and then starts describing how she thinks Wilke was like. She uses the word maybe while describing Wilke, she says “Maybe Wilke called this series Intra-Venus because she found Eros in dying”(Gruba 84). Later on she writes “There is Hannah ( I feel I can call her by her first name because of what she’s shown me)”(Gruba 84). She then finishes this scene talking about how she feels connected to Wilke because of her art, she feels a similarity to a ghost. She believes that Hannah Wilke is like her and “was modeling how to be me for me”(Gruba 85).

            In Rankine’s The Woman Warrior, Rankine also does this comparison and starts describing how she believes her aunt’s life was like. Rankine first learns of the story from her mother of her fathers sister, a ghost, the one who “never existed.” She uses synonyms to the word maybe to demonstrate that these are her own thoughts on how she believed her aunts life was like. Rankine writes “Perhaps she had encountered him in the fields…”(Kingston 6), “She may have been unusually beloved…”(Kingston 10), and “He may have been somebody in her own household”(Kingston 11). These words and phrases demonstrate that these are not concrete facts about her aunt, these are just her thoughts and ideas about her aunt’s life based on how her life has gone and her personal experiences. She personally connects herself to this ghost, her aunt, and uses this to create a story that she can accept as how her life was.

            This connection between the two books is important because they are two different memoirs that are about themselves that use someone that is dead as a way to compare and find themselves. These ghosts allow the reader to see how the authors mind works, and how the author thinks about themselves by reading what they believe these ghost’s lives were like. If we look at their descriptions of these people we can see the authors personal experiences in life through their descriptions, like when Gruba is talking about Wilkes creative process and how she came up with the name and ideas for her art she uses her personal thoughts and logic and it influences how she thinks this person she has never met was like and how she lived. Rankine also does this by basing how her aunt, who was shamed into killing herself by the villagers, lived in the Chinese society. Rankine uses what her parents taught her and her experience with Chinese culture to formulate a story.

            The author’s use of personal experiences to describe ghosts allows us to see more into their life and learn more about them. It makes us have to also interpret their lives instead of them the just coming out and telling us things about them, it shows us who they are without them telling us who they are.

            In Gruba’s case it shows us that she likes art and that it connects her to something. It helps her find herself and express herself. When she says that Wilkes helped show her how to be herself without ever meeting her shows that art has a strong impact in her life. She says that she feels connected and close to Wilke because of what she has seen in her art, she believes that all of Wilke’s art is teaching her a lesson.

Discussion Questions:

1. How do you think an author’s personal experiences factor into how they describe ghosts?

2. What does Gruba’s ideas of what Hannah Wilke was like tell you about her?

Works Cited:

Gruba, Myriam. Mean

Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior

Myriam Gurba’s memoir, Mean, focuses on the childhood and adolescent years of Gurba’s life, where she has to deal with growing up in California as a mixed-raced Chicana surrounded by a population of white people, and being queer. Gurba faces a lot of racism and misogyny throughout her teenage years and over the course of learns how to “be mean”.

“Being mean” is something that had heavily impacted Gurba growing up. She was always treated differently due to her race whether it was in School or in her community. 

She always knew she was Mexican, but she didn’t think she was much different from other people til people started referring to her as a “Mexican”. This can be seen in the beginning of the novel when Myriam has with Emily’s family while her mother has complications giving birth. Myriam asks Emily’s mother what they’re having for dinner and she answers with, “Since you’re visiting, Mexican.” (5)

Myriam thinks that her mom will cook up a storm of all of these traditional delicious Mexican cousine meals, whilst instead she makes a Mexican casserole out of basic American ingredients.

This small example demonstrates how at such a young age, Myriam is already facing racism, and she doesn’t know how to react. On the next page she even adds “There was nothing Mexican about it.” (6)

Americans today even stereotype Mexican cousine to be Taco Bell, however, for a child at a young age to subjected to being called “a Mexican” and making a half-fast Mexican-American meal because that is someone’s ethnicity is extremely damaging to any child.  

This incident sparked and inspired Myriam to become a stronger person and fight back against this racism with the strength she gained from being mean.

At an early age, Gurba learned that it was ok to be mean. It was how she was going to survive in this world.

She learned from this incident that there is evil in this world, and the only way to truly fight back is to treat people the same way they treat you… only 10x harder.

In the next short story from her memoir, The Problem of Evil, Gurba asks her father “Why does evil exist?”, and he answers with “Myriam, think of how boring life would be if nothing bad ever happened?” (16)

Although this probably wasn’t Myriam’s father’s intentions, these words gave her permission to be mean. Gurba expresses on the next page how “we act mean to defend ourselves”, and later exclaims how “It’s best practiced by those who understand it as an art form.” (17)

One incident and the people around us affect us act a young age. If it wasn’t for the people that surrounded Myriam, she wouldn’t have been exposed to racism at such a young age, and I don’t think she would’ve been able to know how to stand up for herself as well as others, if she didn’t have this experience.

However, being mean changed Myriam at a young age, and in many ways led her to be act cruel and senseless towards other people. 

It seemed as if she was looking for a sort of vengeance towards the white people who had wronged her in the past and present. An example of this can be seen, when she exclaims, “I hoped Steve would injure himself and die so that I wouldn’t have to let him into my club. That had been my strategy. To give his sex an insurmountable initiation. Like the literacy test given to black folks in the American South before the Voting Rights Act passed.” (15)

Despite the fact that Gurba had been wronged and treated poorly by those around her, she was acting cruel towards other people who hadn’t wronged her. 

She wasn’t defending herself or anyone else.

So what fun could she have really had?

Discusson Questions:

1. Do you think if Myriam had lived in another city or state, she would’ve had a different childhood experience? Do you think she would still be mean?
2. How can such a small incident impact a child to question the world around them, and change their perspectives on life? 

Work cited:

Gurba, Myriam. Mean

• 

My found poem is made up of multiple quotes found from the instagram page @catcallsofnyc. There is an artist who writes on the streets of NYC, in chalk, the sexual comments made to women. The quotes can be nauseating and heartbreaking having most of them being made to young girls. My method was to pick out some of the quotes that really hit me. I spaced them out and grouped certain quotes next to each other because I felt they had similar meanings. The quotes on the page are all backhanded compliments. The last line was a comment made on one of the posts that I felt I needed to include. It goes to show that men think it’s ok to yell at women if they compliment them. But these comments cause nothing but discomfort and sometimes fear. In a group or even with a parent girls are being singled out and yelled at by men in vile ways. No matter the age, girls will be cursed at and sexualized. Reading this hurt my heart. live near the city and have had many altercations like these but sometimes I can still be astonished by what is said. The woman who experienced these interactions also included the story behind it which I didn’t include. The stories they told were almost all the same. After getting cat called the women are often saddened and feel almost violated. Some altercations give me shivers or women being grabbed while just walking down the street. Men have this expectation that women owe them something after being complimented. Having it so women can’t walk down the straight without the fear of getting verbally harassed. 

Original Lyrics:

I really can’t stay (but baby, it’s cold outside) I’ve got to go away (but baby, it’s cold outside)

This evening has been (been hoping that you’d drop in)

So very nice (i’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice)

My mother will start to worry (beautiful what’s your hurry?)

My father will be pacing the floor (listen to the fireplace roar)

So really I’d better scurry (beautiful please don’t hurry)

But maybe just a half a drink more (put some records on while I pour)

The neighbors might think (baby, it’s bad out there)

Say what’s in this drink? (no cabs to be had out there)

I wish I knew how (your eyes are like starlight now)

To break this spell (i’ll take your hat, your hair looks swell)

I ought to say, no, no, no sir (mind if I move in closer?)

At least I’m gonna say that I tried (what’s the sense in hurtin’ my pride?)

I really can’t stay (oh baby don’t hold out)

But baby, it’s cold outside

I simply must go (but baby, it’s cold outside)

The answer is no (but baby, it’s cold outside)

Your welcome has been(how lucky that you dropped in)

So nice and warm (look out the window at this dawn)

My sister will be suspicious (gosh your lips look delicious)

My brother will be there at the door (waves upon the tropical shore)

My maiden aunts mind is vicious (gosh your lips are delicious)

But maybe just a cigarette more (never such a blizzard before)

I’ve gotta get home(but baby, you’d freeze out there)

Say lend me a coat(it’s up to your knees out there)

You’ve really been grand (i thrill when you touch my hand)

But don’t you see? (how can you do this thing to me?)

There’s bound to be talk tomorrow (think of my lifelong sorrow)

At least there will be plenty implied (if you got pnuemonia and died)

I really can’t stay (get over that old out)

Baby, it’s cold

Baby, it’s cold outside

Found Poem:

I really can’t stay, I’ve got to go away. 

This evening has been, so very nice.                                                     Beautiful, you hurry home

My father will be pacing the floor, so really I’d better scurry

 Beautiful please do hurry

But maybe just a half a drink more

Beautiful, you hurry home, it’s bad out there

But baby, it’s cold out there

   You simply must go, I’ll get you a cab.  You’d freeze out there, I’ll lend you a coat

You’ve really been grand, I’ll see you and talk tomorrow

Artist’s Statement:

For my found poem, I used the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside”. This song has always made me feel uncomfortable, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized it was a song about sexual assault. Just for a brief understanding, this song is about a girl, who seems to be young, mentioning her parents; with a man. As she tells him she must get home, he tries to convince her to stay by stating that it is cold outside, offering her more to drink, possibly drugging the drink, and kissing her. I cut a lot from this song, mainly the male’s parts, to try and make this song about a girl who must go home, and a man agreeing, and helping her out. I rearranged some of the words in order to form completely new lines for the man to show that he is trying to get the girl home. For the women’s perspective, seeing how in the original song she was drunk and he was convincing her to stay, I decided to have the women complain about the cold, but show the man doing the responsible and respectful thing by calling her a cab to get her home. The spacing I used was to differentiate the speaker, alternating between the male and female. I thought that it was very important to keep two speakers in this poem because it shows diversity in the language and still keeps a storytelling base. As I was working on the poem, all I was thinking is how creepy the original artist was, and just how I could change this to make it more of a lesson, showing what the right thing to do in that situation would be. I learned from this that when taking words in context, if you don’t like what it says, then change the context

Shortened version of Maroon 5- “Animals”

“Baby I’m preying on you tonight

Hunt you down eat you alive

Just like animals

Animals

Like animals-mals

Maybe you think that you can hide

I can smell your scent for miles

Just like animals

Animals

Like animals-mals

Baby I’m

Yeah you can start over you can run free

You can find other fish in the sea

You can pretend it’s meant to be

But you can’t stay away from me

I can still hear you making that sound

Taking me down rolling on the ground

You can pretend that it was me

But no, oh

But you can’t stay away from me

I can still hear you making that sound

Taking me down rolling on the ground

You can pretend that it was me

But no, oh

Yo,

Whoa

Don’t tell no lie, lie lie lie

You can’t deny, ny ny ny

The beast inside, side side side

Yeah yeah yeah

No girl don’t lie, lie lie lie (No girl don’t lie)

You can’t deny, ny ny ny (You can’t deny)

The beast inside, side side side

Yeah yeah yeah”

(End of shortened Maroon 5 song, “Animals”)

My Found Poem:

I’m preying on you tonight

Hunt you down. Just like animals 

animals-mals.

You think that you can hide?

I can smell your scent

for miles. 

You can run free, but you cant stay away from me.

You cant deny the beast inside.

No.

Oh,

Just like animals

Animals animals-mals. 

(End of original found poem)

My Artist’s Statement: Found Poem

Isabelle Pastore

I chose to create my found poem using a song by Maroon 5 that is about 5-6 years old. The song is called “Animals”. I remember when this song came out and I would listen to it all the time because I loved Maroon 5. The meaning behind the song is mostly inappropriate, so I’m not sure why I was listening to it 6 years ago. Recently, I heard the song again and I interpreted the lyrics differently than I did when I was younger. Instead of hearing a fun and meaningless song like I used to, I heard a song that was very disrespectful towards women. The lyrics imply that women are similar to objects or prey that can be hunted, caught, and/or shown off like a trophy. 

In the lines of “Animals”, the singer professes that the woman can’t hide because he can smell her scent for miles. Instead of aimlessly listening, I began to analyze the lyrics of the song. 

Obviously, this is some sort of game to the speaker and he claims he will find this woman no matter where she goes. She is a challenge, she is a game, and she is his trophy. As a listener, I am unsure if the woman enjoys this behavior or if she’s just being stalked. The lyrics not only objectify women, but they also imply that men are dominant and women are to be “found” or “captured”, and essentially just treated like animals; hence the song’s title. 

To physically create my found poem, I chose the most descriptive and important words from the song’s lyrics. I picked the words that I thought represented extreme masculinity and objectification. For example, I chose to include the word, “beast”. Nothing shows hypermasculinity more than a man calling himself a beast. The speaker is telling the woman that she cannot stay away from him, proving that he will not give up until he finds her. He constantly compares her to an animal and declares his supposed dominance over her. Again, we are unsure of her involvement in this clearly toxic relationship. While I worked on my poem, I felt relieved that I was able to analyze and understand the meaning behind this song. My thoughts may not be correct, but that’s why they are thoughts. We are meant to wonder, imagine, and learn from our mistakes. I took a song from my past and let myself interpret it the way I would now. During this activity, I learned that I enjoy doing things like this. I enjoy picking apart literature and sharing my own ideas. This will help me see literature, language, and “Zong!” in a clearer way because I will take the time to understand what I’m reading. I can now find more interest in learning more about this creative, philosophical, and intriguing writing that I enjoy so much. I hope that I can do more activities like this in the future.

Works Cited.

https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107859489233/

(2014) “Animals” by Maroon 5