by Sahar Jaafar Al-Keshwan

Frank and Ellie, Indian immigrants to America, are shattered when they lose their child to a sudden illness. They return to India, where they believe that they will find healing and consolation.  However, they have great difficulty surviving in and re-assimilating into the culture of India. In America, theysuffered discrimination, but in India they are faced with a culture shock that makes them question their own identities. Thrity Umrigar’s novel The Weight of Heaven (HarperCollins, 2009), delves into the complicated world of people who feel like immigrants in their own country.

When Frank gets a job managing a factory, he thinks that he will help improve the villagers’ lives. But he is challenged by, and eventually comes to hate, the culture of the town. The Indians around him, meanwhile, dream of America as the land of promises and opportunities. Frank knows that America is not what they imagine, but he is helpless convincing them otherwise. As a result, Frank “finds himself floundering in a country that seems increasingly foreign to him.” He feels that he has more in common with the American soldiers in Iraq, who also think that they are coming to another country to save its culture and life, but who end up with a “contempt and hatred for a culture they had come to save but was destroying them.”

Ellie also suffers from a clash with Indian culture. She volunteers as a therapist for women “trapped in a cycle of violence,” hoping that she can improve their lives. She had envisioned a bright and exotic life in India, while the truth was that the Indians suffered and struggled to earn their bread. “What could she ask these women to do?” wonders Ellie. “Go to the gym to combat depression? Take Prozac when they could barely afford wheat for their bread?” Ellie thinks that her experience in America could help the Indian villagers in her home country, but the Indians do not appreciate her purpose and dream of going to America, as it represents India’s “suitor” for them.

One reviewer, Sandip Roy, says, “Umrigar does not provide pat answers. Instead, to her great credit, she presents India, not as some passive, helpless victim, but as its own agent, smiling at its rich American suitors and manipulating them at the same time.”

The reader might consider the theme of this novel to be the cultural and psychological clash between two cultures. However, Umrigar also implies that, like Frank and Elie, Americans invade other countries under the guise of offering assistance. Indeed, this happens to Frank and Ellie, who are both victims of American colonialism. They emigrate to America to seek a better life, then return after their son dies to recover and heal, but again they fail. Their loss of their son could represent the loss of their identities, which they can find neither in America nor in India.

Umrigar also successfully shows the conflict suffered by Asian Americans when they return home. They are haunted by their culture and their memories of their home countries, but they are also haunted by their newly adopted culture in America.

Sahar Jaafar teaches English in Baghdad and is pursuing a Ph.D. in American Literature.

by Emma Collins

High above the world stand the peaks of mighty mountains, beacons for humble humans to come and prove their strength, courage, and resilience. Humans are unable to turn away from Mother Nature’s challenges, driven by some unquenchable need to conquer and claim her. But in all her wild glory, she does not go quietly into that good night of submission.

Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak at nearly six miles above sea level (29,029 feet, up there with the cruising altitude of a commercial jet) has claimed more than 250 lives. In all her cold, barren, thin-air rapture the mountain attracts thrill-seekers from across the globe every year to risk their lives for glory. While most deaths are attributed to avalanche, such as the 2015 avalanche triggered by the 7.8 Nepali earthquake that claimed 22 lives on the mountain, many more were horrific climbing accident tragedies.

Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest chronicles the events that took place on May 10 and 11, 1996, when a freak blizzard struck the mountain while climbers were attempting to reach her summit.  The movie follows Adventure Consultants, a company that offers professional guides to take climbers to the peak. The commercialization of Everest’s summit is a controversial topic that continues to draw criticism today; the bodies of climbers who perished on the ascent still line the path to the summit. Rob Hall, played by Jason Clarke, first popularized guided Everest climbs and lead a team of climbers during the 1996 events. ) For those unfamiliar with the historic disaster, the following information may spoil the movie.)

Eight people perished in the blizzard, including Hall, whose body still remains on the mountain.  Adventure Consultants lost four clients. The movie tells a story of human error, survival, and loss.  For those willing to accept historical events being glamorized for Hollywood entertainment, Kormákur offers a stressful adventure that may often leave one feeling breathless with the thin air of impossible peaks.  The cast is well chosen, although at times there are lengthy scenes of excessive emotional examination that, while offering a heart-wrenching look into the events, can feel heavy handed.  The truth behind the story offers enough emotionally charged reality.

The movie’s portrayal of Everest shows beautiful, barren landscapes contrasted with lush and untamed wilderness, a contrast that underscores the foreignness of one of Earth’s most treacherous landscapes. Scenes of home life, specifically the domesticity of the family of climber Beck Weathers (played by Josh Brolin), help to articulate the almost familiar tone in which such a monumental tragedy is told. These were not strangers beyond the reach of mortal men: they were simple people with extraordinary dreams. Kormákur offers basic medical terminology to help articulate the impossibility of the human body at 30,000 feet, but it is through the sounds of labored breathing, pained cries, and frozen, half-dead stares that the challenge Everest is made plain.

While many specifics surrounding the climbers’ deaths may never be known, it is nonetheless heartbreaking to watch as those men and women, all seeking glory for different means, perish in the face of the unthinkable. Several aspects of the story Kormákur chooses to tell almost cause fury in the watcher, as some climbers die in the face of others’ ignorance. To go into this movie looking for a Sunday evening relaxation is to be foolishly misinformed of just what the story entails.

Entertaining? Yes.

Heartbreaking? Even more so.

Everest attempts to articulate something Hall himself died trying to instill in his climbers: respect the mountain. For in an instant, she can hurl you into oblivion.

Contributing Editor Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.

by Sean O’Rourke

Believe me, I know. A nineteenth- century novelist may not seem the sexiest subject in the world. But try this: think of Maria Edgeworth as a woman who attempted to exert her influence far beyond the boundaries that her patriarchal society had set for her, who worked in a rebellious and war-ravaged land, and whose own life was threatened by a massive uprising that would define political life in her country for the next century.

Maria Edgeworth

Edgeworth was a descendant of English settlers, long since integrated into Irish society,  known as the Anglo-Irish. These people were often Protestant and landholding, but they occupied a liminal space: they were neither entirely Irish, nor were they entirely English. This put her and her family in danger when the Irish rose up in 1798 and she was forced to flee her estate by oncoming rebels. She also became one of the most influential novelists of the early nineteenth century despite, or perhaps because, she was marginalized, both by her ethnicity and by her sex.

She certainly does not hold this influence today though. Writers like Dickens and Austen have stayed a part of our literary canon and continue to influence writers and readers. Edgeworth has fallen by the wayside.

Turn your mind then from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Today we’re dealing with issues like sexism, xenophobia, and racism. Look at our election process. Look at how political careers are bolstered by these qualities. Look at how we allow ourselves to be divided even from people within our own country, by race, by religion, by politics, even by gender. We’ve seen many tragic instances recently of the desolation left in the wake of denying the basic humanity of our fellow human beings. In the light of viewing our broken world, I’m made even sadder by Edgeworth’s exclusion from our literary canon.

I challenge you to go to your local library and take out Edgeworth’s Ennui and read it. Look at how people in nineteenth century Ireland were divided by religious differences, by political differences, and by racial differences. See how women were excluded then as they often are now. And then look to see how much of these problems within the novel are caused by a stubborn refusal to communicate with one another as equals. In short, Maria Edgeworth identifies a lack of conversation in her society.

You see, Maria Edgeworth, since she was an Anglo-Irish landlord, was able to have conversations with a great many people: people of her own class, English people, and Irish people, tenants, and landlords. She conversed and from that found a philosophy of equality between English subjects and Irish subjects. She was not what we would now identify as an Irish nationalist, but she believed in equality for those oppressed subjects living under the crown.

Part of the problem with oppression is that it silences people. Many Irish were not allowed the power to converse in parliamentary debates because they were Catholic, or because they were not educated enough. In addition, since the Irish parliament in Dublin dissolved itself in 1801, there was no real political power in the hands of the native Irish and with Irish landlords. Religious, and economic differences also unofficially barred them from having many conversations with the Anglo-Irish and the English, especially due to the fact that many Irish people only spoke Irish, having never been taught English. Maria Edgeworth, however, through her book, is a champion of the conversation that was so repressed in this period.

In her book, the narrator travels to Ireland and has many conversations with other Anglo-Irish lords, with his native Irish tenants, and even with a loyal Scotsman who proves to be one of his greatest allies. These conversations lead him away from the philosophy of violent repression and towards a desire to educate his tenants and improve their lives and he only learns to do those by actually talking to them as equals. 

It seems a simple, perhaps even obvious solution to many systemic societal problems until you realize how little it actually happens. We are cloistered in our neighborhoods, in our jobs, in our college campuses. Our class system may be less obvious, but that does not make it any less damaging to those who get ignored and whose voices are silenced by our lacking the knowledge that having open and honest conversation could remove this silence. We could use a bit of education by Edgeworth.

Now, I’m certainly not saying that having the odd conversation with people you don’t usually talk to is going to end all violence and produce peace and harmony amongst all religions, nationalities, and economic classes. However, I think by seeing how Edgeworth uses conversations to overcome the boundaries, that we might be better able to deal with issues such as racism, sexism, and xenophobia more adequately, more peacefully, and more compassionately.

That has been one of the great joys of reading Edgeworth and reading in general. It’s one of those old ideas that your English teachers keep telling you over and over again: that what you’re reading is still relevant today. It’s one of those things we hear over and over again, take for granted, then fail to truly consider. With Edgeworth, the power, relevance, and potential application of literature becomes quite clear. This is what makes her so interesting and so incredibly important.

Sean O’Rourke is a senior at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass. As an English major, he is a part of the Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society and aspires to teach English at the collegiate level.

Photo credit: Portrait of Maria Edgeworth. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Dec 2015. http://quest.eb.com/search/300_209998/1/300_209998/cite