Nostalgic Memories In Yusef Komunyakaa's Facing It Essay

“Facing It” by the American black poet Yusef Komunyakaa of Shreveport is written with the use of visual images. Yusef Komunyakaa writes about one of his many trips to the Vietnam's Veteran's Memorial in Washington DC. This Memorial is a long polished slab of black reflectant granite with the names of all the US soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam. Yusef says “my black face fades, hiding inside the black granite”. Here Yusef uses his reflection in the wall to bring the reader back to the war and how he feels standing at the wall now. He makes his feeling ambiguous and give the reader the opportuntity to decide what he is feeling through his use of viual images.

He struggles to internalize his emotions, telling himself he is stone, like the granite memorial, a strong and steady reminder of the past, but he fails as he realizes the difference between him and the memorial: he is a living human being. He shares the darkness, the blackness, with the granite memorial, yet he can feel the full impact of this connection whereas a granite memorial cannot itself feel the pain that it directly represents. The overall moral of the poems is fairly up front for the reader. It is that war is not how stories make it sound, it is not honorable and fun and glorious, it is gruesome, deadly, and changes the lives of many young men and women who still had a lot of life and innocence left in front of them, and now all they will have are the memories of death and their friends dying in front of them. As Komuyakaa face becomes clear it now serves as a direct reminder of the emotional impact of his surroundings upon him, through mirroring his own face and also by simultaneously illuminating his surroundings and his silhouetted existence within these surroundings, reminding him that he stands within the Vietnam Memorial. This effect is described within the (lines 8-13) His constant turning and moving from angle to angle also suggests emotion as he cannot view the

In the novel “W, or the memory of childhood” written by Georges Perec, we see the story of a Jewish child that lived through his childhood during World War 2 and the time of the Holocaust which was a depressing time for Jewish people. This is an autobiographical novel which uses alternating chapters to help better describe his journey through this depressing time as a child, with trauma comes emotional and psychological harm which causes you to do whatever it takes to numb the pain, whether it is to find the source of the pain or to submerge them deep inside your heart to forget it. In this case, Perec used alternating chapters

In Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez situates his individual experiences with education in such a way as to expose what he sees as the fallacious logic behind bilingual education and affirmative action. He uses arguments to propagate the systematic problems with such programs. His autobiography explains in great detail the entangling problems all American children face by instituting bilingual programs and affirmative action endorsements.

Common themes of komunyakaa's poems include black resilience, jazz, and wartime appeal. In February in Sydney He opens the poem with the image of jazz being played through a tenor sax. This poems allow the audience to see how jazz impacts Komunyakaa in such an emotional way when he says “music is an anesthetic.” The metaphor of jazz music numbing the pain allows for a momentary escape from the world of stereotypes and judgement towards African Americans.

The theme of separation is an important development in the novels Hunger of Memory and How the Garcia Girls lost their Accent. The novels deal with separation differently. For Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez, the separation allows Richard to move from the private world to the public world. Here, separation is a movement for a solution, which is citizenship. In How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accent by Julia Alvarez, the separation is an effect from Antojo.

At first she uses imagery to display the prejudice faced by her daughter, showing how the bully “slanted his eyes at her beautiful daughter”, displaying the prejudice faced by Japanese Canadians. Kogawa also uses the imagery to show the fear that the speaker had to endure in her past, from the “big white boys . . . crowding [her] off the path of the mountain” to fearing “woodticks which burrowed into your scalp”. While the speaker is in the forest, Kogawa’s use of imagery shifts from showing fear to showing how she felt lost in the forest as she “listen[s] for the guiding sound of their laughter” to direct her back to the path. In her childhood the speaker faced many prejudices and had to deal with racism, which instilled a sense of fear and lostness at an early age deep in the speaker’s mind. Kogawa’s use of vivid imagery effectively develops the emotions of fear felt by the speaker at a young age and the racism faced, and what the speaker’s daughter is beginning to be exposed

Memories can last a life time, so we tend to only remember the extraordinary ones. Extraordinary like the essay “The Yellow Ribbon” by Pete Hamill, in which he talks about how a person named Vingo, was riding on a, bus recently released from jail, to this oak tree explaining to some passengers that he had told his wife to leave him if she wanted, since he went to jail or to go to this oak tree and tie a yellow ribbon around it to see if she wants him to stick around and he will go and check it out. In the end, he saw hundreds of ribbons tied on to the tree. Not only is this an amazing story, but also very unforgettable one as well, because he finds out that after four years in jail his wife has enough love for him to go to this tree and tie hundreds of ribbons just to show the type of love the women had for Vingo. I have to say that, I believe this story is truly unforgettable, but I also got a story that is very extraordinary, like the time that I got my very first car. Furthermore, I didn’t just get a car, I got the love of two truly loving parents.

Action speaks louder than words. These actions are shown in both in Memento (film) by Christopher Nolan and Memento Mori (short story) by Jonathan Nolan. The short story is turned into a movie, but it will never be as good. A book has a storyline, base descriptions are given, and our mind gets to create it with every turn of the page. A movie is someone else vision and very directed with certain details. The story starts off with Earl who has amnesia due to a traumatic event that his wife got rape and murder due to this he is unable to create new memories. Earl uses specific strategies to remember what he has already done and will be doing by he uses pictures, letters and transfers important notes onto his body. However, both brothers were able to create a point about Earl mental illness condition who is the main character of Memento Mori in different ways. One of the most important techniques that were both shown in the Memento Mori is time, thus, the film had a better justice of showing the audience/reader the power of past, present, and future.

Nostalgia lives in our veins, we breath and vision it all the time. Nostalgia was a disease throughout the early 1700’s, was coined with a mixture of Greek words of returning home and pain: Throughout the war, nostalgic were affecting the troops over the scale of homesick to perform their duties and the only option to recover the troop was by sending them back home. Now nostalgia has influenced modern day as generations expresses time back at their “good old days”, wishing that they could flashback. Nostalgic has even swayed the media perceptive as recreating their old films or shows in the new modern days to fill the gap of their childhood, and showing their children their favorite shows on television when they were a kid.

No Country for Old Men is a novel that revolves heavily around the theme of nihilism and nostalgia. Main characters, Sheriff Bell and Anton Chigurh represent this immensely throughout the novel.

Enjambment connects the third and fourth stanza together, the enjambment reinforcing the disconnection felt by the child between them and their parent. A detailed description of the items in the room has been given, highlighting the ignored person, who is second place to anything else in her room. The words used have connotations of sea life, in particular a fish bowl, ‘as in a rock pool’ (13), ‘green bowl gleamed’ (15). This imagery illustrates the feeling of isolation, as rock pools and fish bowls are confined spaces

The poet becomes increasingly uncomfortable as he begins to read about specific colors. The "jacket yellow in the green meadow" and the "red rooftops easy to spot in the valley" would hold significance for an audience with sight, but in the case of the blind man, they are worthless beyond their literal meaning (15-16). While the poet may have meant to convey a message to the reader through the red rooftops, his efforts were nullified by the blind man, and he fears that his work is now inadequate. Again, the poet appears to hesitate; he wants to "pass over" the "cathedral's ceiling," "the farewell wave," and "the album with the faces," yet he knows "it's not an option" (19-23). He feels guilty for making his poem so reliant on imagery, and the fear that he is inadequate as a writer continues to

Memory is defined as "the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information." Our memory can be compared to a computer's information processing system. To remember an event we need to get information into our brain which is encoding, store the information and then be able to retrieve it. The three-stage processing model of Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin suggests that we record information that we want to remember first as a fleeting sensory memory and then it is processed into a short term memory bin where we encode it ( pay attention to encode important or novel stimuli) for long-term memory and later retrieval. The premise for the three step process is that we are unable to focus on too much

Recollections of vivid autobiographical episodic memories formed when an individual experiences intense emotions, generating from a surprising public event defines Flashbulb memories (FBMs). Permanent and consistent remembrances processed cognitively and stored as explicit recollections in long term memory are additional features of FBMs (Goldstein, 2014). Brown & Kulik (1977) first proposed this phenomenon and argued FBMs are resistant to change like photographs. The ongoing debate over the process of cognition in relation to storing and recalling FBMs led numerous researchers to advance their understanding of the mental processing of FBMs and to evaluate the impact emotions have on memories. This paper discusses the pioneer investigation and findings from Brown & Kulik’s 1977. It further explores debates opposing their unique theory of FBMs and the apparent inadequacies of their conclusions. Additionally, this paper examines plausible hypotheses from researchers for the formation of FBMs like rehearsal of events and the inconsistencies of FBMs, their distortions and the decay FBMs experience over time. It then evaluates a contemporary study on FBMs and the necessity for future studies to develop a method to measure FBMs. This is imperative in order to gain a deeper understanding of the influences emotions have on shaping, processing and storing FBMs cognitively and consequently how it impacts on our daily lives.