A room surrounded by four walls with bars running vertically down. There is nowhere to go or hide, and an escape route seems impossible. With no privacy or the ability to be unseen, you are enclosed. Waiting for time to liberate you from this torture. I think that is how people envision imprisonment. But, Malcolm X, a well-known leader for black nationalism, had fully embraced and took a different approach when it comes to being imprisoned. Malcolm X used this secluded space from the outside world as a way to improve himself. He began to teach himself how to read, and with this skill came something powerful; freedom.

For Malcolm X, reading and writing wasn’t just a skill you learned from school and use without importance. He was self-taught while in prison and only had a dictionary, tablets, pencils, and I believe motivation as well. In the beginning, he “spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages… I began copying. In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. I believe it took me a day.” From there he soon completed the entire dictionary and was finally able to understand the words on a book. A whole new world opened when he could read his first book. But he also says that “In, fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”

Literature was so vital for Malcolm X that it gave him a purpose and a sense of freedom to keep surviving. Physically he was trapped in his cell. But he had a deep-rooted connection with books, which erased that fact. He elaborates on this when he says, “Let me tell you something: from then until I left prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge…months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned.” Hence, through literature, Malcolm X got freedom he never felt before because through those books he was able to escape past those 4 walls of his cell. His prison sentence became meaningless; in the sense that, as he spent all his time in books, his time in prison would go by. This self-discovery leads him to realize that he didn’t have to be outside to feel free; his mind could go anywhere he pleased from reading a book. Literature and freedom may seem to not correlate, but once you lose yourself in the pages, you’ll find yourself being set free to a world that vanishes your reality.

Amy Tan’s life was centered and revolved around language. She is a writer and spends her “time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.” It was a pure passion and love for language that took part in her. But Amy came to a realization of how she speaks different Englishes. Spiraling to her embarrassment towards her mother, the inability to do well in English, and understanding the biases towards people learning English as a second language. Hence, giving ignition to a better perception about who she is and where she stands in society.

The epiphany that struck Amy was when she was giving a talk about her book, The Joy Luck Club. It didn’t take her long to discover that her mother was present and listening. For Amy, the way she was speaking was completely different from how she spoke with her mother. It was the type of “speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with normalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.” From this, Amy was not taught how to speak English by her mother. She had to actually adapt to learn two different Englishes. Due to this, she would see the way it limited her mother. However, when she was a teen, she discusses the way she felt ashamed. Specifically, because in “department stores, at banks, and the restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.” As a witness, Amy saw the things her mother had to endure and experience. But because she was embarrassed and had a limited perception of “broken” English speakers, she didn’t see the way society downgraded and diminished people like her mother. Amy’s mom was not categorized as a proper English speaker. Rather she was labeled as someone who spoke “broken” or “fractured’ English.

Personally, I think learning a second, third, even fourth language is something to take pride in.

Hi, my name is Mary Tenesaca (she/her). I intend to major in Biology and minor in Political Science. 

As I commence my journey at Lehman College, I’m definitely excited to learn, explore, and grow in many of my classes. Hence, I’m interested in how we’ll be able to write about different topics like political and cultural issues. I know I’ll even enjoy raising social awareness through our responses. Also, the only thing that is nerve-wracking is having grammatical errors and not getting my point across in assignments.

In regards to assignments in our course schedule, I am interested in the video, “Writing a literacy Narrative” Lecture and Amy Tan’s story “Mother Tongue”. I remember reading “Mother Tongue” in high school and relating so much to what she said about “broken” English. As a first-generation Latina, I had to help my mother understand and learn English. Moreover, I remember and felt the embarrassment Tan explained in her writing. Hence, my mother and parents in general, are like the primary visual or image of your family. So, they reflect on how the family functions and what status they have in society. Therefore, when someone speaks “broken” English in public places like supermarkets, they are seen as inferior and or not taken seriously. Due to this, it supplied Tan, and my younger self, to feel ashamed. Anyhow, I’m wondering what type of responses my peers might have on Amy Tan’s work.

After reading “Composition as a Write of Passage,” I think qualities of good writing must follow a particular formula. I think writing should stay on topic, be well structured/organized, zero grammatical errors, and have the author’s voice portrayed. To acconplish all these aspects of writing, I think one must practice writing with a variety of styles like argumentative, narrative, persuasive, and even free writing. But, a critical thing is always to have someone look at your work. So, being able to handle criticism, even if you do or don’t agree with it.

Writing has been part of my whole K-12 education. So throughout the years, I believe I’m well at organically structuring my essays. Additionally, I think I’m good at analyzing, identifying, and explaining evidence to support a claim. But, I think maybe I could be better at editing my essays like knowing the correct writing conventions. If I can apply this, then it can help me in future writing pieces.

The future feels far, but I know that becoming a PA involves writing.  I think I’ll be writing scientific journals and research papers. These types of pieces require the report to be clear and well organized. Especially if your explaining data or any kind of results from a study. Plus, being able to portray your ideas and thoughts clearly, helps in a team-based environment where I defiently see myself working in.