HAWANSUYO

  FAMILY HISTORY              My father parked his truck in the driveway and entered the house through the back door. He called out his wife’s name several times but she did not answer. When he came to the bathroom door, it was closed but not locked. He quickly opened it, realizing that something was waiting for him that he did not want to see! His wife was lying on the bathroom floor in a pool of her own blood.  My father and his second wife, Nettie, were married. They lived on the farm with Mr. and Mrs. Farmer, the parents of his first wife, Delcy. She had been their only child and they left the four-acre farm to my father and his second wife, my mother. I’m not sure how my mother felt about living with the parents of my father’s first wife. The farm was a good piece of property. She probably thought of it as a bit of good luck.   My father was born in 1899. He and his family lived in the shadow of the poorhouse. Wh...

Jose Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Although several of his books were available in English translation, not many people in the United States had read his novels prior to the award. Soon his latest novel, Blindness, was on the New York Times Best-Seller List.  Saramago uses a quotation from the Book of Exhortations as the epigram to Blindness: "If you can see, look. If you can look, observe". Near the end of the novel, when the blind people get their vision back, he has one of his characters remark:" I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see" (292). These two quotations indicate the intention of the novel. They indicate, but do not disclose it. The greatest problem with an allegorical novel like Blindness is that it grants too much freedom to the reader. It allows for too many interpretations. Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for both personal misfortune and soc...

       I remember the two well-dressed men who knocked on our front door. They said they were interested in buying our farm. My father laughed and said, “We don’t want to sell the farm.” One of the men responded, "If you don’t sell, you’ll be surrounded by factories. Everyone around here has sold. We’re going to build an industrial park. If you don’t sell, you’ll be standing in the way of progress.” The sign says “Renaissance,” but the rebirth of what? Fifty years later, rows of condos were thrown up for people on the road to success! The real estate agents promised an industrial park would be built. That’s how they got my parents to sell their four-acre farm. The factories never got built, only the condos. Real estate speculators bought up the whole area for a projected industrial park which was never built. I guess they did not know about the plans for the deindustrialization of America. It was prize land because it was located near the Pennsylvania Railroad line f...