Heavy Acts with Heavy Hearts Relate: Finding Hope in Literature

This essay first appeared in the Oregon English Journal, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, pp. 6-9, Spring 2010. 

“Literature Saves Lives,” reads a proclamation from one of my adolescent journals. Teenage hyperbole aside, this idea holds true for me today as much as it did when I was 16. Like many high school students, I was lost and confused: My body was betraying me by changing in horrific ways, not the least of which resulted in prescription-grade acne. I was starting to become bewildered by a world that I saw as bigger and scarier every day. I had no idea how to cope with all of the frightening things I was learning about the world—the first Iraq war, genocide in Rwanda, global warming—so I looked for examples of how to live life from books. I quickly realized that the books with the answers I was looking for are not exactly what you would call a lighthearted lot: The Catcher in the Rye, Siddhartha, The Odyssey, The Bell Jar, Sula, Hamlet. 

Fifteen years later, in the midst of Othello, a student in my Senior English class sighs dramatically, “Are we ever going to read anything happy in this class?” 

I ponder this for a moment before answering, “No, I guess not.” 

I go on to explain the simple reason why my curriculum is not filled with hearts and flowers. At its foundation, literature is the scope of human experience, encapsulating the good, the bad, and the ugly. And often, the most compelling stories plumb the depths of the bad and the ugly to make sense of what we don’t understand. In our study of Othello, Lord of the Flies, and Night, we explore the central question: What is human nature? Through these works, we inevitably find ourselves embroiled in the savagery and cruelty so often at the core of human behavior. 

My Senior English class tends to be a motley crew: ELLs from Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, and Somalia; first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants; students from white suburbia and local farm families; students with IEPs and 504s for ADHD, depression, and learning disabilities; college hopefuls, college cynics, book lovers, and book haters. Many of them have been through more than I have at almost twice their age, so they don’t need to be taught that life is hard. But they are still learning that being an adult is sometimes about putting truth before happiness, and accepting this truth in order to reconcile life’s often painful contradictions. 

I want to guide them to literature that offers a place of reconciliation within the difficulty of living life on life’s terms. We begin by exploring smaller, personal hard times, which prepare us to understand larger, public tragedies, like the Holocaust, 9/11, and now, the Haiti earthquake. 

The language arts classroom has always been a place where students can share their own struggles, but when asked to write about them, they initially respond with a chorus of, “But I don’t know what to write about!” As a model for the personal narrative, we read Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education,” in which the protagonist Junior suffers through alcoholic parents (“they sat in separate, dark places in our HUD house and wept savagely”), discrimination (“The most valuable lesson about living in the white world: Always throw the first punch”), living on government assistance (“Happy to have food, [we] opened the canned beef that even the dogs wouldn’t eat”), and the legacy of post-colonial reservation life (“Everything looks like a noose if you stare at it long enough”). 

Alexie’s candor inspires the students to examine their own experiences through adversity, and I am often taken aback by their courage and honesty as they describe journeys with alcoholic parents, the uncertainty of living in an unexpectedly single-income household, or violent pasts that led them to the juvenile justice system. 

The writing process helps some students put their pain into words for the first time, and to change its status from liability to asset. In her narrative, Fouzia, a Somali immigrant, describes how she “had never seen blue-eyed and green-eyed people” when she learned that her head scarf would provoke some people to treat her differently. She describes how her third-grade teacher tugged at her clothes and told her, ‘This is not Africa, this is America,’ and concludes that this experience strengthened her faith and made her realize that no one can change her. 

“I have grown stronger,” she writes, “and know that no matter what one’s feelings are I will go to school with my layers and I will graduate and become what I wish to be in the future.” 

In Othello, we continue to explore human character, this time through the lens of the tragic hero. When students balk at the baffling Elizabethan language and question why we read a play over 400 years old, we talk about the still-current issues at hand: gender inequality, racism, the politics of difference. We question how the characters’ personal tragedies are connected to the public sphere of social injustice. 

When asked exactly what makes Iago so evil, students draw insightful revelations on the human will to power and admit to their own infractions that make them identify with Othello’s nemesis. Using a list of social offenses that includes everything from stealing and cursing to killing someone for revenge, students evaluate the characters’ culpability through the play. Iago invariably (and rightfully) gets the most votes, and the class delights in detailing his crimes. 

Yet as students revel in Iago’s often inexplicable malice, they start to consider the characters’ nuances and get closer to their own inner complexity. They don’t approve of the play’s more depraved acts, but they come to understand how such behavior is possible. When Othello explains that he is “one that loved not wisely, but too well,” they empathize with his fall from grace and the consequences of succumbing to irrational emotions. And they often come up with life applications without my prompting, as Matt notes: “I learned that love makes you do crazy things. I would never stay with someone if they cheated, but I would certainly not kill them.” 

In brainstorming for the play adaptation students are asked to create at the end of Othello, Matt compared Othello to Chris Brown and Desdemona to Rihanna, revealing how he applied the original tragedy to make sense of current events in pop culture that were important to him. With this final project, students show an appreciation of Shakespeare’s meditations on human nature. One group details how they made their play relevant to the group’s collective Mexican heritage: “We…show[ed] the class that it doesn’t matter what race you are; Shakespeare is for everyone and we should be open to others and their ways of looking at the world of literature and fine arts…By translating the original script to Spanglish and adding ‘traditional Mexican’ costumes, we attempted to show the adaptability of Shakespeare’s plays to any culture, and time.” 

Lord of the Flies works especially well for teenagers; its characters serve as proxies for the crossing of the threshold from innocence into what Golding terms “the infinite cynicism of adult life.” Ralph and Jack represent human nature itself, embodying the battle of civilized and savage behavior within each of us that is in turn writ large in global conflict. 

As I introduce the novel, students fill out an anticipation guide, then debate about such statements as “It is human nature to be savage” and “If given the chance, people will do the right thing.” To provide a personal gateway to the specific context of the book, an island simulation asks students to examine their attitudes toward self-preservation and the common good while they role-play a group of stranded survivors. Over the course of the novel, we track examples of civilized and savage behavior, and add them to a continuum on one of the classroom walls. 

While Golding’s allegory is ultimately a rather dark treatise on “mankind’s essential illness” (89), many students find it the most valuable of all the course texts. On the summative essay exam for the book, Javier reflects that “the thing that will haunt me for a long time is Lord of the Flies; it cause[d] a very mind-changing affect on me. I[t] taught me civil things are taught and children will turn savage without guidance…The future of the world will soon rest on our shoulders but together we can keep it safe.” Inhyean observes that we can gain “humanity by helping each other out no matter [how] bad the situation you are in…Anyone can lose their humanity and there are things [that] lead people to do cruel things.” 

After these works lead us through the heart of darkness, other questions emerge: How do we incorporate what we have experienced vicariously through these literary worlds to make positive changes? Is there any hope in tragedy? 

Our study of Night serves as a link to the real-world experience of meeting Holocaust survivors at the Oregon Holocaust Memorial. Over the past three years, my students have had the privilege to listen to the stories of Leslie and Eva Aigner, Hungarians Jews who came to the United States in the 1950’s. They tell of their harrowing journeys; Leslie’s especially bearing an uncomfortably close resemblance to Elie Wiesel’s coming-of-age in Auschwitz. They take us through the fear, the loss, and the process of how, as Wiesel describes, they became “damned souls wandering in the half-world, souls condemned to wander through space till the generations of man came to an end, seeking their redemption, seeking oblivion—without hope of finding it” (34). 

Yet through all this atrocity, a clear message emerges. Leslie calls himself “the luckiest man alive” and when looking in the mirror one day, remembers realizing, “There was a reason I had been spared. I had to live life.” He goes on to remind students that out of all the misery, the couple’s legacy is the belief that “we all have to fight for equality and accept each other as human beings.” 

When reflecting on this unit, many students comment on the tragedy of Night and the survivors’ accounts, yet they also talk about finding inspiration in those who have made it through unimaginable hardship. Claudia talks about how she gained knowledge of the Holocaust, and also about “people’s acts and behaviors. I also grew up as a person [after Night] because I feel I value my life more [and] think that my life is precious compare[d] to what other people might be living without the world knowing.” The day after our visit to the memorial, one of Claudia’s reading logs explains why she didn’t read anything that day: “I just thought about our field trip, I cannot imagine what the Aigners went through…What surprised me the most is that the Aigners don’t feel any hatred towards the Nazis. I [will] remember [the] phrase that they say, ‘We are living our lives looking forward and not back.’” 

My students might not imbue literature with the life-giving powers I once celebrated in a diary scribble. But in the end, I want them to experience the symbiotic relationship between life and literature that I found as a lost teenager, to see how literature serves as a bridge to the real world and back again. I want them to see how exploring the shadows inside each of us shows us where hope is possible, as Orion shows in his course reflection: “I gained a better sense of love and forgiveness from the brutality of Night. I gained a sense of… human…characteristics from the savages of Lord of the Flies. I learned to think hard before the next time I want to do an evil deed to someone in the future. That there I got from Othello.” Samantha explains how, even in today’s troubled times, literature taught her not to take her life for granted: “Not everyone in the world was as fortunate as us right now.” 

With these words, my students give me hope even in these times of fear. 

References Alexie, Sherman. “Indian Education.” The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove Press, 2005. 171-180. 

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigee Books, 1954. Oregon Holocaust Resource Center. http://www.ohrconline.org/home_-_oregon_holocaust_resour.html. 

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice. Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1993. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.