Literary Homelands Essay Response

I sat the Trial HSC Exam.

I'd seen other English teachers talk about doing this, and I'd done it earlier on in my career with Standard English to 'test' myself for reassurance, so the idea to undertake an Extension English 1 examination wasn't completely foreign to me. I won't lie and say it was a piece of cake; I have to admit that I felt kind of nervous walking into an examination with no notes to rely on and having to write a response legibly enough by hand.

I also feel nervous sharing my responses here on the blog... going into that big cold school hall and having to adhere to those time limits was surprisingly intimidating, but maybe the writing will be useful to someone's students. Hopefully.

Anyway, I wanted to do this for a few very important reasons.

1. There doesn't seem to be a textbook out there filled with Extension English 1 essay responses. I inquired about this with a publisher that I've previously contributed Standard and Advanced essays to and the response was, understandably, that the market was too small. I decided that starting to write my own essays might be the way to go about it.
2. I wanted an essay that was written in as close to student conditions as possible. I sometimes think that the 'Band 6' (or in the case of Extension, Band E4) responses provided by teachers (myself included) are slightly disingenuous as they often aren't written by hand, in timed conditions, or isolated from revision notes.
3. Understanding how the examination works feels like a really important thing that I should know. The only way for me to get a fair summation of this is to do it myself, otherwise I'd forever be an observer looking in.
4. I often feel like I shouldn't ask my students to do anything that I wouldn't do. I want to be able to perform well in exam scenarios... teaching students how to write essays for exams without being able to do it myself has made me feel in the past like I was missing something.
   

I was lucky this year as the examination had been set and finalised several terms ago so I was able to go into the examination without remembering what the questions were. As I said earlier, it was kind of nerve-wracking, and I found myself wandering around mumbling quotes to myself in the preceding days in an effort to memorise some appropriate textual evidence.

The Experience

In the past I've given my Extension students the advice that they should do their Elective essay first, and that they should devote 1 hour to each of the two papers. I tried to follow this advice and I was mostly successful, but here's what I learned:

• I ended up needing at least 70 minutes to write an essay with four properly supported body paragraphs.
  
• The Literary Worlds section, even with its two separate parts, only ended up taking me about 30 minutes. The more organic nature of imaginative writing meant that I wasn't constantly needing to stop and keep track of what I was doing in quite the same way that I needed to for an essay.
• I planned out my essay fairly carefully. This burnt up valuable time but it was entirely necessary to ensure that I didn't stray too far from the question or my thesis. I kept having to stop myself mid-paragraph to go back and check on the question, the thesis, and my plan - this is part of why this section took me so long.
• My planning involved quickly writing down my 12 quotes/textual examples, brainstorming a thesis statement of sorts, and then calling upon four different talking points that our study of Literary Homelands is built around in class. I then matched up each of the textual examples to each of the talking points before I started writing my response.
  
• In writing the Literary Worlds imaginative response I had to be careful to remember I was writing for the purpose of reflecting. To this end, I ensured that I consciously used a couple of techniques that I could discuss in reference to the way we had studied the module in class - this meant crafting a piece of writing that allowed for some implied discussion of reader-response theory, demonstrated how I had both mirrored and subverted the stimulus text, and indicated an understanding of the question that had been posed in the examination.
  
• Side Note: I was conscious of writing something that was of benefit to my current students, so I resisted writing too academically. That is to say, I wrote within the constraints of what I hope my students will be able to write. If I'm being honest and self-critical then I think that my elective essay may be too formulaic and that my imaginative piece could have leaned a bit more on the Joyce stimulus.
  

The best aspect of all of this is that I can now safely say I have a much better appreciation of what Extension students need to keep in mind while doing their exam. In concise terms: it's a lot.

The Exam Questions

The exam used is from the practise responses that can be easily found online at the NESA website. I wanted to try and make sure that the Trial HSC matched the HSC as much as possible, so I've relied on this exam for the first two times I've taught this course.

In light of this, if my students went looking for these practise papers and did them all in advance then they'd have a big advantage going into the trial exam. But, really, I think I'd be so overjoyed that they did this much preparation that I wouldn't mind them having this 'advantage' (I say 'advantage' but really, it's just assessment as learning). Suffice to say, I aim to write a new, original paper next time I teach the course - whenever that may be.

The Responses

Section 1, Part A

She sat outside watching the morning sun embrace her backyard. Eveline had never felt more awake than she did now.

This was a new world of action and desire and excitement and endless opportunities. Her memories of home were fading, in fact - 'home' was starting to disappear altogether. Home? But Australia was now home. That place in the past, Ireland, was something that happened to someone else. Not home.

"Mrs. Jones, when do you expect your husband will be arriving?"

It took a moment for Eveline to register that the butler was talking to her. She turned and caught his raised eyebrow before he re-composed himself.

"Oh, I don't know - he's always traveling. I shan't be surprised if you never get to see him."

The butler sniffed, clearly unimpressed. What did Eveline care? This was the other side of the world. If she wanted to say she was Mrs. Jones, that she had an ersatz husband off fighting wars or exploring jungles, that she was educated and upwardly mobile... If she wanted to say these things then how could this snooty, ridiculous butler challenge her? In Australia, she could be anything.

Yes. The morning sun was radiant as it glinted off the river over yonder, as it reflected off the greenhouse, and breathed life into everything it touched. Eveline? Who was Eveline? She was Sabrina Jones now. She must think of herself as Sabrina, not Eveline.

"Pass me that, would you, James?" she said in her best, most haughty voice.

The butler reluctantly gave it to her and she held it high in the sunlight.

Beautiful.

Let them try and take it away from Sabrina. Just let them try.

Section 1, Part B

In order to invite the reader into my continuation of Joyce's 'Eveline' I took the opening sentence of the writer's original text and mirrored its structure while subverting its intentions. Where Joyce wrote of the character looking out from an interior world through a window, I decided to place her outside to symbolise a difference in place. Where he wrote 'evening', I have used 'morning sun'. This is intended to suggest a new, positive beginning for the character through the use of pathetic fallacy, and Eveline is no longer 'tired' (as described in Joyce's opening lines) but now "had never felt more awake".

To give the impression of this being a more energetic setting and frame of mind for Eveline, I used polysyndeton, "action and desire and excitement and..." The character is clearly open to new possibilities now that she has left Ireland for Australia. A stream-of-consciousness approach is used in the second paragraph with fragmentary and truncated sentences, as well as rhetorical questions, to show the process whereby Eveline constructs a new identity for herself - Sabrina Jones. This acts as a symbol for the embracing of new opportunities.

Needing to generate a potential for conflict, I have made some suggestion that the butler is suspicious by having him ask after her "ersatz husband". The reader is encouraged to engage with further mystery through my choice to have the object at the end remain unnamed. By referring to it obliquely as just 'it' and using an enigmatic, one-word paragraph of "Beautiful" (which could refer to anything - the object, this new situation Eveline is in, the view of the backyard), I hope to unsettle the reader enough to provoke their own reader-response: a deliberate choice with no intended meaning at this point, as I want to convey how reader-response theory can work.

Download Section 1 Response.

Essay Plan

Section 2

Composers use their texts as a platform from which character voices are employed to illustrate the changing world. As a result of processes of modernity such as marginalisation, hybridisation, colonialism, and the instability of language, these characters become representative of the formation of complex identities that result from shifting homelands in the 20th and 21st centuries. The creation of these identities can be observed in texts such as Eileen Chong's suite of poetry, Burning Rice, the play The Secret River by Andrew Bovell, and Ding Xiaoqi's short story, 'The Angry Kettle', each of which provide a forum in which authors can explore the aforementioned ideas.

With the impact of diasporic migration, communities and individuals often find themselves marginalised within Australia's constantly changing society. Eileen Chong explores this idea in her homage to her Chinese ancestry, 'My Hakka Grandmother', with the line "Wild birds in search of a new place to call home" illustrating the lack of power inherent in migrating peoples. The Hakka people are a nomadic group lacking in a fixed homeland, as evidence by the use of the adjective 'wild' in a metaphor designed to evoke images of a group forced to 'fly' from place to place. The connotation of the word 'new' further conveys the idea that the persona's people have lost their previous homeland: they lack the security afforded by a fixed community. This process of disempowerment in similarly expressed in Xiaoqi's short story 'The Angry Kettle', wherein the Chinese protagonist faced with a symbol of white Australian dominance, the titular kettle, remarks that she "barely had the guts to look straight at it". This allusion to the kettle's power lends the object a sense of personification as if it were an intimidating force to be reckoned with - an item that symbolises historical English superiority in Australian society. The process of marginalisation that results from unequal relationships of power is further explored in Bovell's adaptation of 'The Secret River', in which the play's events reach an appalling climax whereby the increasingly dominant white settlers massacre the Dharug people while singing a song of home, 'London Bridge'. The contrast between the tragedy that befalls the Dharug and the image of grown men singing a song so well-known to children provides a tonal dissonance that illustrates the way British power has disrupted the natural balance of the Dharug people - a process of violence that pushes them to the margins of their own world, so to speak.

The ability of migrant identities to find a foothold in their new homeland may also inevitability lead to a process in which new, hybrid identities are formed. Against their best wishes, the people of the Dharug in 'The Secret River' find themselves subjected to the influence of their European invaders. This is perhaps best exemplified by the ex-convict Thornhill giving Ngalamalum the anglicised name of 'Jack'. Despite the insistence of his son Willy that the Dharug man's name is easy to pronounce with practice, Thornhill's self-assurance in his own culture results in his own choice of name being imposed on Ngalamalum, a metonym for the process of re-naming that has seen Aboriginal culture develop accordingly in times since. This process is explored in other ways by Chinese-Australian migrants too, with Chong's poem 'Chinese Ginseng' labelling the taste of the eponymous Chinese medicinal herb as 'bitter-sweet' - a paradoxical description that showcases her mixed emotions about the traditions of her mother and illustrates the complex ambiguity of being Chinese in the Western world. Conversely, the Chinese protagonist of 'The Angry Kettle' resists the attempt of her housemate Michael to subsume her traditional identity completely. When Michael racistly asks her if Chinese people have to eat 'fried food' she hyperbolically retorts with a question of whether all Australians have to "treat their kettles like sweethearts," a simile that subverts his discriminatory question by turning it back on him. In considering each of these texts it becomes clear that the ongoing development of cultural identities is something that happens in connection to opposing identities that exist in the same space.

The creation of shared spaces is, in the case of Australia, a result of the 18th and 19th century practice of colonialism. In 'The Secret River', the settler Thornhill makes the claim that "dug-over dirt" is as "good as planting a flag." This simile references a belief that the British way of using land is the only true proof of ownership, and is used by Thornhill to discount the validity of Dharug pre-existence along the Hawkesbury River. This event is representative of larger historical events that impacted on Australia's Indigenous peoples and would have an ongoing ramification on their concept of identity in years to come. The violent impact of colonialism is also felt in more subtle ways, with Chong's persona in 'Burning Rice' sadly looking at her burnt rice and metaphorically describing it as "my ancestors' ashes in a bowl", an observation that illustrates the loss of connection to her previous homeland that has result from living in a nation still characterised by British cultural dominance. This dominance is also evident in 'The Angry Kettle', with the ever-present kitchen implement signifying the living spectre of British colonialism that still sits, 'shiny' and important, in the average Australian home. The narrator of this short story demonstrates this through the juxtaposition cause by her dirty 'fingerprint' on the gleaming kettle - an act that symbolises the intrusion of Asian identity into the homogenously white world that had grown from British colonisation of Australia. Each of these texts convey how composers use the voices and presence of these characters to explore the way identities change through experience.

The instability of language is another key component of literary texts that embody changing cultural identity. In Chong's poem, 'Winter Meeting', the persona describes a meeting with an older Chinese poet in Melbourne. As a suggested for her depression, Kim Booey Cheng tells the persona to read the famous traditional Chinese poets. She is, however, unable to, reflecting, "But where you go / I cannot follow... I lost the language years ago." This metaphor reveals the way in which a Chinese-Australian's changing command of Chinese language can affect one's sense of cultural connection. In contrast, the Chinese protagonist of 'The Angry Kettle' is unable to grasp the finer nuances of Australian English, describing her housemates words as "pouring out", a verb choice that carries a connotation of natural force, of hot water from a kettle, of something that cannot be stopped so that understanding can be checked. It is at this point in the story that the reader first gets a sense that a division is appearing between the protagonist and her housemate, and it is a division created by a difference of language. The power of language is utilised in a different way by Andrew Bovell in 'The Secret River'. The Aboriginal characters speak in the Dharug dialect, which is used to allow the audience to experience the cultural barriers between the British and the Indigenous. At various points in the text there are moments of misunderstanding that result from Thornhill's ignorance of the language, and his unwillingness to learn it foreshadows that it is a language doomed to extinction.

Through examining 'The Angry Kettle', 'Burning Rice' and 'The Secret River', readers can get a sense of how cultural identity is fluidic, flexible process that happens in interaction the development of new 'homeland' spaces. Through a process of self experience, characters shift and resist and hybridise in the modern world, and authors present their voices so this can be better illustrated.

Download Section 2 Response.