To Be Human

The Church on Dr. Gaines’ Property, where Grant teaches students in “St Raphael”

“‘Do you know what a myth is, Jefferson?’ I asked him. ‘A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on earth—and that’s a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer have justification for having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in. As long as none of us stand, they’re safe. They’re safe with me. They’re safe with Reverend Ambrose. I don’t want them to feel safe with you anymore.’”

— Grant Wiggins, to Jefferson

As we pulled up to the small town of New Road on that warm and sticky Wednesday afternoon, I felt a sense of awe at the eerie quietness and haunted beauty that the area exuded. Seeing the place where Ernest Gaines (the author of the next novel in our bookpacking adventure, A Lesson Before Dying) set this deeply personal and moving piece was uncanny. Never had I really felt so connected to this idea of bookpacking, as I saw firsthand how walking and experiencing where a novel is set just added so much richness and dimensionality to the pages of the book I’d read a few days earlier in the car.

From the very beginning, Gaines portrays a deeply unjust South of the 1940s in which a young black man, Jefferson, is jailed and sentenced to death. Jefferson had been involved as an innocent bystander in a horrible shootout, and faced trial while his defense attorney, who was meant to represent Jefferson in court, argued unsuccessfully that Jefferson should deserve mercy and not be found guilty because he is more like a hog than a man, and incapable of committing such a crime. The novel details the relationship between a defeated Jefferson who no longer sees himself as human, and the local schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, who is charged by his own aunt and Jefferson’s godmother to teach Jefferson how to be a man before his execution. While the story is fictional, Gaines largely based it off of his hometown of New Roads (“Bayonne”) in the novel, which is located in the Point Coupée Parish (“St. Raphael”), and so naturally, us bookpackers made a journey to visit the locations in which the book took place.

As we walked up the steps of the Point Coupée Sheriff’s Office, we were warmly welcomed by the parish’s sheriff, Rene' Thibodeaux, before we could even enter the building. His warm, enthusiastic presence made us feel right at home, and he wasted no time bringing us into his office, introducing us to the Chief of Police and the Mayor of New Roads, sharing his story and asking us about our time in Louisiana, what we studied as USC students, what we wanted to do in the future, and a whole other slew of friendly questions. It was both a heartwarming experience, being welcomed with such open arms, and yet there was a slight discomfort, as the reason we were at the sheriff’s office was to visit the old jail cells, no longer in use, but in which Ernest Gaines portrays Jefferson within in his book.

I’ve never been to visit a jail cell before, and while I’ve seen it in movies and imagined it while reading news articles and books, nothing quite compares to standing in the warm, stagnant air of a prison, its dark metal bars and peeling ceiling entrapping me. We laughed nervously as Tammy wheeled the jail cell doors shut, but as soon as the doors shut, I already felt entrapped by such a tight, small space that left me with a few classmates in a cell with literally nowhere to go until the doors opened again. After just a few minutes in the cells, I had to step outside into the larger corridor again. My head was aching from the small space, and my limbs felt tight, and in that moment, I glimpsed the smallest of uncomfortableness that prisoners must go through, being confined to such a small space. It robbed me of my thoughts, my clarity, and I had to escape that cell to regain it. That’s the element of humanity, of thought, that I felt I momentarily lost my grasp on in that cell, and it's that struggle of defining the human experience and what it means to be a human that Gaines is having Grant teach the incarcerated Jefferson.

It’s odd walking through that jail cell, no longer in use, because it feels like history, a memory. If only that were the case. Andrew had reminded us in our seminar just that morning of Angola and the thousands of inmates there, the frightening statistics about the U.S. and how our proportion of prisoners far outweigh the population proportion we have compared to the world. It’s frustrating how slowly things move, how little progress we seem to have made in terms of racial equity, justice for wrongly incarcerated individuals, how far we’ve come and then how far we’ve yet to go to truly allow for equality and justice.

“The same people wore the same old clothes and sat in the same places. Next year it would be the same, and the year after that, the same again. Vivian said things were changing. But where were they changing?”

— Grant Wiggins, "A Lesson Before Dying"

I’d like to end my blogs here in Louisiana with a beautiful quote that Andrew quoted from Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun” that he ended my last seminar with. I think it’s fitting considering our course in literature and history in the South, and it builds on the experiences we have had to force us to realize the world we live in today.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

— William Faulkner

Thank you for taking this journey alongside me and my fellow bookpackers. I hope we have been able to share a little slice of Louisiana through these blogs, both the fun and exuberant and the melancholy and injustice that have shaped our trip here. Thank you Andrew, for such a wonderful and unique experience. It's been an honor journaling and blogging as we've bookpacked across this state, and I'm so grateful for this experience and being able to learn, live, laugh, and grow alongside so many friends and peers this past month. Thank you, to those who have kept up with these rambling blog posts, and farewell—for now.

Meaning in Mundanity

When I told others that I was going to Louisiana for the month of May, I got many shocked reactions and questions about why I was going to the South. New Orleans is in the South, but in my mind, a city known for its license and exuberant extravagance didn’t really match up with the redneck reputation of the deep South. However, as we walked through the “genteel” districts surrounding New Orleans such as the Marigny, the stomping grounds of Binx Bolling, our protagonist in Walker Percy’s classic novel “The Moviegoer”, I began to gain some clarity and truly see the values and ideas that built up the Old South.

Seminar in Audubon Park

Last week, we did this exercise during our seminar time in which Andrew asked us to come up with a list of descriptors that came to mind when we thought of the South. Answers were hesitant at first, but as we got rolling, we came up with a list of adjectives and phrases that played into both ideas, stereotypes, and descriptors of the Old South. Some were positive: “etiquette, poise, strong beliefs, Southern hospitality” while others more negative: “oppression, knowing your place, racism.” Looking at all of these, one thing struck out to me more clearly than ever before—one’s belief and value system was a key component of the idea of the South.

Part of Binx’s personal search for meaning in The Moviegoer included looking for the moral codes that other people in his life lived by, and trying to see how others use them to find meaning in their lives. Two of the ones exemplified most clearly in the novel are religion, explored through his mother’s strong Catholic faith, and the idea of Southern honor and dignity, which is exemplified in his Aunt Emily’s pressing for Binx to live life with a sense of duty and honor. Aunt Emily’s values are clear when she talks to Binx, urging him “I wanted to pass on to you…a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly… the only things that really matter in this life.” Binx seems to reject these all though, and seeks to find his own purpose through one of his favorite activities—movies, which act as a symbol of his search for meaning through others’ lives.

“More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women—the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life.”

— Aunt Emily

As the title of the book suggests, Binx enjoys going to the movies not only for the fun of it and to escape daily life, but also as a search to better understand his own life. Even though the film itself Binx is sometimes critical of, he instead goes to the movie as an experience, saying “before I see a movie it is necessary for me to learn something about the theater or the people who operate it to touch base before going inside.” As a moviegoer, Binx watches the scenes of his life go by, confused and searching for meaning, but he continually returns to the theaters, holding onto the experience of the people he interacts with, the character’s stories he is able to watch, seeking an individual experience at the theaters, which subverts the conformity that American cinema tends to promote.

“If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time.”

— Binx Bolling

As we discussed all these things under a grand old oak tree in Audubon Park in New Orleans, Andrew shared about how the book was deeply profound and beautiful for him, one man’s search for meaning and how at the end, he was able to be satisfied with the little things in life rather than the grandiose promises, riding off into the sunset ideas that movies tend to press. Similar to another book we read on this trip, many of my fellow bookpackers felt strongly about the ending, disliking the fact that Binx seemed to have settled for suburbia and married his cousin Kate after wild romps with his many secretaries, who he treats as substandard. Binx’s initial objectification of women highlights his lack of values and desire for pleasure. By the epilogue, though, Binx comes to the conclusion that “it is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way” instead of the “big search for happiness”. Binx is now caring for both Kate and his half-siblings as a family man of sorts, indicating that while he may no longer be searching for this idea of a grand purpose in life, he has found pleasure in the small things that give him a life worth living.

There wasn’t a grand attraction or trip that really exemplified and brought the reading of The Moviegoer to life during our trip in New Orleans. Whereas other books had very physical and tangible experiences, the neighborhood in which the Moviegoer is set is quiet, the experience not particularly noteworthy in any way. And yet, I think that is deeply representative of Binx’s epilogue and the story which Walker Percy sets out to tell. There’s not always a hero, a fascinating and dynamic character who undergoes a daring adventure—rather, Binx is meant to be representative of the common people, a man of the world who could be like any other man searching for meaning.

It’s rather profound, the soul searching and reflection this book ponders, uncovering and journeying along Binx’s search to understand what it means to search for purpose. While it isn’t about faith or about Southern ideals of honor and dignity that his mother and Aunt Emily, who are representative of two traditional Southern values, Binx comes to find purpose with the people he’s with, taking care of his wife Kate and his half-siblings. And it’s in those little actions, that Little Way, that he is able to find meaning in mundanity.

The Dunce and the Daiquiri

““Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?” Ignatius bellowed. “This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, antichrists, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, hades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protect by graft.””

— John Kennedy Toole

There’s a certain duality to New Orleans. No where else would you be able to find priests and nuns going to the cathedral for confession and mass on the same street as topless women and the “Trashy Diva Lingerie Boutique”. It’s a eccentric and colorful quirk of New Orleans that can be distilled into John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize winning comedy “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

You can’t really escape this book in New Orleans. It’s on bookshelves in every bookstore we’ve gone into, and even in the most tourist-y of gift shops in the French Quarter, our “protagonist” Ignatius Reiley’s bushy black mustache and green hunting cap with its large green earflaps stare back at me, the only book in a boutique full of jewelry and various bric-a-brac. I’ve had people come up and tell me how much they love the book as I’ve brought it to restaurants and cafés to prepare for this blog post, New Orleans natives sharing how the book like no other captures the true eccentricity and “soul” of New Orleans.

It’s ironic how the first night we arrived in New Orleans, we immediately were greeted by a bronze statue of Ignatius. We had no idea he was there, and many of us walked past him without a second glance. However, the tousled earflaps drew us in, and to our great delight, the statue of our protagonist Ignatius greeted us with caterpillar eyebrows and his impressive mustache. A literary Ignatius definitely would not have been pleased with our ragtag group of California tourists stopping and taking pictures with him, us probably lacking “taste and decency”, our outfits “casting doubts upon one’s soul”. Since he’s a statue though, he has no choice but to entertain us bookpackers delighted at finding a character in one of our books captured in bronze during our first night in the Big Easy.

Group photo op with Ignatius!

What’s been interesting to me is how strongly my classmates have expressed their dislike for Ignatius. From middle school English to our writing classes and AP courses in high school through the books we’ve read in our time at USC, we’ve been constantly reinforced with the idea that in every story, there’s this arc, character progression that leaves our protagonists changed from how we initially met them. Ignatius' frustrating selfishness, clumsiness, and inconsiderateness led me to initially be irritated, but as I read, the comedy of the novel started to make sense to me. It’s quite like Don Quixote, as Ignatius similarly goes from adventure to adventure like how Don Quixote tilted at windmills, letting out gas and bringing about the stench of old tea bags wherever Ignatius goes.

“I dust a bit. In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

— Ignatius Reilly

In my mind, I think of Curious George, Sherlock Holmes or Paddington the bear when I think of what type of character I’m looking at Ignatius through. They each have their charm: Curious George is always curious, Sherlock is consistently witty and brilliant, Paddington charming and clumsy, and now Ignatius’ lumbering, gassy, and blundering figure joins the rest. The fact that they are static characters going through different scenarios is what makes the story so exciting, charming, or in our case, funny. When I realized that Confederacy of Dunces was one of those types of books, I no longer read it critically for metaphors, themes, or various analytical purposes, but instead as how Toole intended it to be—a truly laugh-out-loud comedy, timeless and absurd.

As we walked the streets of Bourbon Street coming back from our ghost tour on my last night in New Orleans, I couldn’t help but think about what righteous outrage Ignatius would have toward the tourists drunkenly drinking daiquiris, the racy stores and bars, and the party atmosphere Bourbon Street embraces. It’s part of the whole comedy, seeing how licentious and exotic the atmosphere is and the contrast to Ignatius’ chivalric ideals.

One of many Daiquiri shops around Bourbon Street

The city of New Orleans has been a true experience of a lifetime. As we depart New Orleans for the state capital of Baton Rouge next, which Ignatius describes as the “heart of darkness, where the true wastelands begins”, I’m excited to put the parties behind and explore the city in which our next book, Lessons Before Dying, is set. I’ll remember how colorful and exciting New Orleans is though, and if I’m ever longing for a piece of the wild and riotous city, Confederacy of Dunces is there to remind me of the eccentricity and soul of the city.

A Language Called Jazz

Jazz is woven into the fabric of New Orleans. Its wild, soulful, vibrant, colorful tones fill the air as I walk through the streets of the French Quarter or as I’m in a restaurant eating spicy crawfish and gumbo. Its syncopated rhythm welcomed us on our first night in New Orleans on Bourbon Street, an informal group of street musicians filling the humid night air with their music.

These street musicians are the ones, the people on the ground and in the streets, where jazz is first born and comes to life. Having played both violin and piano for many years of my childhood, I know firsthand how difficult the style of jazz is. Whereas classical Baroque or Romantic era music follows simple patterns, rhythm, and style, the beauty and complexity of jazz is its wild and eccentric freedom, the refusal to be bound by convention and instead be pure emotion, syncopation, and improvisation coming from the artist. Jazz was always the most complex and most difficult to master of the many different styles, and yet for many, it seems to flow naturally out of their artistic selves.

Jazz statue in Louis Armstrong Park

Buddy Bolden, legendary cornet player, is one of these people. When people think of jazz and New Orleans, Louis Armstrong usually comes to mind. However, it was Bolden’s work as a pioneer in the field that paved the field for a young Armstrong, playing in the red-light district of Storyville, to hone and popularize the style of music Bolden performed. In our book for this period of our bookpacking experience, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Bolden’s story is displayed in a fragmented, syncopated form to mimic the style of jazz he brought to life.

“Though I knew Buddy’s blues before, and the hymns at funerals, but what he is playing now is real strange... He’s mixing them up. That is the first time I ever heard hymns and blues cooked up together.”

— Dude Botley, on Bolden's jazz

The story is presented in what seems as bursts of unrelated thoughts, highlighting not only Buddy’s unstable, fragmented mental state, but also as a nod to the rifts played in jazz music as scenes and descriptions of the story suddenly lurch into unpredictable new ideas. The improvisation is what makes jazz so unique, as the music can range from pain to sheer joy depending on the performer, a celebration or a mourning or even both at once. We see this in the book, how Bolden’s bursts of thought and streams of consciousness in the novel illustrate the highly evocative and emotional process that is jazz.

While we were able to hear this musical improvisation on the streets of New Orleans in the French Quarter, nowhere were we able to better see and experience jazz at its most celebratory and enthusiastic than at the Second Line Parade that Sunday afternoon featuring the Money Wasters Social Aid & Pleasure Club and the Dignified Achievable Men Social & Pleasure Club.. After having frantically run about searching for the Divine Ladies, we finally found another group—the Money Wasters, parading on St. Bernard Ave. and Claiborne Ave. Social clubs are rooted in tradition and necessity, many having been formed to help its members through illness and burial costs. During the “second line season”, there’s nearly always a social club parade to be found around Tréme or Central City each Sunday afternoon. After passing a small group of players and a few floats, we finally found the main attraction—with a large crowd of people, the second line, exuberantly dancing on sidewalks and in the streets to the music of a brass jazz band. As our class joined in, dancing, parading, soaking up the music, the sweat, the sheer joy and pure energy as we traveled down the streets of New Orleans in this one beautiful moment in time. Even as much as we stood out from the crowd that was there, we were welcomed with open arms and invited to join into the event that declared the vibrancy and refusal to be silenced that this community declares. There’s no way of capturing that moment as eloquently as I wish to be, as there’s no way to feel that palpable warmth and excitement that swept over me as we watched and paraded with people who just exuberantly celebrated life through music and dance.

There’s an interesting emphasis on the senses in Coming Through Slaughter. More so than any other type of music, jazz is heavily influenced by sensory emotions, it being a very rhythmic music that almost dares the listener not to sway or move as the music swings by on its bluesy path. I found myself in a trance listening to the music at Preservation Hall, where our class was able to listen to a group of extraordinary musicians play the trombone, piano, drums, sax, clarinet and cornet in a style that Andrew mentioned as being true to how the groups of Buddy’s time would have played. There’s a moment towards the end of the novel where Buddy is now in an insane asylum, where he would be kept until his death. While he’s there, he slowly stops speaking, instead going around touching things. As a violinist, I know how important touch is to the playing of the instrument—it’s the connection between the instrument and the brain, unconscious movements that draw the sound out of the body of the instrument into the world.

“He does nothing, nothing at all. Never speaks, goes around touching things.”

— Michael Ondaatje

Music is the soul of the city of New Orleans. It draws out every raw emotion and shares it generously for the world to see. It’s what connects one person to another in this human experience called life down here, a universal language we communicate in and through, an emotional experience, and it truly is such a blessing to be able to witness this all firsthand.

Time for a Great Death

We’ve been in New Orleans for a week! I’ve been really fortunate to really be able to drink in the rich experience of the exuberance of the city in this short time, from its beautiful colonial architecture and chaotic yet syncopated jazz to its spicy gumbos and decadent beignets. While visiting Bourbon Street the first night in New Orleans may have not been the best experience , being able to explore the French Quarter, the Business District, the Warehouse District, Faubourg Marigny, Tremé, Storyville, and the Garden District to get a picture of the incredible Catholic, Creole, African-American, Protestant, French, Spanish and Cajun influences that make this such a unique and beautiful city.

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However, as our class dug deeper into the history of New Orleans, I got to understand the complex and unjust history that built the foundation of such a vibrant city, which gave greater context and helped me to recognize the undertones of melancholy that runs under the joyous party-style atmosphere as Andrew had previously described. As we walked through the busy business district where slaves had been sold, there was no trace of the previous wrongs that had been committed. This was just one of many layers of the city that I have come to ponder as we uncover the complexities of the city.

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During our seminar on Saturday, Andrew posed a great philosophical question to our class that has been an altogether deliciously tricky one to ponder: what makes a good death? It may be something morbid to think about, but it’s something that I thought was fitting to grapple with as we read our book for the next leg of our journey, Anne Rice’s classic gothic horror novel Interview with a Vampire. In a city famed for its connection to the gothic supernatural, the novel aptly tackles themes of love, danger, culture, and the passage of time through the chilling confessions of Louis, a vampire from the tail-end of the 19th and the early 20th century who recounts his story and experiences as he wanders the lonely streets of New Orleans.

““This was New Orleans, a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire, richly dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after another might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures””

— Anne Rice

A Live Oak with Spanish Moss drooping off of its branches in the French Quarter, where Claudia loved to search for her victims.

“Years passed in this way. years and years and years.”

— Louis, in describing how Claudia grew up

The passage of time is something that is felt very poignantly in Rice’s novel, as the immortality of vampires such as Louis and his vampiric love, Claudia, plays a large role in how they interact with their environments over the course of this story. Louis, a wealthy former indigo plantation owner turned vampire in 1791, describes how his family built their wealth off of indigo and the exploitation of black slaves in the early period of Louisiana’s history. Claudia, a child he turns into a vampire who later becomes his lover, is described as “the demon child…moving toward womanhood, never to grow up”. As these immortal beings are stuck in the bodies of their former selves, they see people they once knew and the city and culture they come from change as they themselves are captured in that state of being for supposed eternity.

As I myself have spent two decades on this Earth, it would be a stretch to say that I have felt the passage of time keenly. However, I have seen how I have grown and changed both physically, emotionally, and as an individual over this time to reflect my lived experience, my knowledge and my sense of self. I’ve seen how places I’ve walked as a child change with time, old neighborhoods rusting away and new, shiny buildings rising to take their place. I’ve seen friends as they’ve grown old with me, met new friends and grown distant from others, seen family members come and go—it’s all just a small part of this experience we call life.

“Though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.”

— Walt Whitman, "I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing"

Now going back to the question of what makes a good death. With death, one must contemplate life, and what it means. Unlike the vampires of Rice’s novel, we will all die—in fact, I would hate to live forever like Louis and Claudia are cursed to, to be quite literally an adult in a child’s body. Instead, the goal is to be a part of or make something that will. So rather than what makes a good death, I instead choose to look at it from the opposite side of the same thread. While Andrew posed the question to us in terms of what makes a good death, I'm choosing to approach it from the perspective of what makes a great death, for what makes a great death is a great life. It's a subtle distinction, but when I look back on my life, I don't want to have deemed it just a perfunctory obligation to live, eat, breathe, sleep, exist in a vacuum, what could easily be defined as a "good" life. It’s not about the length of my life, but about the depth of it, as no one is going to remember me for the good grade I got in my accounting class, the extra hour I spent working. Instead, my legacy will be left in the people and relationships I had. My faith is something that is really important to me, and so I choose to live my life in the perspective that while my life on Earth may be short, what comes after is forever. A great death isn’t just about it being painless, or content, or even surrounded by loved ones, even though that would be nice to have. For me, it’s about knowing that I’ve lived a life worth living, and having accomplished what I’ve set out to do in my life.

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Because vampires in Rice’s novel have eternal lives, if anything, they fear death even more. Each responds to death in their own way—where Louis’ mentor Lestat chooses to laugh at death, Louis himself looks at death with a sincerity and somber attitude, elaborating in his interview that he “never laugh[ed] at death, no matter how often and regularly [he] was the cause of it.” It’s a grim and sobering response from a man who quite literally feeds off the blood of innocent victims to survive, an interesting parallel to his former life as a plantation owner metaphorically feeding off the blood of innocent enslaved individuals to build his life and his wealth.

Tomb of the Unknown Slave

As we’ve spent our time here in New Orleans, I’m in awe by how much the threads of death are woven into the very fabric of the city, as we’ve explored graveyards and tombs, and seen how voodoo influences the city, which in and of itself is tied with the supernatural and of the interplay between life and death. We’ve explored the plantations where enslaved people have literally lost their lives building the backbone of the exuberant wealth of the South at the time, and even stood in front of an unmarked grave commemorating the unknown who were discarded, their lives treated with so little respect they weren’t even buried with their names, their identity.

Yet it can also be a beautiful thing, as we paraded down the streets with the Moneywasters social club— we were supposed to go see the Divine Ladies, but they had apparently moved their parade up a week in commemoration of famed musician Ellis Marsalis, who had passed during COVID-19 but hadn’t had a proper sendoff until this past week because of the pandemic. While we weren’t there to experience it ourselves, from the social club’s gathering we were in, I was touched to see how family, fans, and friends would have come together to celebrate with music and color Marsalis’ life rather than simply mourn him. Death is a regular part of time as it moves ever so steadily forward, and so while the city of New Orleans will continue to be an exuberant force of celebration and excitement, it’ll also stand as a testament to the ones who were enslaved and gave their lives to fuel and bring prosperity to the sheer exuberance and decadence of the Big Easy.

Louis Armstrong Park Statue

An Awakening of the Self

Awakening: rousing from sleep, coming into awareness

What is an awakening? As I looked over the first book our bookpacking class would read together on Grand Isle, Louisiana, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, I knew that it wouldn’t be as simple as the surface level definitions the dictionary could give me. I got a surface-level answer from Google, but as our bookpacking class traveled to Grand Isle, Louisiana, I pondered what revelations the next few days on the island would bring to that word.

“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin

The island air, warm and heavy, enveloped me the moment I stepped foot onto the shores of Grand Isle. The incessant buzz of the insects, the gentle murmur of the water, and the gentle cry of the shorebirds invited a sense of lethargy that tempts even the most productive of souls into taking a cool, refreshing nap to escape the incessant heat of the midday afternoon. The pace of life felt slower here on the island, almost like I was trapped in time, in another era where the final exams and internship searches that seem to crowd every walking step in my studies as a business student at USC were but a dream.

““How many years have I slept?” she inquired. “The whole island seems changed. A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics.””

— Edna Pontellier

Rocking Chairs

Rocking Chairs with a oceanside view—perfect for a good afternoon read

Waterside

A sunset view of the water’s edge—where Edna learned to swim!

Grand Isle Landscape

The broken landscape of Grand Isle post-hurricane

Hammock

A colorful hammock for when the mid-afternoon nap calls

It’s in this dream-like location of Grand Isle where our protagonist Edna Pontellier, begins to establish her independence and define her role as a woman and an individual in 19th century Louisiana. The novel sets itself between two worlds, the busyness of the bustling city of New Orleans and the languid romance of Grand Isle. I’d previously read this book for my junior year English class in high school, but this time I felt ready to grasp Chopin’s nuances of exploring themes of repression, femininity, culture, and depression through Edna’s story while experiencing the same warm breeze and froth-tipped waves that she describes so vividly.

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“In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle...they were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.”

— Kate Chopin, "The Awakening"

One way in which Edna feels trapped is in her societal expectation to be this “mother-woman” figure which her friend and her literary foil, Adèle Ratignolle does so well. She fights this societal expectation to have a maternal instinct, declaring that while she’d give her life for her children, she wouldn’t give herself for them. While I’m not bound to the same social expectations that Edna is, within my identity, there are so many facets which bind me to social expectations in my background as a second-generation Asian-American, older brother, son, student and so many more. Although our paths are wildly different, I empathize with her struggle not fitting into the Creole society of the day and her role as a “mother-woman” figure. As a student, I’m constantly struggling with feelings of imposter syndrome, not feeling worthy of my place here at such a prestigious university. Even though logically I know I was chosen to attend this school for a reason, there’s still an emotional tension, a back-and-forth that invites a certain responsibility and necessity to act and perform up to a certain standard in my everyday life to “fit in” with the academic culture and the expectations of myself as an Asian-American student from my peers around me, filling my life with academic and extracurricular activities to be “competitive” for college, then for post-grad life, for the first job, and on and on.

2022 Maymester New Orleans Bookpackers Class Photo

Edna’s awakening from her past subdued self is stemmed from her lover Robert’s awakening of her repressed identity. She comes into awareness of her unhappiness in keeping with societal norms, from her Tuesday’s at home receiving calls to caring for her children and being a good wife to her husband Leonce, and casts it aside to do whatever she wants to do. When questioned by her husband about what possible activity could have led to Edna’s sudden departure from the house on her calling day, she replies simply, “Nothing. I simply felt like going out, and I went out.” This laissez-faire attitude toward her domestic responsibilities and following of her own desires and whims shows her newfound independence and refusal to adhere to social norms.

In many ways, this trip is a personal awakening to the importance of not filling my schedule packed to the brim with things to do as I see others around me compare how busy they are, as if it's a representation of their self worth. At college, I’m used to running about my day, a dozen or so meetings, classes, interviews, and lunches that I’ve got to attend. Here though, when we’ve inquired with our illustrious Lord Chater, also colloquially known as Andrew, what’s on the schedule for the day, he replies simply: “time to rest and read”. I’m used to taking an hour of rest here or there to refocus and recharge. But a twenty-two day excursion that is both somehow class and travel at once is foreign to me. My habitual instincts call out to me to be productive, to get things done and get ahead on work. The waves and the hammock beckon gently though, and I’m entranced by the sweet simplicity of living life laissez les bon temps rouler, or letting the good times roll. 

Laissez les bon temps rouler

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Laissez les bon temps rouler 〰️

What does living with the good times mean?

It means I’ll mull over ideas as I wander the lonely streets of Grand Isle with my peers, or as I’m eating my fried catfish po’boy (somehow everything in Louisiana happens to be fried?) at the Starfish Café. 

It means reading, toes in the sand that Chopin’s Edna’s children played on, or wading in the warm gulf waters breathing in the same salty air where Edna is first wooed by the voice of the ocean, and later returns at the end of the book, to take her final fateful swim. 

It means engaging in conversations around our wooden table about the origins of Creole Louisiana after eating a hearty portion of jambalaya from Joe Bob’s, an affectionately named gas and grill station on the island that is named after the store’s pet cat, or exploring the old tombs in the cemetery that hold the remains of residents of Grand Isle of over two centuries ago.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the other type of awakening to reality when we saw the destruction Hurricane Ida had left on the community of Grand Isle. As we arrived to the location where Andrew had previously brought bookpacking classes to take pictures, he lamented the destruction and loss of what had once been a vibrant thriving community that had been reduced to a broken debris of homes, bridges, buildings, and parks. It was an unpleasant awakening to the destruction this little community had suffered, but its resilience and dedication to rebuild was evident all over the island, as home-made signs and kind-hearted individuals proclaimed their love of the island and their determination to rebuild Grand Isle together. 

So what is an awakening? I’m still not quite sure, but I believe it’s a new beginning, a new start to what we’d once been asleep to. It’s a recognition of what’s new and a realization of our surroundings and behaviors that we’d previously been unaware of. I’m looking forward to continuing our bookpacking journey through Louisiana, awakening to a new culture, locale, and pace of life.