Imperial Dietetics on Ivu'ivu

Hey! This article talked about Pacific Islanders!  That’s really exciting.  Okay, moment over.

It would be very easy to pair up sections of Tompkins's article with The People in the Trees, as she addresses many themes also central to this text:  imperialism, eating, bodies, sex, assimilation, exoticism, and many more.  For instance, one of the perplexing aspects of the experiences of protagonist, Dr. Perina, on the island is the conflict between his relationship with food compared with that of the natives.  Every item of consumption is foreign, if not exotic:  Spam, manama fruit (a fictional breadfruit type-thing that grows on a tree with scales), vuakas (a small monkey the islanders eat as delicacies), and, of course, the opa’ivu’eke (the magical turtle consumed when one reaches age 60 and subsequently achieves immortality). Furthermore, Dr. Perina’s encounters with the Ivu’ivans becomes sexually charged after his discovery of a pederastic initiation ritual.  While the island itself is not colonized, the neocolonial forces of global capitalism deplete the island of its every food source and then the bodies of its natives, and finally, Dr. Perina adopts dozens of the Ivu’ivuan children for what first appears to be for their education and assimilation, but end up victims of his sexual appetite, bringing full-circle Yanagihara’s allegory of imperialism.  

Since there are so many avenues to explore in this pairing, I might use this text as a way to challenge the students to develop the skills that they will need for essay writing, specifically in integrating a secondary source for their end of term research paper.  This assignment is, of course, for the same course (ENL 180, Univ. of California) for which they read my award-winning Norton Anthology last week (yes, future-me definitely won awards for that masterpiece).  In the class, I would then try an exercise in which they use their collective close reading skills to practice writing strong analytical paragraphs for their essays.

Here’s how it might work:  I’ll put a series of quotations from the primary text up on large sticky-note paper around the room, say 6-8 quotations for a 20-ish person class.  Then, after having read the Tompkins article, they can pair a quote from the secondary source that they feel can either support, complicate, expand, etc, the primary source quotation, and then with their classmates who also like that particular quote, work on crafting an analytical paragraph  on the large sticky-note using close readings and interpretation.  After the groups have written their paragraphs, we all walk around looking at the sticky-notes in a "gallery walk," marveling at their wonderful work.  For example, they might see this quote:

“She took the slippery bits of Spam from our palms, sometimes with her mouth (her puckering lips, wet and vaguely vaginal, kissed against me) and sometimes with the flat of her hand; she seemed not to use her fingers--and waited until she fell asleep flat on her back, all of us watching her by Tallent’s flashlight” (99).

And pair it with this one:

“In Graham’s story from the 1830s food and sex emerge as central themes in a premonitory fantasy  of imperial expansion.  Here commodity consumption and the desire for land serve as a catalytic desires for interactions across national, regional, and ethnic differences [...] Absorbing these alien others and “Americanizing them” is  a constant preoccupation in a nation that is both militarily aggressive and open to successive waves of immigration.”

And maybe they could talk about imperialism, or food, or the sexualization of the “foreign” body, or consumption of that body, or maybe her mouth...maybe they could talk about how her mouth is a vagina.  Maybe.