Reply With QuoteLol what? Spanish book? :p
Okay I'll check it out
I couldn't find a spanish book. I PMd you a link though that might help
Lol what? Spanish book? :p
Okay I'll check it out
My friend let me borrow it
My hatchling has wingsOriginally Posted by Bammeh
My friend let me borrow it
If he's a hater
is he a haterling?
@(you need an account to see links) I couldn't find the text for it, but I hope this helps... Looks like it would be a good read also
Part of the Group: “Brownies”
Subject and object, active and passive, observer and participant, knower and known -- these
reversible complementarities have structured the psychoanalytic relationship. (Benjamin xiv)
Jessica Benjamin’s statement about the psychoanalytic relationship also fits the patterns
of relationship in Packer’s story “Brownies.” Here, opposites produce a story that is rich in
tensions revolving around the issue of community. Laurel, the narrator, struggles with her place
in her Brownie troop. While she treasures her place within the small community, she questions
much of what goes on. In her relationships with the rest of the troop, she is both subject and
object. She is a member of the group who plots to attack another troop and she is also the object
of her own troop members’ jokes. She is both active and passive in her relationships. She
passively joins the activities of the group and goes along with their actions so she is not isolated
by the girls. She actively tries to separate from Octavia and Arnetta, the aggressive leaders of
the group, by trying to connect with Daphne, the troop’s most introspective member. Laurel
observes as Octavia and Arnetta rile the other girls to action against Troop 909, and she is forced
to participate in the nighttime excursion to ambush the opposing troop. Laurel is indeed both
subject and object, active and passive, observer and participant, as she struggles to find her way
among these competing positions.
Laurel narrates the story of her Brownie troop and their run-in with Troop 909 at an
overnight camping trip at Camp Crescendo. The story’s opening lines emphasize the sense of
community among the girls: “by our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie
troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909” (1). After just
Howe 15
two days at camp, Laurel’s Brownie troop has formed a solid and unwavering opinion about
Troop 909. Their sense of togetherness makes them all act in unison, agreeing to the proposed
attack. While two girls, Octavia and Arnetta, lead the pack, the rest of the girls follow suit
quickly and unquestioningly. Their connection with the rest of the troop is too important for
them to consider questioning their leaders.
Race is an important trope in this story, as in all of Packer’s stories. Troop 909 is a white
troop and Laurel’s troop is black. Racial difference and the experience of exclusion lie at the
heart of the girls’ insecurities and the tensions that ensue among them and with outsiders. The
girls in Laurel’s troop feel they need to protect themselves against Troop 909, even though they
have had no real indication that the white girls pose a threat. The girls of Laurel’s troop have
decided to “kick the asses” of Troop 909 because of Arnetta’s unconfirmed claim that “she’d
heard one of the Troop 909 girls call Daphne a nigger” (5). Daphne, the quiet and reserved girl
of the group, does not confirm or deny Arnetta’s claim about the name-calling by Troop 909.
She simply says nothing, isolating herself from the discussion in which she is the main subject,
and lets Arnetta and Octavia decide how they are going to handle the predicament. The other
girls never question Arnetta’s claims and agree the Troop 909 girls need to be taught a lesson.
Their total acquiescence in this decision speaks to their strong need to remain united in their
community. The girls have a compelling need to find strength in their own community and to
guard that community against all outsiders. The girls’ sense of community causes them to isolate
themselves from outsiders. Their sense of trust in one another, while superficial, allows them a
sense of security from outside threats.
Their lives at home reinforce this exclusivity as the girls are marginalized within their
home communities. The white world that exists just blocks away keeps them at a distance:
Howe 16
“when you lived in the south suburbs of Atlanta, it was easy to forget about whites” (5). Their
marginalized and segregated lives have taught them that to be a separate community is a good
thing; by being separate from the white world, which depicts some kind of perfection, they are
able to form their own tight-knit community. This racial separation also prompts the girls to
guard their community against any outside penetration.
When the girls are confronted with the presence of the white Troop 909 at Camp
Crescendo, they automatically view them as invaders. Even though the girls have no real
territory to claim at Camp Crescendo, they see it as their space and any white person who
appears is automatically an outsider (5). Part of the issue between the white girls and the black
girls is that, for Laurel’s troop, white girls are a rare sight. Even when they first come across the
Troop 909 girls, Laurel expresses a sense of wonder and her own distance from the white girls:
“We’d seen them, but from afar, never within their orbit enough to see whether their faces were
the way all white girls appeared on TV -- pony tailed and full of energy, bubbling over with love
and money” (7). Laurel expects these stereotypes to be confirmed once she and her friends get
physically closer to Troop 909. She is also expressing the sense of exclusion that her group
routinely experiences because of race. She and her friends are separated from others because
they are black:
everyone had been to Rich’s to go clothes shopping, everyone had seen white girls and
their mothers coo-cooing over dresses; everyone had gone to the downtown library and
seen white businessmen swish by importantly, wrists flexed in front of them to check the
time as though they would change from Clark Kent into Superman at any second. (5)
Clearly, Laurel and her friends have a media-based vision of white people and that imaginary
vision threatens them because it signifies what they think are unattainable goals. As a result,
Howe 17
Laurel’s troop bristles against the appearance of Troop 909 even before they actually meet.
Even though Laurel is a part of her troop and her race, she struggles to define her
individuality by separating herself from the troop. Daphne seems to have already accomplished
this so Laurel has a sense of reverence for her. Laurel desperately wants to connect to Daphne
because of her individuality and a poem she wrote that obtained a lot of praise: “I thought
Daphne and I might become friends, but I think she grew spooked by me whispering those lines
[from her poem] to her, begging her to tell me what they meant, and I soon understood that two
quiet people like us were better off alone” (7). Daphne isolates herself to maintain autonomy
and Laurel finds that perhaps she should do the same instead of relying on the rest of the troop
for her sense of self. Nevertheless, Laurel yearns for connection to someone who can offer her a
genuine relationship, something her relationships with the other girls lack.
Even though she yearns for individuality, Laurel needs to be included in the group and to
feel like part of the community. While her need for community prompts her to stay in the group,
she still asserts her independence. She shows her separation through her declaration that she
likes the Brownie songs the rest of the troop hates to sing. There is, however, one song that
Laurel dislikes as much as the other girls and that song goes, “Make new friends/But keep the oold,/
One is silver/And the other gold” (17-18). Laurel’s dislike for this song indicates her dislike
for her troop mates: “if most of the girls in the troop could be any type of metal, they’d be
bunched-up wads of tinfoil, maybe, or rusty iron nails you had to get tetanus shots for” (18).
Laurel obviously doesn’t like her troop mates but she remains in their company because of her
fear of isolation. Even though her need for individuality pushes her to show her difference from
her troop mates and she wholeheartedly disagrees with them on numerous points, her need for
community makes her continue her involvement.
Howe 18
The girls have formed unique signifiers of their closeness and of the importance of their
relationships. For example, their use of words that they can hardly understand, let alone spell,
speaks to their need for a common thread to tie them together: “trisyllabic words had gained a
sort of exoticism within our fourth-grade set at Woodrow Wilson Elementary” (3). Words such
as “Chihuahua,” “Caucasian,” and “asinine” are threaded into the girls’ conversations in an
attempt to separate themselves and establish their superiority over the rest of the school, and to
address their sense of separation from the white world. The girls instinctively look upon any
white person in the vicinity as an intruder. At their school, for instance, there is one white boy
and Laurel’s mention of him is less than welcoming: “Even the only white kid in our school,
Dennis, got in on the Caucasian act” (4). She expresses a lack of respect for Dennis and his
attempts to include himself in their community by using the special term her girlfriends coined
for use as an insult. The girls, then, react in an expected negative manner towards the group of
white Brownies who have invaded their space at camp.
When Laurel’s troop finally finds the opportunity to confront Troop 909 about the
alleged name-calling, Laurel does not want to join the group; she wants to stay with Daphne.
Arnetta, however, will not stand for this and tells Laurel, whose nickname is “Snot,” that she will
not let her stay behind: “No, Snot. If we get in trouble, you’re going to get in trouble with the
rest of us” (21). Laurel has no choice but to participate: either she isolates herself from the group
and risks losing her place in the community or she goes along with the plan and joins the rest of
the girls, reaffirming her inclusion. She chooses the latter. On the way to the bathroom, where
they plan on confronting Troop 909, Laurel finally feels connected to the rest of the girls: “Even
though I didn’t fight to fight, was afraid of fighting, I felt I was part of the rest of the troop; like I
was defending something” (22). Laurel, in this moment, feels as though she really is part of the
Howe 19
Brownie troop community. She feels she is defending not only Daphne but her whole
community by participating.
Inside the bathroom, Octavia and Arnetta confront Troop 909. Laurel’s friends quickly
see that the Troop 909 girls are mentally disabled and that they are a very tight-knit community.
The Troop 909 girls instinctively flock together to form a cohesive group that protects them
against attack. They have an understanding about the protection and support that community can
offer the individual. Laurel’s group is surprised by the apparent disability of Troop 909. Troop
909’s ability to stick together, however, speaks to Laurel’s group’s own dissatisfaction with the
interactions within their own group and they quickly abandon their plan.
On the way home from Camp Crescendo, Laurel and Daphne share a moment of genuine
connection: Daphne gives Laurel the journal she won for the poem Laurel admires so much.
This small but significant gesture shows a glimmer of the connection between Laurel and
Daphne. They both have found their individuality and struggle to maintain that individuality
while still being a part of the group. During this trip, Laurel has reconfirmed her place within the
troop community but has also separated herself from it through her interaction with Daphne. The
girls talk about the Troop 909 incident and realize that, even though they were at camp with
white girls, they were still very much isolated from the rest of society because the Troop 909
girls were mentally retarded. They recognize their own marginalization within society when
they discuss they way other people stare at them in public places. Arnetta says, “My mama and I
were in the mall in Buckhead, and this white lady just kept looking at us. I mean, like we were
foreign or something. Like we were from China” (28). The racial exclusion that each girl
encounters on an individual level strengthens their ties to each other. They all experience the
same prejudices and are bound together in their anger and pain.
Howe 20
Laurel conveys her own story in which her father asks a family of Mennonites to paint
the porch of their house. At first, the girls tell Laurel to keep quiet, but Daphne speaks for the
first time in the story and asks Laurel to continue. It is this story that brings Laurel to some
understanding about race and about her place in community. When the other girls ask Laurel
why her father asked the Mennonites to paint only the porch and not the whole house, Laurel
remembers that her father had said that, “it was the only time he’d have a white man on his knees
doing something for a black man for free” (30). Laurel recognizes that “there was something
mean in the world that I could not stop” and that racism permeates every person (31). Her
inclusion in the racial group to which she belongs will always exist, even though she knows
racial barriers are a societal construct.
Laurel understands her place in the troop more fully through the tensions between her,
the others in her troop, and outsiders. In discussing the psychoanalytic relational model, Barbara
Schapiro states that,
Conflict is always implied in relatedness. Ambivalence and conflictual passions
revolving around issues of autonomy and dependence are inevitable in any single
significant relationship; and conflict is equally unavoidable among the competing claims
of different significant relationships in one’s life. (Literature and the Relational Self 3)
Tensions are inevitable in relationship. Laurel yearns to connect to Daphne but Daphne is too
isolated and, therefore, there is tension for Laurel as she tries to define herself in relation to
others. Daphne, while part of the group because of the protective actions the rest of the girls
perform on her behalf, distances herself from the group. Both Daphne and Laurel need
individual autonomy; Laurel’s tension lies in trying to balance that individualism and being part
of the group. At the end of the story, Laurel has recognized her need for individuality through
Howe 21
her interactions with Daphne and has reaffirmed her need for community by remaining part of
the troop.
That's an "essay" on it. I got the book already, but thank you
---------- Post added at 01:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:38 PM ----------
wings = swag.
swagerling.
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