The Things You Learn

About what I´ve been doing with my spare time...

I currently have 3 classes: Latin American Poetry, Stylistics, and Modern Latin America. They luckily offer a wide variety of material and views.

Poetry, taught by the director of my program, is quirky and fun. He´s essentially has an english major´s often frightening love for the craft - except for that this is all in Spanish...or Castellano. Spanish isn´t an actual language. What we refer to as spanish is actually Castellano, one of the rouhgly 20 dialects that came out of Spain over 1500 years ago. We read and critique a different poet every week, while writing some of our own based on the style of the poets. It is intersting to interpret and learn about the wide backgrounds and mysticisms that build much of Latin American poetry and prose. And often times my teacher just goes overboard with stuff, leaving me as the unappreciative rational one in the class who just can´t understand where the hell he is coming up with some of his ideas. It makes it interesting!

Stylistics, not too surprisingly, looks at styles of writing. Because it is a major Latin American theme in all aspects of literature, we are concentrating on fantasy, or Los Cuentos Fantasticos. We are reading a variety of short stories, which are akin to some well-known artists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Frida Kahlo, Huidobro, etc. My teacher Marcella always keeps it interesting by taking field trips and having odd conversation topics.

Modern Latin America is probably my favorite class. Althuogh pretty much only a lecture, the information is astounding. We started with the Cuban Revolution of ´59 and have been moving forward since. Latin America really has some amazing history, lots of which cannot be understood in the US simply because the cultures are so different. Military coupes wouldn´t work in the US, but under-the-table coupes like with that of Nixon wouldn´t work very well down here. There are just different approaches to government, with almost all having heavy influences from largely different areas: US, France, Germany, Russia, etc.

Haunting
My professor was a political prisoner for 1.5 years during Allende´s rule. The different sections of military at the time were both very strong and opposed one another, and my professor was caught in the middle. Although he didn´t go into full details and said that he would more in the future, he was a bit of a child-genius (he was 16 and 17 while imprisoned) and for that reason he was under observation. He was tortured and spent most of his imprisoned time chained to a single chair. He was most scared when the torturing ended...he didn´t know what would come next. The torture itself he could take - testicles are bad he said, but the eyes are even worse.

To this day he still is in a court process against one of his captors - the man shot a girl in front of my professor. Living in an area (all of Latin America more than simply Chile) with a dark history of military coupes and disappearances, this has been an amazing and horrifying few weeks thus far learning from someone with first-hand experiences.