Blog Assignment #4 Toure What's inside you brother

         Toure explores his identity in his piece What's behind you brother in a style that is difficult to decipher yet allows for a broader picture of his struggle to be made. Most of the story is told in third person and it is portrayed as a character study of the writer himself, as it progresses it become more difficult to distinguish the real voice of the piece. It begins with a first person narration, studying the writer himself, it then suddenly turns into a second person perspective where the reader is now Toure. The scene at the gym implies to a greater racial connotation, "You speak to yourself in the most necessary black english in america, that of the humble assimilationist, and you move around the bag, trying to hypnotize your opponent, then lashing two, three rocket shots at him, and imagine yourself, like the brown bomber, lighting the world on fire, quietly". The fight with the bag implies toure's greater fight with his black identity, another line show this, "This is the body english of the back alley, the backroom, the back corner of the prison's back cell, where liston, serious criminal, mob enforcer, learned to box and became a straight-ahead, raw and rugged, black as blue, bruiser nigga. The grandson of Nat Turner, the grandfather of Mike Tyson. He attempts to identify as several black figures to reinforce his battle with his own blackness, it comes off in some ways as denial, as a battle he will never win.

Blog Assignment #3 Church on the Golodnaya Steppe

Across the Golodnaya Steppe

A symphony of bells scatter across the sky as the inhabitants make their way across the flatlands of the steppe. The horizon gives way to a couple of small points that are distinguishable from arrows on a barn, closer it becomes more apparent that those are actually Russian orthodox crosses. Since the rule of the Russian empire not much has changed, the farmers are left to farm and go to church, those points might actually be the only signal that they are living in a Russian controlled Kazakhstan. The bell tower from which the sounds originated stands no taller than eight meters. It is a makeshift structure made from wood and rope, there are actually a series of small bells that hang from top and the main big bell is hidden below in the middle of the tower. These bells are all strung together to make a indomitable sound that is meant to heard for miles. On Sunday the steppe people arrive at this unassuming church settlement and fill the small church which is also made of wood. From out the window they can see a stone cottage close by and the plains stretching endlessly and disappearing into an afternoon haze.   

blog assignment #2 Total Eclipse Annie Dillard

“The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord,” Joel 2:31

When Annie Dillard watches in horror as 'the sky snapped over the sun like a disk' she was not merely observing a rare astrological event but the coming of the apocalypse. The very fabric of space and time transmuted into something totally unfamiliar, it was something that even she could not describe without a level of psychosis setting in, "I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the middle ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the middle ages.". She repeats the phrase twice, rewording it as if trying to make it into something that will bring her back to reality but of course it is in vain. She does this again when describing the eclipse, "In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone", she struggles to comprehend something that would simply be described as a lifesaver and why is that? Why is an event that was well understood at the time such an enigma? Why does this fascinating yet simple occurrence prove to be such a traumatic experience? What does she gain from her primitive fear of the forces of a wrathful God that she couldn't get from just marveling at an awesome scientific event?

Non-creative fiction intro blog assignment #1

My name is Malik and i'm a writer. This is my first year at LaGuardia and i'm studying writing and literature. I write fiction and poetry at the moment and my intentions are to learn more and write more. I'm taking several creative writing class at the moment but this is my first time taking a non-fiction class. I'm a bit enthusiastic of getting involved with this class for i don't read much non-fiction works and bits i did read i never found interesting so i expect to be surprised by what i learn. I write mostly fiction short stories and try to write poetry that i enjoy.  
Creative nonfiction describes a form of nonfiction that allows for more freedom to search other styles of writing. Non-fiction like historical accounts, biographies and journalism, creative nonfiction takes more liberty on how those are written. It accounts for the imagination while also using true events which is the biggest difference between creative and typical non-fiction.