Causation
I broke a mirror, and then I lost my wallet. My dog ate the chocolate cake, and then he got sick. First one thing happened, and then another. But was the first thing that happened the cause of the second? If I do something, what will happen? If I forget to water my plants, what effect will that have on them? If I drink strong coffee all evening, what effect will that have on me? What effect will the closing of a factory have on a town where there is no other source of employment? What happened when U.S. car buyers started to buy more and more cars from Japan? What happened when one woman went home to Toronto after a stay in Hong Kong? Sometimes it seems that one cause has one effect and it stops there. More often we find that there is a chain reaction: one event causes something to happen, and that in turn causes something else to happen, and so on. For good or for bad, one event can start a whole series of events. Have you ever lined up dominoes and then knocked over the first one?
Assignment: Read the passage by Gloria Anzaldùa. Then, describe some childhood interest or talent that led to your current academic or professional goals. If you would like to read more about Gloria Anzaldùa, go to the website below her photo.
"Stories"
Gloria Anzaldùa from her book Borderlands/La Frontera
An essay by Gloria Anzaldùa describes how her Mexican heritage affects her writing. In this, the first part of the essay, Anzaldùa tells of her beginnings as a storyteller and writer.
"Out of poverty,
poetry;
out of suffering,
song."
–A
Mexican Saying
When I was seven, eight, nine, fifteen, sixteen years old, I would read in bed with a flashlight under the covers, hiding my self-imposed insomnia from my mother. I preferred the world of the imagination to the death of sleep. My sister, Hilda, who slept in the same bed with me, would threaten to tell my mother unless I told her a story.
I was familiar with cuentos–my grandmother told stories like the one about her getting on top of the roof while down below rabid coyotes were ravaging the place and wanting to get at her. My father told stories about a phantom giant dog that appeared out of nowhere and sped along the side of the pickup no matter how fast he was driving.
Nudge a Mexican and she or he will break out with a story. So, huddling under the covers, I made up stories for my sister night after night. After a while she wanted two stories per night. I learned to give her installments, building up the suspense with convoluted complications until the story climaxed several nights later. It must have been then that I decided to put stories on paper. It must have been then that working with images and writing became connected to night.
Reprinted in Changes: Readings for ESL Readers by Jean Withrow, Gay Brookes, and Martha Clark Cummings, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/ANZALDUAgloria.html