Speaking about a home
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In my opinion, MC Solaar presents himself as someone who has no choice but to persevere in his survival methods so that he can live a decent life. He uses the rebelliousness of the hip-hop sound so that more people can put themselves in his shoes, as rapping often entails telling a story. Having a beat to it can make it appear less serious than it is, avoiding "full vulnerability" about a life that was not so easy for him and his family. Though many aspects from his song, I was unclear about due to the language barriers, what I did find clear was the importance he felt in sharing his voice with the world. Especially, when he mentions
"Puis trip en Égypte, École française du Caire. Pour parfaire mon flow et mon vocabulaire" because he used school not necessarily just to follow the probable state's regulation of having to be in school, but used it also as an opportunity to learn how to give more "flow" to his voice as his music is important is for his future.Baldwin
His writing on a life of difficulties including alienation, racist remarks, and poverty points to his invitations of love into his life to cope. Through being open to love, he learned how to "deal" with himself (p.1). The color of skin in this text proves that it does fully capture who someone is as it is merely a "cover" (p. 2) of the realness of a human being. It is through looking past the labels that colors are associated with that there is true comfort as he says "you have a home- your lover's arms" (p.2).
He characterizes French attitudes towards Algerians as the miserables of the country as they are treated like dirt and seen as filthy and lazy. In any human experience, if one is treated as such persistently, it is bound to bring feelings of miserableness as humanness is not recognized by others. The treatment by the police reflected the continuous colonial power they once had full control of (in Algeria). He also noticed that they too have a longing for a place to call home, however, Algeria was their home and to Baldwin when he reflected on his own he thought that he had no real "home". So as we saw in class, the definition of melancholia here is apparent as he felt feelings of returning to something that is not concrete as a lot of history around Black Americans has been stripped away from a singular origin.
Mandin
In Mandin's writing, it seems that one of the main interviewees who moved to Montreal was to be invisible, and I totally understand this sentiment. In Europe, they felt "hyper visible" due to different ethnic and religious markers, which led to different and even bad treatment by others. They had hope of blending in with Montrealers, where the entirety of their different sets of identities was acknowledged and not just one that was associated with negative outlooks. I resonated with this piece as it emphasized how important it is to feel irrelevant for our mental health's sake sometimes because too many eyes on us for the wrong reasons creates tensions between ourselves and the outside world, where we feel like we have no space in it. Speaking from a personal perspective, this leads to an emergence of negative melancholic feelings coming up in random places in public, as it brings up feelings of never belonging anywhere despite being born and raised in the same place.