We Travel the Spaceways Reflection

Jasper Martin 

Dr Ellis 

EN 376 

November 6, 2023 

    The short story "We Travel the Spaceways" has a lot of hidden meaning behind a lot of the things one may just take for granted in the story, so there is a lot to unpack here. First, examine how LaVelle reflects on how things we see as major issues in our society today still exist in the future. People still live homeless and mass poverty still seems to be a major issue in the future New York City. This is such a major point of relevance to the underlying meaning behind the story because we think today that we will eventually find a way to eliminate mass poverty and get the homeless people off the streets, and this future shows us that we may not be able to find an answer that easily. It also represents the path we are on right now as a society that does not take tradeoffs if it means less money flowing in. It shows how homelessness, along with many other global problems, will not simply go away in time if we as a society do not learn to make the necessary sacrifices. Another major theme found within the story is something meant to resonate with people of major urban areas like New York City, and that is the feeling of using your intuition and gut instincts. Many people who have lived in urban environments will understand this feeling well, because many people rely on just intuition to make their decisions, and it often is correct. It is also something reaffirming in our decision making, because people often get a gut feeling when choosing one thing over another, and when what your intuition told you to chose is correct, it reaffirms what you have been thinking, which is a similar situation to what we see occur with Grimace and Kim when their continued success in what they are doing reaffirms their beliefs that are based solely on intuition. This is especially true for Grimace, who is vandalizing things for what he thinks are the gods sending him messages through bottles, which he, through intuition alone believes and because he has not been caught/arrested yet, he continues to believe in.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LaGuardia Reflection

The aspect of this graphic novel that stood out to me the most was the visualization of the future. This is probably fairly obvious as most of our work this semester has been traditional written word, but seeing the future before my eyes was very beneficial. I have not read a lot of science fiction, so visualizing the futures of these stories has always been very difficult for me. Most of the futures I have imagined and the ways that I pictured our class’s texts is one centered around silver and metal. There was always something cold and distant about the future. This totally contrasts Okorafor’s vision of the future and I love that. It brought me such joy to see a future where the world is so bright and colorful. I also love, especially given our current environmental situation, to see how central plants are. Although they are as alien as they are plants, it still provides a lot of hope for the planet. I also thought the use of aliens in the novel and their parallel to immigration in ...
Read more

Pet Second Half

  The aspect of the second half of Pet that stood out to me the most was how performance was used as a metaphor for Jam’s guilt about hiding Pet. One of the earlier examples in this section was when Jam was eating breakfast with her family. Her parents are concerned more than anything else, but Jam still feels the weight of their watchful eye because she is anxious about Pet’s hiding.“Pet was a loud secret in her, a wrong note in the usual harmony of her house, making it discordant, guilty” (Emezi 103). Of all the metaphors, it is fascinating that Emezi chose to focus on music, specifically its creation. By portraying that the happiness in her house is something that Jam feels she must actively perform to achieve, Emezi is showcasing the roots of Jam’s anxieties in a really interesting way. A similar situation happens when Redemption is over for dinner. While they are eating, Jam notices the metaphorical mask of casualness that Redemption has put on to avoid suspicion, and once ag...
Read more

LaValle

     The aspect of “We Travel The Spaceways” that was the most interesting to me was how LaValle worked bits of our modern society into his version of the future. The most obvious example of this is the name Grimace. I love that no matter how much the world around will change, there is always a guarantee of McDonald’s. While it brings a smile at first, it is moments like these that make the reader realize how little the future might change if we do not do the work to make it different. The story opens with Grimace’s distaste for that name compared to the other McDonald’s mascots and uses it as the set up for Grimace’s situation as a homeless black man. “I do not like that nickname… If I make a fuss about it, the local store owners would just call the police; between them and me, it’s easy to guess who’d get handcuffed” (LaValle 3). He starts with something familiar, McDonald’s, so that the presence of something even more deeply rooted in our society, racism, has a bigger ...
Read more