Life of a Slaved Girl to Her Car

I was born a slave, but I never really knew it until I was 8 years old. My young years were full of love from my parents and younger brother. My father always traveled all around the world teaching people how to do their jobs and my mother was always at home taking care of my brother and I. We were a very happy family until my father lost his job and we came to the U.S. to live from Europe. That was when he gave his hard earnings to the sale representative at the Volvo dealership, and we became enslaved to the 1995 Volvo 850. We moved to this country, where I couldn’t walk anywhere anymore; everything was far away and when I wanted to go anywhere I had to use the Volvo 850. After that moment, I realized for the first time, that I was enslaved to cars.

When I turned 16 years old, it was decided that I was going to be enslaved to my own vehicle, 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee. He had full possession of me, but I vowed to myself that I would never become fully dependent on him. For years to pass, the Jeep started to pollute my mind with ideas that caused myself to become fully dependent on him. I couldn’t go anywhere without him, not even to the grocery store 4 blocks from my house. I lost all my self-respect! Even though I was enslaved to this car, I felt so humiliated!

Finally I decided I was to be done being enslaved to a vehicle, and do something about it. I sold by the Jeep and moved to the urban city, never to come back to suburbia. I still live in fear at times, because I feel like one day it will find me, there is no way to feel completely free of these vehicles. I cannot breathe God’s fresh air without feeling some sort of anxiety in my heart, but I know it is worth it in the end.   

Meta-Commentary

I have decided to parody Harriet Ann Jacobs slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I tried to make it very apparent from just the title itself. It is mostly meant to be a parody about how attached and controlled we are with the use of cars in our country. It is a simile to how we are enslaved to cars just like slaves were to their owners, until they were able to gain freedom.

From the title I tried to mimic her work. I named my parody “Life of a Slave Girl to Her Car, because it is very straight forward and that is how her title is. I started my parody mimicking Jacob’s narrative because her tone from the start is very empowering and straight-forward. Her narrative starts out, “I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away”(Jacobs 11), while mine starts out saying, “I was born a slave but I never knew it till I was 8 years old”(Hafner). I did this on purpose because I wanted to mimic Jacob’s serious tone.

Another way I was trying to mimic Jacobs slave narrative was by getting my own “slave owner” which was the Jeep. Jacobs had become the property of Dr. Flint, as an individual, without her family. She wrote, “DR. FLINT, a physician in the neighborhood, had married the sister of my mistress, and I was now the property of their little daughter”(Jacobs 17) and eventually became his. I wanted to show the separation, which is a form of reaching adulthood for both her and I.   

I applied a couple different elements of what a slave narrative is from Donna Campbells’ website, “The Slave Narrative” to my parody. One of these elements is the, “showed acceptance of the ideas of the dominant white society”(Campbell). I tried to show how I started to accept the use of cars by saying, “the Jeep started to pollute my mind with ideas that caused myself to become fully dependent on him”(Hafner). It started to take over, and I was accepting the idea without really realizing it.

Another element I incorporated into my parody from Donna Campbell’s website is, “the fourth phrase is that of freedom obtained”(Campbell). A free slave always writes the slave narrative, hence the fourth and last phase Campbell explains about a slave narrative. I am referring to the last part of my parody in which I get set free from the use of cars, “Finally I decided I was to be done being enslaved to a vehicle”(Hafner). At the end, I was hoping to capture the feeling of being freed, but still having the thought of never being truly freed, like Harriet Jacobs does.     

Hopefully soon we will all be set free from the use of pollutant causing machines!

"The IPhone 4"

Once upon a late night party, while I danced and sipped Bacardi,

Called to friends with drinks in hand to join me on the dancefloor,

While I stumbled, nearly falling, but I was forever calling,

To my friends to share my fun, but as I danced my skills proved poor,

Thinking I could handle more, while never knowing what’s in store,

For me and my precious iPhone 4.

Oh so blankly I recall the ungracefulness of what was my fall,

And as it flew out of my grasp my heartfelt cries did I outpour,

After I made that careless fumble, On my knees I crawled and tumbled,

Under foot I saw it crumble, crumble and tears began to pour,

For my cherished paramour, and I now knew there was no more,

For my IPhone 4 shall ring no more.

Meta-Commentary

I decided to parody Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Raven.” I first decided to look at the meaning and the theme of the poem. My interpretation of Poe’s poem is about how he is waiting for the love of his life, and she never arrives; being told that by the raven that keeps knocking on his door. One of the pages we were referred to in class says, “Poe’s writings are more the result of his imagination than his personality”(“Edgar Allan Poe’s Problematic Biography). Since his ideas were more based off imagination, I did the same, by calling the love of my life, my IPhone 4. Based on our society now, it could pretty well be; some people are so attached to their phone devices as if it was their love of their life.

When writing this poem I followed the rhyming scheme that Poe had which is ABCBBB. The last word of the first and third lines do not have a rhyming couplets with other ending words within the stanza of the poem, while the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth lines all rhymed. For example, Poe wrote, “’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door/Only this, and nothing more.’”(ll. 5-6). He rhymed the word door with more. I followed this same pattern in my poem writing, “Thinking I could handle more, while never knowing what’s in store/For me and my precious iPhone 4”(ll. 5-6). I rhymed the word store with IPhone 4.

Also throughout his poem, it seems to be his style that the second line within the stanzas doesn’t seem to follow any specific rhythmic pattern, while the other lines contained rhyming words that help the reader flow through the line. I also decided to follow this pattern when writing my parody of “The Raven” hoping to catch this same literary style in the poem, “The IPhone 4.”

As I was examining Poe’s poem, some gothic characteristics popped out at me. One in particular that I found was on the webpage we were directed to, “The Norton of Anthology of English Literature.” There it is said that one characteristic of the gothic style, “came to designate…the terrifying”(The Gothic: Overview). You see this in “The Raven” from the beginning. Poe sets the setting writing, “Once upon a midnight dreary”(l. 1). He starts out by setting the scene as a dark night; making you realize something terrifying is bound to happen. I tried to do the same thing by setting the scene with alcohol and friends, knowing that something terrifying is going to happen to my IPhone 4 with all of that around. I tried to mimic his gothic style with a different twist; trying to make fun of our society and how attached we are to our cellphones, that it is terrifying when you think of your cell phone being surrounded by liquids.