From the song:Lookin' For Love (In All the Wrong Places) "When I was alone then, no love in sight
And I did everything I could to get me through the night Don't know where it started or where it might end I turn to a stranger, just like a friend."
Angie (my character choice), was looking, she was looking for something, and, she was looking in all the wrong places. "Early one morning when Carla was still a child & Jamal was just a baby, Angie had taken them with her to the bank. On the way Angie played a game. . . the rules shifted at every turn. . . today she needed a sign. A simple sign would have done it. . . If the baby didn't cry,. . . if,if,if. . . when she arrived at the apartment building, all of her ifs had run out."
"Derek hadn't pushed Angie over the balcony, but he might as well have." My blog, my final English 180 blog, is about Dionne Brand's Angie from What We All Long For. Angie, the mother, through the eyes, mind, and heart of Carla --Carla Chiarelli, now twenty-three. "When Carla was four, Angie had taught her the address(782 Wellesley Street, apartment 2116. Toronto M6H 5E7. Phone number 962-8741 (when the bill was paid). And her last name --Chiarelli. And, its the story of a litle girl, five years old, the memories of those few years of living, and the inherent residue of the next eighteen. Derek was Carla's father, also the father of Jamal her baby brother. Derek was not the husband of mother Angie. But, the husband of Nadine, who became step-mother to Carla and Jamal.
Carla held Angie's memory close to her heart. The very core of her being was the unrequited love for her mother. "She hated her father because she loved Angie, she loved Jamal because she loved Angie, she was a bicycle courier because she loved Angie. . . " It was an all-consuming passion. Carla's life was devoid of possessions - of clutter. "Carla needed a clear, empty path to Angie as a living being."
They, Carla, baby Jamal, and mother Angie got back home from the bank. With all of her "ifs" run out, Angie kindly and calmly settled Carla with a pencil for her drawing, picked up baby Jamal and hauled a chair to the balcony -- stood on the chair and suddenly remembered, calling to Carla --"Come here, hurry and take the baby. Hold tight, dear and go inside. . . stay there until Mummy comes. Mummy has something to do. . . " Angie waited until Carla had gone into the apartment, then she sepped off the balcony." "Carla sat on the sofa with him in case he woke up. Angie was taking so long."
Angie's step from the balcony was the end of her longing and the beginning for her children.

Quy's story really stood out to me as i read this novel because it was set in such harsh conditions that i have never fathomed being forced into. the tragedy of being blindly separated form your parents while trying to flee your country at such a young age seems so incomprehensible. when Quy is first lost at Pulau Bidong he is entirely alone and mistreated. he sits and waits for his mother and father to come find him and at this point all he longs for is to be with his family again. he "ran to be photographed each time some new reporter or refugee official prrived. Perhaps [he] hoped [his] father or mother or [his] frightened sister would find [him]. how did the pictures turn out? [did his family] recognize [him]? [He's] the one who is smiling brilliantly less and less and then giving up on that more and more" (9). soon Quy gives up on this longing and accepts the refugee camp as his new home.
the most heart aspect to Quys character is that he never sees the things that happen to him as unfair as he is growing up. he says things such as "other tragedies have overshadowed mine" and "my life at Pulau Bidong wasn't always unpleasant" even amongst all of the pain he is exposed to throughout his childhood. he doesn't see his life as being any worse then it was supposed to be and never holds onto things from the past. he begins to leave behind his longing for his family and begins instead to long for identity. during his time spent with the monk he is just living but nothing he does feels like him. i noticed that even in the way it is written. the little bits of hope are gone from his voice. nothing seems to seem immoral or anything but everyday life. death, rape and stealing are all just parts of his life. in the end though he is finally reunited with his family as a man. his sister Tuyen is very uncomfortable with the reunion but knows that it is what her parents always longed for. i loved how every aspect of this book was connected.

In Dione Brand's, What we All Long for we are introduced to numerous characters, all struggling with certain aspects of their lives. In Carla's instance, her relationship to her brother is rather troubling. At the start of the novel, Carla feels a great deal of anger towards Jamal, not able to comprehend why he is always convinced that he is so innocent, and why he is foolish. We also learn that Carla's mother died when she was younger, and as she grows older, she struggles to maintain that memory of her mother in her head. Carla states, "There was no signs of Angie's presence, no old wardrobe, old door buzzer, old dress." (110) As Carla continues to speak of the memory of her mother, we learn that everything she does is reflective of her relationship with her mother. "She loved Jamal because she loved Angie, she loved her friends because she loved Angie..." Although Carla wants to remember her mother, she is frustrated by the lack of material items to remember her by. As the story continues though, memories of Angie arise, permeating Carla's memory of Angie. "A surge of memory about her days in this house came over her." (248) Carla's relationship with Jamal also changes as the book progresses.It seems that she is finally recognizing, or trying to recognize her emotions regarding Jamal. Carla recognizes that Jamal needs him, for support, friendship, and faith. She remembers when he is born, becoming nostalgic.While she loves Jamal completely, Carla also struggles to accept the challenge of dealing with the memory of her mother and struggles of Jamal. She becomes exhausted, yet through these memories, and through this reflection, Carla finally understands why Jamal needs her so much, and why he acts the way that he does.

Jamal longs to live the thug life at the beginning of the novel when he is talking to Carla at the detention facility. They are seperated by the plexiglass and Jamal is speaking in a manner to suggect that he is from the streets to impress and intimidate his fellow inmates. On page 30 Jamal "...pulled the neck of his grey issue aside, showing her a rough, ugly branded G on his breast under his left shoulder blade." I'm assuming Jamal got the G, to show that he is a gangster and once again to impress his prison peers.
Carla's reaction supports this, "The brother trying to be someone she did not recognize... He did it to assume badness" (30).
When Jamal decides to get back into the thuglife at the end when he could have walked away from it he goes to get his friend Bashir, who says, "Fuck, this is a sweet ride... You're living very large, J-man" (315)
This is the type of praise Jamal wants and he goes back to carjacking, this time he carjacks Quy. Jamal, "Practiced two or three times in his head, Get out, motherfucker, as he's heard in the movies" (317).
Jamal wants to be the hyperreal black man glamorized in the movies, the man who breaks the law and lives the thug life and he succeeds in doing so.

and he seems to still be doing it at the end.

Carla longs for a cohesive family wherein her mother, Angie, is still alive and her father, Derek, is the loving, caring, and selfless man that he is not within the book. Carla's enmity toward her father (whom she calls by his first name as if he were a sibling) is best exemplified when Carla goes to visit Derek and Nadine at their house to ask her father about helping bail Jamal out of jail. Derek responds that he has done everything he could to help Jamal in his situation, but the problem no longer lies within his sphere of responsibility. Carla erupts into a rage at hearing these words from her father. When Derek asks her why she came to the house, she responds,

"Because I was hoping I was wrong about you. I was hoping that you were human, you fucking jerk" (254).

Carla was hoping that Derek would help his son in his situation, but she most likely knew that he would not. Once the reality and futility of the situation sets in, Carla feels such an intense animosity toward Derek that she attacks him physically by slapping and kicking him. This is the only outlet she has for her anger.

Derek reasons that she cannot talk or act like that toward her father and Carla asks,

"What the fuck does that mean, Derek? What the fuck does that mean? It means nothing to me, it means nothing to my brother, and it meant nothing to my mother. You made her walk off the edge of a building, it so didn't mean anything" (254).

The word "father" rings hollow to Carla. As far as she is concerned, she has no father or mother. In her situation she feels like an estranged orphan with no one to turn to for emotional support except her friends. Nadine and Derek do not truly understand her although Nadine does make a supreme effort and Carla does credit her for that.
Carla essentially longs for what she lacks- a family to love and care for one another throughout the trying times of life in urban Canada.

Dionne Brand’s novel does a very good job of providing perspective. While Eden Robinson brings readers a perspective from native culture, Brand brings perspective from refugee culture. Refugee culture is something that 1st world citizens don’t like to acknowledge as difficult or painful; being torn away from your home, family, and everything you have known is hard, and it is truly amazing how people do it.

The character Quy in this novel is a character that demonstrates refugee strength. When Quy is separated from his family he encounters harsh mistreatment and loneliness. What he immediately longs for after his arrival at Pulau Bidong is his family. He is separated from them and desperately desires their company. However, Quy is unable to locate his family and eventually turns to the realization that he is alone, and living in a refugee camp.

Yet, with being forced from his home, being separated from his family, and moving to a harsh environment, Quy is fairly optimistic about his surroundings. At one point he discusses that there are other things going on in the world that are worse than what is happening in his own life. This is the remarkable attitude that many refugees that I have encountered have had. Even here is Burlington, the Bosnian refugees are so grateful to have a new beginning that many of them are indifferent about living in poor neighborhoods or having to work several low paying jobs.

Of course, I don’t completely buy this, nor do I completely buy this attitude in Quy. I think that after awhile his optimism wears low and then he has a new longing; a longing to belong. Quy is eventually reunited with his family, but his experience without them I believe are much more defining.

I was really touched by Tuyen's character in this book. Her struggle with her culture, her place in society and her love for Carla seemed so overwhelming at times. I feel that what Tuyen really longed for was a place, a position where she could be herself, what she wants to be in society and in the world. Tuyen is always pushing away from her parents Vietnamese culture, however, her artwork really leans towards this world, its almost a crutch or a bridge that she is creating. It is her way to hold onto her parents world. It was interesting to have some insight into her parents world and see how strongly they long for their old culture, as well as how much they long for Quy. The psychological affects of this tragedy were remarkable, the covering of all the furniture with plastic, keeping every possible document. This is such a contrast to Tuyen, she is pushing away from her culture where her parents are trying to preserve it was it was, fearing that they may lose themselves, their identities that they already have.

Tuyen is surrounded by family and friends who are all searching for 'something.' However, it appears that all that others seem to long does not involve her. As Tuyen reaches adulthood, she is curious about what could have been. Growing up with parents who are extremely dependant on her, she was forced to grow up quickly. Without parents who could teach and model the ways of an American life, she was obligated to figure this out alone through her experiences. Furthermore, she had to serve as the "paraphrast" (p. 67) for her parents, which in turn put an immense amount of pressure on this young, confused girl.

This character explores the dilemnas that are faced by first generation children. In such cases as these, parents often need their children in a way that eliminates the childish ages for a young one. As we discussed in class, Tuyen's art could possibly serve as a concrete representation of what she is truly longing for. Often artists are extremely experimentational. Their emotions are reflected in their works which often leave them defined as 'open-books.' However, Tuyen, an installation artist, makes pieces that are mysterious and hidden in themselves. The cylinder that she makes on page 307 needs to be dissected and explored in order to be truly understood. This could possibly be concurrent to the way Tuyen feels about herself.

A great end to the semester!

After finishing What We All Long For, Brand's protagonist Tuyen still stands out the most for me. Tuyen's already complex personality coupled with young adolescence revealed both a sad and somewhat desperate existence: Tuyen is frustrated with her family dynamics and in love with her best friend, Carla. The following quote from page 67 looks at Tuyen's family life: “Cam and Tuan expected much from them. As if assuming a new blood had entered their veins; as if their umbilical cords were also attached to this mothering city, and this made Binh and Tuyen not Vietnamese but that desired ineffable nationality: Western. For Tuan and Cam, the children were their interpreters, their annotators and paraphrasts, across the confusion of their new life.” This quote is the most succinct description Brand provides about the relationship she intends to present between the children, Tuyen and Binh, with their parents, Cam and Tuan.

A separate description, about Tuyen's art supplies on page 11, reveals her unconventional but still Western lifestyle having moved from her parents' (and Binh's) suburban home: “the clutter of wood, canvasses, paper, and the general debris that Tuyen considered to be the materials of her art.” Tuyen's studio apartment, as disorganized as the collection of art supplies in it, reveals the balance she manages to maintain throughout the novel-- internalizing her true feelings for Carla while maintaining as much maturity as she can in the relationship with her family.

Like Robinson's Monkey Beach, Brand's What We All Long For is an illustration of a family living in a setting that starkly contrasts with their traditional/ethnic values. Both Brand and Robinson present realistic depictions of difficult family life in rural and urban Canada.

Every single character in What We All Long For is, in some way, incomplete, right down to the auxiliary ones. It seems that the longing of Tuyen, Carla, Oku, and Jackie have all been discussed at length. Tuyen’s brother, Binh, has yet to be discussed in any detail, and he seems one of the most obviously desirous characters here. Binh is Tuyen’s not-much-older brother. He and Tuyen were both born in the states, and to me they represent two of the principals on which Western culture is founded: capitalism (Binh) and freedom of expression (Tuyen.) While cultural ideals would have these two qualities merge, the two siblings are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Binh is the first and only boy to be born after the precious lost brother, Quy. He longs to fill that void for his parents. When he realizes that he won’t be able to do it by BEING enough for them, he sets off on the journey to bring back the brother that will fill that void, and then he, in turn, will be favored for bringing him back. Binh also longs for “rawness of emotion,” to be loved by his parents in a non-obligatory, emotional way. The word rawness here indicates a certain degree of pain or masochism, that he wants to be loved until it hurts.
While important, I think that the individual longings of each character are less crucial on their own than they are as a collective. The title asks us to consider the “we.” It’s what WE all long for, not what Tuyen longs for, not what Carla longs for. For this reason, the opening chapter of the book is about the city of Toronto, not one character. There is no supreme longing here, no particular desire that reigns supreme. If Brand had opened the story with Tuyen, we’d consider her longing to be the most important. I think that each of the character’s longing has to do with completion. Desire implies incompletion. However, desire humanizes: to be free of it would make one akin to the divine. There’s no such thing as a human without longing, no such thing as a complete soul. There’d be no reason to live without longing, without something to reach for, to push you into the next day. The point of longing is not the desired, it’s the longing itself.

I think that as complex as weaving the stories of several characters into one another is, Dionne Brand's individual characters are even more complex. Each of them long for so many different things, from Oku's longing for Jackie to his longing for his father's approval, to Tuyen's longing for Carla to her longing for her own life, outside of her parent's. No character only longs for one thing in this novel. One of the most interesting longings, I guess you could say, in my opinion was Carla's longings towards her family. Carla wants nothing more than the protect her younger brother, Jamal, but at the same time she longs to be free of the responsibility of caring for him, of setting him straight. I think that by the end of the book at least some of her longing is fulfilled. Jamal obviously isn't set on the right path, and she still feels uneasy about his situation and her father's help. But, she doesn't feel an unbreakable, one-sided link between herself and him anymore. She isn't free of him, "she didn't want to be -- she only wanted to be free of his pain. And of her protectiveness of him." I think that what she gained at the end of the novel is her freedom to not be selfless and have her own life outside of her family's problems -- "she can go back to the apartment and live her life." She does not have to put Jamal above everything. He doesn't need to completely depend on her anymore. She is able to be emotionally independent of her family.

I found the book to be difficult to like just because it was obviously a character driven book while still trying to poke at the larger issues of identity and construction of identity in a melting-pot kind of setting. Dionne Brand did a wonderful job at portraying a multicultural Canada, but some of the characters feel underdeveloped in their purpose and some characters seem overwhelmingly OVER-developed, which can be disregarding to the fact that Brand is trying to represent a complex meaning through her characters. I believe this to be the reason why the ending needed work, because she was trying to wrap up the characters so much that it felt like she didn’t leave room to really bring it all home with the plot.
In any case, I found Quy character to be most interesting. He was lost in Vietnam by Tuyen’s parents and, had to survive through camps and shady back streets of Thai society with a name that means “precious”. Basically, Quy is having to constantly reinvent himself throughout the novel to survive in the place where he happens to be at the time. It is clear that Quy longs for a place to fit it, call his own, to feel less like an outsider. On page 74 in the novel, the reader catches wind of Quy’s feelings of constantly being alone, “In my heart, sometimes, I feel lightness, a nonexistence…I have these moments, very dangerous, I feel scattered.”
Later in the novel he is reunited with his family in Toronto, but the reader still doesn’t get the feeling that Quy is satisfied with the reunion of long lost loved ones. He’s so used to being on his own and moving, yet the bird is returned to its cage with a sense of unruly stability and doubt, “So now I’m here in the car, waiting to go meet them…and I’m sitting here…and I’m thinking, People disappear all the time into cities. Why not me?” (311). This shows a fear in Quy that has been developing all his life. The fear of actually being found. Both good and bad, expected and unexpected, Quy is being pushed and pulled in his own mind of whether or not he could change into a ‘normal’ person of society with a family, friends, and loved ones.
At the last minute, Quy accepts the terms that come with being ‘found’, and decides that sticking around might not be that bad after all. Ultimately he found what he was longing for, “My mother will cry and my father too. They’ll forgive themselves now. I’ll marry someone, I’ll have a kid or two, and just like that man I’ll sit outside, I’ll find someone to tell this story to, and I’ll laugh because all my predictions and interpretations were wrong. So I’m waiting, I’m going to rest my head and wait.” (312)