A Weak Woman in a Bar

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Clarissa

October 25, 2012

From a student’s essay:

“Gender roles are completely reversed in the film. Ana becomes very masculine because she has a job and pays the bills. Amador, in the meantime, becomes feminized. He turns into a weak woman as he spends his days getting drunk in a bar.”

Two more students produced the same “analysis” with slight variations.

I deserve those course releases, people, because there is nothing harder than teaching students how to write academic essays. For weeks, I’ve been begging students to be careful with terminology and they still refer to a film as a novel and a novel as a short story.

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2 responses to “A Weak Woman in a Bar”

musteryou

October 25, 2012

I had a huge amount of difficulty determining genre in Marechera’s writing. He really mixes it up and obeys no rules. His posthumously published work, The Black Insider, reads a bit like a Platonic discourse. It starts off an an adventure novel and ends as one, but the parts in the middle are about considering the political state of the world from the position of an black intellectual, and raising metaphysical speculations about the nature of life on this planet. There is also a drama, representing dialogue within the government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, which appears early on in the book. The book also has significant autobiographical aspects and reflections in it. Many of the ideas are quite poetic and aphoristic.

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1. musteryou
  
  October 25, 2012
  
  And when I say there is a drama, I mean it is written out in that way, with character parts. It reads like a satire with aspects of pantomime.
  
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