Seminar

My group had chosen poems "Kidnapped" and "A Book And A Pen" for our seminar. Both poems are having the theme of criticizing the colonisers trying to assimilate the islander student from education.  Those colonisers changed their education system, taught them European culture and history rather than their own islands' culture and history. This is to serve the political purpose that European colonisers wanting to rule those islanders from inside as well as outside.

 Me and my ancestors do not have similar experience because although China was invaded by Europeans and Japanese before, China has never been taken and ruled over by them, so our education system was never changed by invaders. But I can still see how cruel this is, being forced to learn a culture and language that belong to the enemy of your country. If Japan won the war over China, then all Chinese start learning Japanese and Japanese history, I think we will be very angry about it. When I first read the poem "Kidnapped", I feel the title is too strong and harsh, but to think deeper about it, I think this is the right word to express the angry, despair feeling of the author.

I like Pacific culture, yesterday I watched a youtube clip of Pacific dance, that is so beautiful. I don't really understand pacific culture, but from what I learnt so far, they are a very primitive, loving god and nature and living simple, happy lives. I like their flower necklace, I like their traditional singing, I like the sea shell and I like their canoe. So I can understand that in the poem "A Book And A Pen", the character is moaning about himself missing out so much about his own Pacific culture.He should learn it at young age, but instead he only get to access it at old age, finally he find his culture, his identity, his true pleasure, but he had so many years of confusion, and those years, nobody can pay him back.

I am glad that both characters are released at the end of the poem, because they love their culture so much, I think they will go and seek it immediately. Just like a bird, being shut in a cage for long, one day it is released, it will fly so high and so far away. Just like those two released characters, I can imagine them singing their traditional songs with their fellow islanders in the beach, their beautiful voice fly across the whole Pacific ocean.