Ideas and Prompts for Week Three: "We are old enough to haunt this land"

Hi everyone!

As always, your 500-word blog post is due Friday by 3:00 pm. This week, you're blogging about Shawn Wong's poetic, historical novel Homebase. Here are some prompts to get you started:

1. In the last chapter of Homebase, the narrator and protagonist, Rainsford Chan, states that "The chronicling of my life should be given the name of a place. [...] We are old enough to haunt this land" (94). How do we see Rainsford's life story tied to place and land in this novel?
   
   
2. Reflecting on the effects his father's death had on him, Rainsford narrates, "I was left a father to myself after my father's death. When a family loses a beloved dog, they go out and buy another quickly before the self-pity replaces that life. When a father dies, there is only violence. I am violent" (8). What do you think he means by this? In what sense is Rainsford a "violent" character? Do we see this "violence" elsewhere in the novel?
   
   
3. Chapter 5 takes place on Alcatraz, near Angel Island. Here, Rainsford has a conversation with a Native American man about grandfathers, islands, ethnic identities, and the power of claiming land as home. What is the role of this character in the novel? What do you make of this conversation?
   
   
4. In the novel's Introduction, Shawn Wong describes an argument he had with a student who thought Homebase was "masculinist," or solely male-centered. He writes, "the reality is Homebase is a story about my mother and father and it hurt me to hear that the student hadn't considered the role of the mother in my novel or worse, ignored her for the sake of cramming my novel into her literary theory" (xi). What is "the role of the mother" in Homebase? How is she characterized, and what does she add to the story?
   
   
5. In Homebase, Wong mixes straightforward storytelling with dreams, myth, family and national history, letters, interrogation records, and other genres. In a creative post, add a new section to Homebase in which you use one of these genres in a new way. For example, imagine that Rainsford's great-grandfather carved a poem into the walls of Angel Island. Write this poem, and describe its significance.
   

Enjoy! :)