Response 1: Personal experience

Azel Kahan

Middlesex Blog: personal experience

Everyone experiences traumatic events in their life at a certain point, and Middlesex delivers spectacularly a part of the protagonist’s life that not many experience. This is the 1967 Detroit race riots, which depict Callie’s hometown as an apocalyptic war zone with tanks, gunshots, and the burning down of her father’s restaurant, the Zebra Room. ”The French toast sign was in flames. The zebra-skinned barstools were like a row of torches” (Eugenides, 250). Upon reading this passage, a part of my childhood was able to relate to the story of Callie witnessing something disastrous. During my second year of elementary school in the Lower East Side, the teachers rounded all of the students up unexpectedly for an early dismissal, a “surprise half-day” or so I thought. My parents were not the ones to pick me up from school that day. Instead, I went along with my friends and walked to the Williamsburg Bridge through a fog of dust and fire truck sirens to go back home in Brooklyn. An unknowing 5 year old, I interpreted this strange end to the day as something good; I would be playing with my friends for the rest of the afternoon. However when my parents met us at the bridge, their facial expressions concealed worry, stress, and a hint of fear. Walking up the bridge none of us asked any questions about the fog, or the early dismissal or the fact that we weren’t taking the subway home. At the middle of the Williamsburg bridge I turned around briefly to get a view of the city, only to see an enormous cloud of smoke resonating from an area not too far away from my school. Helicopters buzzed overhead as we slowly distanced ourselves from Manhattan. Much like Callie’s experience in Middlesex, I was oblivious to the reality of the danger and more confused that I was scared. The ending of this memory involved me and two of my friends from school sitting on the couch in my living room flipping through channels on the TV, only to find the same news cast of the world trade center in smoke. None of us really cared, we simply kept pressing a number on the TV remote, hoping SpongeBob or Scooby-doo would appear on the screen. This form of ignorance I only realized years later helped me get into Callie’s shoes when talking about past experiences, and highlighted the importance of reflecting on major events in one’s life.