Guest Speaker

I thought that the guest speaker today in class was very interesting and her work is also exciting.  The videos that she showed us were very powerful but sad.  It was interesting that these people were able to open up and allow themselves to be subject to judgment from what they have done.  Domestic violence among husbands and wives is a very scary thing that goes on and for people to talk about what happened is very courageous.  This cleansing that these people were able to experience is very powerful and helpful to not only them but the people they have hurt.  Her work with prisoners was very interesting as well.  The fact that she was able to get them to open up about their crimes and how they express their guilt and sorrow for the families was amazing.  These prisoners are considered monsters because of the things that they have done, however, there are multiple things that goes into the way these men were raised.  These men had parents or relatives that instilled this violence and rage inside them but that fact goes ignored because society just wants to blame the man for being a monster and a killer.  The way she is able to express these people’s feelings about battery and murder is quite compelling because it is a difficult thing to do.  To have prisoner’s write music or poetry about what it is like to be in prison is interesting because I would not think that these men would have these feelings or be able to express them in the extraordinary ways that they did.  The struggle that these men go through on a daily basis is awful and every day they have to live with their mistakes from when they were younger.  That would be a very difficult thing to deal with to know that you are not the same person you were 20 years ago but are still in prison for the same crime.  She was a good guest speaker because she informed me about the ways the arts can help express conflict and understanding.