Literature provides an opportunity to learn, escape and find common ground, BYUH students and professors explain
Words have power because they offer connection, new perspectives, and reflection, said BYU–Hawaii students and professors. “You can use words to not only understand yourself but to make other people understand you or themselves,” explained AnnaMarie Christiansen, an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts & Letters.
Through literature, people can gain new perspectives, explained Jessika Santoso, a senior from Indonesia majoring in TESOL. Dr. Patricia Patrick, associate professor in the Faculty of Arts & Letters, also shared, “It’s a place where we can find common ground, [somewhere] we can go and be fully seen for who we are.”
Understanding the human condition
Patrick said stories don’t always have to be shared through traditional literature to have an impact. “Although we don’t have a collected book, there’s the book of all our conversations and the storytelling we share,” that allows people to connect, she explained.
Iliana Rivers, a senior from Waianaemajoring in biology, said she feels closer to her ancestors when she reads about their life experiences in their journals. “Even though I don’t know them personally, I know about their integrity, their personality and how much charity they have, which gives me more inspiration to be like them,” she shared.
While working on a family history project for a Hawaiian studies class, Rivers said, “One specific [story] I stumbled on was about my great-great-great-great-grandfather.” She said he was an orphan, originally from China, who was found by sailors in Samoa. They called him “Ahmu” in reference to where he was found, Rivers explained. As an adult, he found missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who introduced him and Rivers’ ancestors to the church, she said. “His testimony was really inspiring because when he passed away, he left his property and his house to the church,” she shared, “He sold it to them for $1 and now it holds up the Apia Samoa Temple.”
Christiansen shared, “Reading literature helps you understand other people and the human condition.” Literature often has themes of death and love, she explained, which are universally understood. “Everybody understands loss [and] strong emotions like love, so I think that’s what drew me to literary texts at first,” she said.
Seeing students struggle with understanding reading material, Santoso said, “If someone has at least one thing they can relate to, it will overpower the loss or confusion.”
Through literature, Patrick said, people have a space to share deeply personal thoughts and experiences. “When you’re looking for consulation for something you wouldn’t want to tell your best friend, that person can be somebody in a book who’s asking the questions you thought you were the only person who had,” she shared.
The transformative impact of literature
Patrick said literature allows readers to see the world from another person’s point of view. “One of the big things I look for in my reading is, ‘What are other people thinking? What’s life like for other people?’ and that’s vastly empowering in the way that a person can get outside their limited perspective and experience,” she shared.
Referencing “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo, Christiansen said, “Important literature has either driven or come out of political change.” Set in the 1800s, “Les Misérables” used narrative to display the societal issues that followed the French Revolution, Christiansen explained.
“For any group that’s ever been persecuted or marginalized,” Patrick said, “having the power to get your story out there is the power to say that things need to change.”
For Queen Liliuokalani, Christiansen said, writing was a way to disprove rumors and display her true character during the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. “She was smart and civilized and had faith in other humans. She was proud of who she was and where she came from. All of that comes across really strongly in her book,” she explained.
“A story, in a lot of ways, reaches beyond the capabilities of simple language,” Patrick shared. Through William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Patrick said readers could see the negative effects of revenge and aggression. “It makes us think. It makes us want to make the story to turn out differently,” she explained.
Santoso and Rivers, writing tutors in the Reading Writing Lab (RWL), said they’ve been able to help others find joy in literature through their work. “We wear a lot of hats as a tutor, not only as the one who knows how to [write], but also as an ally who comforts or encourages,” Santoso explained.
Through RWL’s Book Club, Rivers said she’s observed students being transported into the world of literature. “They wished they were in the book, in the character’s shoes. It gave them empowerment to be more confident and challenge themselves,” she said.
A token of memories and reflection
Whether through journaling, creative or academic writing, Santoso shared, literature provides a platform to reflect. She said her sister often advised, “‘If you have all of the strings jumbled in your head, try to write it one by one and it will make your mind much clearer.’” When looking back on personal writing from the past, Santoso shared one can see their improvement over time.
Rivers said journaling is also therapeutic for her. “It makes me reflect about my life, where I am, and it gives me hope at the end of the day,” she shared.
Christiansen said she often wrote creatively as an undergraduate student but stopped during graduate school. She said it is an important means of expression now that she’s returned to it at a later stage in life. “I’ve lived quite a bit and I feel fairly powerful in reframing the stories of my life,” Christiansen shared.
As a child, Santoso said she enjoyed writing poetry about her life. “Back then life felt so simple, so beautiful, it was just easy to write it down,” she shared, “[It was] also a token of preserving memories.”
Christiansen said, students “are in this constant state of learning and reassessing and learning,” She said she hopes students will take advantage of their opportunities to read and write throughout their educations because they “grow the world around you, what’s in your brain [and] the way you think.”