Four our Who Am I, class our action project was to create a time machine. The time machine consists of one individual or collective memory. I chose to tell the story about the day my cousin was born. One thing I learned is the lesson of life my grandmother told me, am very proud of my visual representations.
My Script
Hello y’all. I have a question for you. Do you have someone special in your life that you love/ respect very much? I am sure we all have at least one person that we can’t imagine our life without. For me my family are the most important people because they make me feel that my life have a real meaning.
For example during an interview i conducted with my grandmother, she told me that she learned to live like she was going to die tomorrow and to think of her future as if it were an unstoppable dream. Based on this, I believe that my family members are always the ones who give me advice to decide my future.
One way I have come to understand what my grandmother told me was by getting ready to teach this lesson to my little cousin. To understand why I decided to teach this lesson to this particular cousin, let me tell you about the day he was born.
It was September 19th, 2007 in Syria, at three in the morning. My mom and I were helping prepare my aunt to go to the hospital. I was so nervous sitting in the kitchen, watching my aunt closely drinking her cup of milk. I didn’t know whether she was having a baby girl or a baby boy. I was hoping for a baby girl so I could use her as a doll and play with her. ”Its time to leave,” shouted my mom in a nervous voice. I started crying, feeling scared that my aunt would be going to the hospital. We left with my aunt, but for a moment I couldn’t find her. I asked my mom where my aunt was and she told me that my aunt was with the doctor. Tears started coming out of my eyes for no reason, until I heard a little baby’s voice crying. It was my new baby cousin! I ran to my aunt. Then i started looking at that doll that the nurse was holding. It was so cool! I told my mom I wanted to get a doll that was just like this: a doll that can move and cry. My mom smiled and said, “This is your baby cousin, and it is a he.” At that age, I was obsessed with making my dolls seem like real babies, especially those dolls on T.V. that could talk, and eat and do cool stuff. I looked closely at this cute baby. He smiled, and seeing this made me feel that I owned the whole world. His smile was bouncing like a bundle of joy. He smelled like baby powder, and his eyes were too small. We decided to name him, Haitham. I didn’t really like that name so I decided to name him Tome. He even calls himself that. Looking at this cute baby I said, “This is a baby who will change my whole life for the better. Now every time I look at his face I will forget every bad thing in my life and smile.” “He is my whole life,” I thought. “I am living just to be with him, even though we are in two different states.” Listening to his soft voice just makes my whole day.
To conclude, let me connect the story of my grandmother and the story of my cousin using Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Collective unconscious for me means a story passed down from one generation to the next. Getting the advice from my grandmother and passing it down to my little cousin would determine my future and my cousin’s future because we will be making decisions about our future by following this advice.