Topic Questions
In section 12 of her essay “The History of Nomadism,” called “Dream House,” Megan Harlan describes an imaginary bedroom she would create in her head as a child. This imagined space was a kind of refuge or place of safety for her through the many moves her family made throughout the world. In that space, Harlan writes, “I was alone there, hidden away as long as I wanted to be.” While she and her family were constantly moving, she could feel “safe, but motionless, in perfect suspension. Living never entered into it.” Throughout the essay, in describing her family (which along with Megan included her father, mother, and brother), as moving and living together but as not very “intimate” or close to each other. This explains why Harlan looked for an imaginary place in her mind in which she felt close and intimate with herself, like a “nest.” For her, daydreaming or imagining a home was freedom, while all the travels that her parents took her on for their own reasons were the opposite of freedom for her. Later in her life. reading books by writers interested in nomads, Harlan came to understand some ways to compare herself to the kinds of nomadic people she saw in the Saudi Arabian desert, the Bedouin and their “black-tents,” but also how she was different from nomads in fact, their opposite.
A dilemma is a contradictory situation that a person faces, and that asks that person to make a choice between two things or directions, In section 12, “Dream House,” Megan Harlan describes “the settled person’s dilemma: how to extract from a singular home a universe’s meaning?” On the other hand, she says, “The nomad has different issues, an exact inversion: how to sculpt from rootlessness an identifiable, meaningful universe? Or, put more unnervingly: how do we attach meaning to constant change?”
Harlan continues to explore and define this question, and perhaps to answer it, in the essay’s next section, section 13: “Privacy”: “In his book on human geography, Space and Place, Ti-Fu Yan makes this distinction: ‘Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.” This definition of place versus space leads Harlan to this statement and question: “Those contrasting definitions of space and place are exceptionally useful. But since nomads of whatever iteration are attached to space and its freedoms, how secure do we ever feel in a single place?”
These ideas, definitions, and questions come late in Harlan’s essay, and she provides information throughout the essay-before and after sections 12-13-to give context to these questions and explore their meaning and possible answers from her own experience, the experience of her family, and even what she calls a “made-up memory” of her great-great-grandfather, Wilson Barber Harlan, who walked over 1,000 miles across the United States to find and build a home (just as Harlan herself walked around and around Manhattan and NYC in a place that reminded her of the deserts of her.
Childhood). As Ti-Fu Yan described it, people need a sense of place to feel secure, to feel “at home” in a place and comfortable with who they are. At the same time, people also need or long for a sense of space as freedom, of movement, of a horizon that can change and grow into the future. These ideas and the questions that they raise are the heart or Topic of “The History of Nomadism,” and through them Harlan seeks to understand her own present, past, and possible future identities.
The first step of developing a clear, organized, and critical essay is to understand and explain or explicate (to yourself and your reader) the ideas and examples of a source. You must have a clear understanding of the whole source but also specific supporting details, statements, and ideas that communicate that whole source. This work is accomplished through using 3 linked writing skills:
1. Summary: in an effective summary, the writer identifies and explains the main ideas of a source. The summary must be brief enough to focus on those main ideas, but also include enough specific examples and definitions that those main ideas make sense to the reader.
2. Paraphrase: to support an effective summary, the writer has to “zoom in” on specific key ideas and translate them effectively into their own words to explain exactly what the source states at a specific point. By “translating” the source’s words into the writer’s own, the writer shows they understand those words without repeating them.
3. Direct quotation: to focus even more closely on exactly what the source states, the writer can “zoom in” even further to a specific set of words in the source that express a main idea or key meaning directly. However, once a writer quotes directly from the source, using no more than a word or two, or at most a sentence or two, then they have to explain (not repeat) what those words mean directly, and
also the context in the source that gives them a specific meaning.
Essay 1 Step 1:
Begin by introducing Megan Harlan’s “The History of Nomadism” to a reader who has not read the essay. Identify the author, title, and main ideas of the essay, using the following outline or ideas to develop detailed, well-organized paragraphs:
1. Who is Megan Harlan, based ONLY on the evidence given in her essay? Who is
she today, with a house, husband and son in California, and what do the ideas of
security versus freedom mean to her at the present time (of writing the essay)? What do we learn about her background experience as a child that explain the dilemmas or questions she has about home and the meaning of home in the present time? What does her experience as a child, seeing the “black-tents” of the Bedouin in Saudi Arabia, mean to her life and identity then and later, through the moves and experiences that led her to being an adult in New York City? 2. Based on what you wrote about in your answer to question 1, choose 2 specific sections in the essay where Harlan writes about different examples or ideas of her own experience that helped and challenged you to understand not just her
experiences and identity, but also their meaning, to her. These examples should identify what “nomadism” or the meaning of movement (security versus freedom) means to her, and what she learned from her mother and father’s experiences of moving, boxes, and home as a mobile place. Use at least one, brief direct quotation for EACH of the sections you discuss to support your summary (identify the page number from the handout in parentheses after each quotation).
Explain clearly what each quotation means in the original context (of the essay) as well as why you think it is meaningful for you. 3. Finally, in your view but connected to the specific sections of the essay you discuss in question 2, what is the relationship or dilemma between security and freedom in the meaning of home? How does your own idea, understanding, and experience of home relate to the ideas of Harlan that you defined above? Make
clear, specific connections between your ideas or experience and that of the author.