I belong to a lot of discourse communities. Some of the discourse communities I am apart of are: basketball team, my family, class, social media etc. Discourse community is a group of people that share a common goal or who interact with each other. For my basketball team, our goal is to score a basket. During my High School years, when I was on the team. Me and my teammates practiced every day after school to get our plays right. So, in the game we are ready and we are not tired. Our goal during practice is to get in shape and make sure we are performing at a high level in the game. During the game we have a different goal. During the game our goal is to score more points than the other team and make sure to play defense and stop the other team from scoring. But at the end of the day, all of those tasks combined our main goal is to win games and stay on top of the league. Another form of discourse community would be my religious community. I am Muslim. Every Friday we go to the mosque to pray something called “Jummah” or the Friday prayer. Friday is an important day to Muslims. The goal for everyone on Friday is to go to prayer but if they have a really big emergency then they don’t have to attend. We all share the goal of making it to prayer on Friday.
The book we are discussing in class is called “Drown” by Junot Diaz. This book is mostly about a discourse community because this book has different parts that shows different sides of discourse community. Junior’s family is a discourse community. Their family’s goal is to all be cool with each other and make it to the United States to make money. Another example can be, when junior become a drug dealer in NJ, him and his friend share the common goal of selling drugs to other to make money. Other topics that can be discussed from this book is bullying, male vs female, victim vs victimizer etc. For Example: when we talk about bullying. We know that junior’s older brother Rafa always bullied and beat junior because he was weak and small. The author argues that Rafa might have acquired such behavior from his father because his father is really violent. This could be another type of discourse community. Rafa and his father share the same type of goal. Let’s move to their family relationship. Their family relationship wasn’t so good because his father was really violent and at that time his father was cheating on his mother with another woman. His father cheated on his mother and asked his grandfather for money to move to the United States to make money. How messed up is that? Even after moving to the United States his father sent letters to his mother saying that he will return but several times he didn’t actually come back to visit. Out of a few times sending the letters, he only came once to visit.
From reading this book I learned about how discourse communities work. I have never learned about discourse communities before. But learning about it the first time was fun and exciting. From my point of view, I would say that most of junior’s family from problem came from money. Because when there is no money and the father is trying to make money, they always act violent. If his dad wasn’t so violent then Rafa wouldn’t have learned that from him and use it against Junior to bully him. If there was money I would say most of their problems would’ve went away and they would be a happy family.
