In “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia” of 1979, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that “the will to explain is a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world. In other words, on the general level, the possibility of explanation carries the supposition of an explainable (if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject”. Darling, the main character of “We Need New Names”, tells her life in an attempt to explain a home that never existed in the first place, and the descriptions of the different homes are a way to make sense of her own self and to try to understand her identity. Darling is a girl whose absent parents make her the daughter of the community. The real family of Darling is Mother of Bones and her friends, with whom she wanders around her village. The link between them is extraordinary, and they play, eat and even defecate together. There are no adults to teach them anything, and even religious authorities are strange figures living in a world of their own, incapable of seeing what is happening to the children. When the father of Darling appears very ill with AIDS, she doesn’t care about his situation, although at the end she manages to reconcile with him. To sum up, adults are absent figures from …show more content…
“There are two homes inside my head: home before Paradise, and home in Paradise... There are three homes inside Mother's and Aunt Fostalina’s heads: home before independence, before I was born when black people and white people were fighting over the country. Home after independence, when black people won the country. And then the home of thing falling apart... There are four homes inside Mother of Bones’s head: home before the white people came to steal the country, and a king ruled; home when the white people came to steal the country and then there was war; home when the black people got our stolen country back after independence; and then the home of now" (Bulawayo
This chapter addresses the central argument that African history and the lives of Africans are often dismissed. For example, the author underlines that approximately 50,000 African captives were taken to the Dutch Caribbean while 1,600,000 were sent to the French Caribbean. In addition, Painter provides excerpts from the memoirs of ex-slaves, Equiano and Ayuba in which they recount their personal experience as slaves. This is important because the author carefully presents the topic of slaves as not just numbers, but as individual people. In contrast, in my high school’s world history class, I can profoundly recall reading an excerpt from a European man in the early colonialism period which described his experience when he first encountered the African people.
“We remember the Home of Infants where we lived till we were five years old, together with all the children of the City who had been born in the same year,” Equality reminisces about his first childhood home (20). Once a child reaches the age of five, they move to the Home of the Students, where
As the story continued, the father and the mother did not show improvement, which made them unqualified parents due to the lack of providing for the basic survival needs or their children. According to Abraham Maslow 's theory of "the Hierarchy of Needs” there are five different types of needs that should be provided to all human beings, which are “the physiological needs, the needs for safety and security, the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualize the self” (Boeree 2). Those are the needs that have to be satisfied for someone to have a healthy, successful, and a happy life. At the end of the story, the children received all their needs on their own, without the help of the parents. They only addressed those needs, when they escaped home and their parents.
The parents’ actions after the change from them caring for their children to the nursery caring for them shows that they are scared of the change. The parents are scared that there are going to be further changes to their family and want to change it back to before the nursery. However, some disagree with this theme and say that the main theme of the story is abandonment. They say this because there are many points in the story which showcase abandonment. The children’s actions also support the theme of people are scared of change.
Through Arimah’s diction in “Who Will Greet You At Home,” I was able to understand the main character, Ogechi, and her placement within the working-class; I was able to empathize with Ogechi because of the knowledge of her working class status the text provided. The reader is introduced to Ogechi and the unique way of the creation of life/birth in her world as such: “Her mother had formed her from mud and twigs and wrapped her limbs tightly with leaves, like moin moin: pedestrian items that had produced a pedestrian girl” (Arimah 65). The use of the materials, mud, twigs and leaves, tells a lot about Ogechi. In Ogechi society, mother 's make their own child with the materials they find. The materials make up who the child is, as Ogechi was made
Early in the story, we see the kids getting everything they want beginning to develop when the parents walked to the nursery to see if there was something wrong with it. They saw that they were in Africa, surrounded by animals that looked very real. In the distance, there were lions eating a bloody animal. “( The nursery) had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing 's too good for our children," George had said.”
They are only present in the family conversation at the top of the hill, and do not contribute much to the scene, besides giving the scene the essence of ‘family values’ in the way of a group discussion about how to help
The differences I see between these two poems can be found in the speakers. One is a first person speaker and the other is observing, but both are reflecting on the transformation from youth to adulthood. In “Quinceañera” by Judith Ortiz Cofer the speaker is growing up and becoming a woman. She must put away childhood and embrace womanhood. Take the first passage, “My dolls have been put away like dead / children in a chest I will carry / with me when I marry” (lines 1-3).
Jamaica Kincaid 's A Small Place examines the historical/social context of how Antiguans dealt racism through slavery after an oppressive European colonization. Kincaid reveals that European colonization resulted in Antigua dealing with injustice such as corruption and poverty. She argues Europeans and Americans traveling to Antigua are focused on the beautiful scenery, which is not a correct representation of the day to day lives of Antiguans. Although racism has many negative effects, Kincaid seemed to state the benefits of Europeans’ colonialism and how it contributed to her life such by introducing the English language and the library that helped her to become a writer. Kincaid states that we “cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget” (26); therefore, Kincaid feels that the past influences the present.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s coming-of-age novel Purple Hibiscus narrates the story of Kambili, a girl in Nigeria, who deals with religious hypocrisy and abuse of her father, a product of the British colonization. She and her brother, Jaja, visit their aunt and receive a different perspective on their family’s lives. This novel takes place in the Igbo region of Nigeria, after the Nigerian Civil War that ended in 1970 and colonialism of the 1900’s. In Purple Hibiscus, Adichie conveys her views of the Nigerian Civil War to the reader by using the setting, specific events reciprocated in history, and contrasting characters within the novel. Purple Hibiscus is set in post-colonial Nigeria- where incidentally Adichie grew up- in a time of government, economic, and social struggle, after the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War.
Children are constantly learning about themselves and the world around them. As they grow up, their world expands from their home to peers and, eventually, to people and places they know about. Children should learn about themselves and develop a positive self-image if they have to be successful citizens in society. They must learn how different they are as well how alike they are in relation to others. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s childhood growing up in a tumultuous post-revolutionary Iran.
A Small Place authored by Jamaica Kincaid is consistent with these words. Her work showed great passion illustrated through rude language to demonstrate her experiences. She, one of many people, experienced struggle and pain throughout her childhood. Now she shares the story of Antigua, her home. By viewing through the Postcolonial, Marxist, and New Criticism lenses, the reader is able to perceive Jamaica Kincaid’s perspective on the changes.
Throughout the book the children were constantly putting themselves in danger only because they were immature which called for a mother being present. There is always a motherly instinct to protect a child. This was seen when Peter was trapped on a rock and isolated by rising water until he was saved my a mother bird. It says, “Nevertheless the bird was determined to save him if she could.” This was also seen when the Darling children left their home and flew to Neverland, and Mrs. Darling immediately became worried about them.
Her personal experience is socially and theoretically constructed and emotions play an essential role in the process of identity formation. Her identity is not fixed, which is portrayed by inquisitiveness that her own mother and Aunt thought she was possessed, enhanced and made this story an enriching experience. The family is the first agent of socialization, as the story illustrates, even the most basic of human activities are learned and through socialization people
The time when this story took place was a time when women were viewed as second class citizens. Mothers had traditional roles, which usually left them in the house, while men also had their roles, outside of the