The Importance Of Friendship In Recitatif By Toni Morrison

In “Everyday Use,” two sister Dee and Maggie have different views on how they should preserve and honor their heritage. The story is told from the point of view of their mother, Ms. Johnson, and it is from her that we learn about the difference in the sister’s characters. Dee, who changes her name to Wangero, is outspoken and is the educated sister. Maggie is shy and appears to be ashamed of the burns on her skin. “[Maggie] thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that ‘no’ is a word the world would never learn to say to her” (Walker 6).

In the short story “Everyday Use,” author Alice Walker allows the difference between two sisters, Maggie and Dee/Wangero to illustrate the theme heritage. As the story progresses, it reveals an African American family living in a small home with some sort of struggles. Dee, the eldest daughter, is a very intellectual young woman who lacks understanding in her family’s heritage because of her embarrassment of Maggie and Mama. Contrary to Dee, Maggie is not smart, but yet she understands her family’s background and is grateful of it. Sisters, Dee and Maggie differ in ideas of heritage.

Monkey Bridge, by Lan Cao, is a book that goes into the trouble of a young vietnamese women, Mai, trying move past her childhood, to fit into the fast pace culture of America. But she is haunted with the horrors of growing up in saigon during the Vietnam War, and trying desperately to cut herself off from anything from her past life. This would have been easy considering almost none of her old life is like the one in america, but her mother, thanh, is stuck in her old ways and tradition. Because this mother daughter dynamic started to become deformed, and soon mai no longer can spread her feeling toward her own mother and her war stricken country. Lan cao use lots of literary devices in her writing to add more depth and meaning to the reading.she uses a metaphor that not

Melinda gets depressed and starts expressing her pain through stuff like biting her lips and her nails, and not talking. At the end of the story she finally found her voice and was able to stand up for herself. In the beginning, Melinda didn't talk to anyone, barely even to her parents. She says, “I have tried so hard to forget every second of that stupid party and here I am in the middle of a hostile crowd that hates me for what I had to do. I can't tell them what really happened” (Anderson, 28).

Raeburn asks about a crush possibly a girl and she avoids it. Steers the conversation towards a boy with nice shoes when she was sixteen avoidances at its finest. Heidi and Dina took a shower sprayed each other down and Dina had the realization that maybe she loved Heidi. That maybe she loved her when she first met her. Once she heard Heidi's confession coming out though she had broken away distanced herself, having trouble with having heard her say

The coffee house is significant because it represents where Mattie grew up, lived, worked, and spent her time. This means that Mattie is therefore having to say goodbye to her childhood as a result of the fever. Due to the fever, and due to this goodbye, Mattie is having to mature and become more of an adult throughout this fever. So, this goodbye changed Mattie. A last goodbye Mattie had to suffer was with Nell, an orphaned little girl that Mattie took under her wing and took care of.

The grandmother is an outcast from her own family by still expressing her outdated beliefs about African-Americans. The grandmother refers to African- Americans as “pickaninnies” and “niggers” throughout the story, and tells a few racist stories. None of her racist remarks are even acknowledged by her own family, which speaks wonders to her outdated opinions. The grandmother tells of a love interest who brought her a

Hosseini illustrates this innate ability to preserve through characters like Mariam, “The years had not been kind to Mariam. But perhaps, she thought, there would be kinder years to come. A new life, a life in which she would find the blessings that Nana [her mother] had said a harami like her would never see” (Hosseini 256). Mariam has not only endured emotional torment, but the suicide of her mother, the rejection her father, abuse from her husband, miscarriages, and a war that has rained havoc on her homeland for decades. Yet, Mariam prevails to achieve the hopes she had since childhood.

One subject they tend to talk about often is motherhood. Larsen continues her use of character foiling through the contrasting of Irene’s and Clare’s feelings about motherhood to emphasize how their contrasting situations influence their feelings. Clare does not enjoy being a mother. She believes that it is too much pressure, especially because she doesn’t want her daughter’s skin to reveal that she has a black parent. She says, “I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear she might be dark.

(Rowell 10, Yousafzai 31) Because of all the protests for women’s rights, the Taliban eventually let girls go to school with many restrictions such as wearing a shiela to cover their entire face. Eventually, the Taliban started to blow up girls’ schools so that they would be unable to go back to school after winter break. The laws that were inflicted by the Taliban, impacted, mainly, women.

The author, Barbara Mujica, uses her niece’s school experience in Florida as an example of what not to do with bilingual education. Mujica’s niece called her feeling very upset about the decisions she had to make with her athletic scholarship, because her comprehension and writing skills in English were deficient. Although her niece had lived in Miami most of her life the environment was equipped to service people in foreign languages. During Mujica’s visit she observed this first hand; businesses, not just teaching, were conducted in Spanish. People and business think they are helping those who do not speak English, but in actuality it may be doing them a disservice.

They kept the problem and dealt with it on their own which made the nine student parents sue the board of education because the verbal abuse and threats kept going on and getting worse. The little rock nine parents had gotten tired of the harassment and wanted to do something about it. Linda Brown took herself and her sister to the Supreme Court. Linda felt that segregated school systems violated the fourteenth amendment and took them to court. The name of the case that took place was Brown vs.

While Cameron’s life was flourishing, Screamer left Messina in hopes of becoming an actress in Hollywood (65). Rather than showing the world her talent, she tried to sleep her way to the top, which hurt her in the long run (66). According to Nat, Cameron’s best friend since Kindergarten, Screamer looks like an aging high-dollar call girl, while Cameron is nothing but class (98). Neely neglected Cameron because Screamer was hot and trot, but fourteen years later all she had become was a thirty-two year old, looking fifty that was fat, ugly, and tired (97, 182-183). Outer beauty, obviously, cannot define a person for who they are.