Crossing Boundaries Involves Triumphs and Failures in Sally’s Story by Sally Morgan

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The idea of crossing boundaries and its failures and triumphs is explored in the autobiography, Sally’s Story by Sally Morgan, which tells you about the life of a young Aborigine who overcame many boundaries in order to develop and change her life and the lives of others. Comparably, the poem, “Refugee blues” by Wystan Hugh Auden discusses about migrants who crossed a geographical boundary and experienced difficulty fitting in. These two texts discuss the experience of prejudice and segregation the personas have lived through. To cross a boundary means, to get out of your comfort zone and take risks to achieve your goal, there will always be obstacles, challenges and changes in one’s life, which aids them to develop a better understanding of themselves and transform their lives and the lives of others. This autobiography shows us that there are positive and negative aspects of changing, you could either gain from it or be affected detrimentally by it. Sally’s father fought in WW1 and returned with a severe sickness, he stayed in the hospital for a while and his sickness got worse, eventually he passed away, this is shown through the expression of her mother as she “broke down completely” as the two ambulance men took their father away. Their neighbour also spoke to the kids and through the emotive language where she mentioned, “I have bad news for you all”, it was quiet clear that he had passed away. This demonstrates that crossing boundaries and making decisions can sometimes lead to failures and his consequence was death even though he couldn’t chose whether he wanted to fight or not to fight in the war. Sally’s Story is based on the life of Sally who is in search of her identity, she noticed she was of darker skin than most... ... middle of paper ... ...n’t the same as the Europeans. In the second last stanza, it states that there were, “A thousand windows and a thousand doors, not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.” This represents closed opportunities and in the last stanza, “ten thousand solders marched to and fro, looking for you and me.” They are in a dangerous position and through the use of rhyme, it demonstrates that they are being targeted. These individuals are experience failure as they attempt to cross a geographical boundary and seek asylum. Therefore, it is clear that both texts demonstrates different ways of how people of different backgrounds can experience crossing boundaries. The link between the two text is that the personas were being alienated against because they were from a different cultural background, they experienced segregation and were experiencing inequality.

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