There seems to be a dominant view throughout Western Civilizations that we are all living in the best possible time to be alive so far. For many of us, that tends to be the case. In Western Civilizations, literacy rates are up, child mortality is low, race relations and the LGBTQIA movements have made strides, and technology has provided a level of convenience and excess not yet seen. These simple truths that we take for granted, however, are not simple truths all across the globe. In fact, many areas have suffered due to these advances. In the play, Ruined, by Lynn Nottage, a powerful narrative is told that serves as a commentary about the destruction of local cultures due to the intrusive nature of war and Western Civilization in that it …show more content…
War ravaged the land and tore people apart emotionally and physically. One recurrence that came about during the war was the raping and “ruining” of women. To be ruined meant that a woman was raped and/or tortured so severely that she would no longer be capable of having sex. In a culture that values the fertility of its women, this lead to the breakdown of many communities. A perfect example of this breakdown would be in the case of Salima and Fortune. Salima was taken into the bush and raped for 5 months and when she returned home her husband, Fortune, turned her away. This violence committed against Salima caused her to be forced from her community, and it also forced her to take up work at Mama Nadi’s. Here she has to endure a change of identity in order to do the work required of her and to come to terms with her past. At the end of the play, Salima dies and states the haunting words; “You will not fight your battles on my body anymore”(94). These last words sum up just how intrusive the war has become in the lives of everyone in its path and also represents a clear shift in Salima as an individual. Instead of the woman who just wanted her husband back at the end of the play, we are left to contemplate a …show more content…
The war was worsened by the wealthy minerals in the ground and the influence of the mineral was strengthened by the fear and displacement the war caused. The intertwining of these two destructive forces is seen in the story Salima is told by a man who bought her. In this he tells of a man who stuffed”...the coltan into his mouth to keep the soldiers from stealing his hard work, and they split his belly open with a machete”(31). Not only does this story show the harsh conditions the men are exposed to in war, but also it further demonstrates the hold coltan has on the minds of those who live in the Congo. The want for coltan leads to the destruction of the community and individual identities of those involved as it perpetuates a cycle of war that damages men, induces violence against women, and ultimately creates a cycle of lost identity. In the end, Ruined illuminates a war that ravages the people of the Congo and strips them of the community they had once called home and of the people who they used to be. The need for cell phones and the mineral coltan in the Western world lead to a great deal of war and strife in the Congo. Ruined acts as a medium where we can view those consequences and understand just how big of an impact globalism can have on other areas of the world
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
The concept of standing up for one’s self plays a key theme in the novel, Wanting Mor. The novel unfolds with an illustration of Jameela, as a timorous, obedient girl, influenced by her religious beliefs. As it states in the novel, “ ‘Don’t tell me what I am! I’ll tell you!’…My face is hot. How could I have been so careless? So disrespectful. Maybe I’m tired too” (Rukhsana 29). These statements are followed after the death of Mor and how Jameela’s father, Baba, reacts to the situation by demeaning everything including his own daughter. Jameela tries to soothe her father in the attempt to make her father relaxed by informing him he is simply fatigued. In spite of this, her father believes this to be offensive as he needs to be mollified by her young daughter, which results into Jameela believing the cause was of her own. She is also depicted as diffident because she abides to anyone regardless of her own feelings and emotions. This is illustrated through chapters’ three to nine, which begins with Baba telling Jameela that they are leaving their village to go to the picturesque city known as Kabul, regardless of Jameela’s consideration in the process. Afterwards, Jameela labours away with the multiple Khalaas, respectable term for o...
The concept of standing up for one’s self plays a key theme in the novel, Wanting Mor. The novel unfolds with an illustration of Jameela, as a timorous, obedient girl, influenced by her religious beliefs. As it states in the novel, “ ‘Don’t tell me what I am! I’ll tell you!’…My face is hot. How could I have been so careless? So disrespectful. Maybe I’m tired too” (Rukhsana 29). These statements are followed after the death of Mor and how Jameela’s father, Baba, reacts to the situation by demeaning everything including his own daughter. Jameela tries to soothe her father in the attempt to make her father relaxed by informing him he is simply fatigued. In spite of this, her father believes this to be offensive as he needs to be mollified by her young daughter, which results into Jameela believing the cause was of her own. She is also depicted as diffident because she abides to anyone regardless of her own feelings and emotions. This is illustrated through chapters’ three to nine, which begins with Baba telling Jameela that they are leaving their village to go to the picturesque city known as Kabul, regardless of Jameela’s consideration in the process. Afterwards, Jameela labours away with the multiple Khalaas, respectable term for o...
As civilization advances, most of the people in society are uplifted by the development made. In a thousand years, we went from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and we are rapidly entering the digital age. But inevitably, there are people whom civilization has abandoned and exploited in order to advance this far. In his poem, “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015”, Craig Santos Perez dispels the preconceptions we hold about our society and reveals the horrors that we have either suppressed or neglected. He uses the Halloween scene to reveal how we have taken the atrocities that mankind has afflicted and relinquished. Through figurative language, imagery, and repetition, Perez
The first chapter of Assia Djebar’s novel, Children of the New World, is split into two parts. The first part is a background into the setting of the novel. The novel is based on the time period when the Algerians were at war with the French in the 1950’s in what is now called the Algerian War. The narrator first describes what it is like for women when neighboring villages were under attack. They try to stay safe by hiding in the backrooms of their house. There they try to hide what is going on outside from the children while at the same time watch what is happening. They would dream of a time when the war was over. The narrator quotes a woman whispering, “’The end,’ someone whispers, and then recites verses from the Koran to ward off bad luck. ‘That will be a marvelous awakening, a deliverance.’” They could be stuck there for days depending on how long the attack is. Even in their houses though, they were not safe. Occasionally, bomb fragments could end up on the terrace and destroy parts of their home. They also were not safe because if the attack was on their own village, the military would set every house on fire until the village was burnt to the ground and there was no way to find refugee from this.
...nd bloodshed. Women gave a reason to go to war, a reason to come back from the war, and oddly, a reason to want to return to the war. The men were in a fraternity of life, and with no women around for so long they began to rely on themselves, and no longer had the needs that were provided them by women. They wanted to play in the jungle with their friends, only this time with no guns. They missed the life that they spent together eating rations and swapping stories. When they went home they were veterans, like the old men of the World Wars. If they stayed, they were still heroes, warriors, and victims. They still loved deeply the women at home, because they had no reason to fight or bicker, or possibly realize that the women they assumed would be waiting for them had changed in that time. The men were torn between love of women, and the love of brotherhood.
...tiple times that they succeeded in getting Rasheed to stop. They were willing to fight back despite the consequences and the fact that they knew Rasheed could bring out so much more anger. Even after attempting to run away and being beaten so badly, they both still showed their bravery. They were on the edge of death, but they still fought every day to stay alive. Mariam shows amazing inner strength when a loved one is involved. Sadness and evil are two things that are very evident in their lives, enough to cause anyone to lose hope in humanity. But, Mariam and Laila are both able to stand up to violence in order to find their courage, inner strength, and even happiness in the end. Life in Afghanistan has always been hard for women, but just like Mariam, women are able to take on these obstacles and overcome them, helping to make the world a safer place for others.
One can easily note the physical and sexual violence brought upon the people (black and white) of Congo after independence, but we must locate the other forms of violence in order to bring the entire story of Patrice Lumumba to light. The director’s attempt at bringing the story of Patrice Lumumba to the “silver screen” had political intentions.
This relates back to Congo, where violence spurred by ethnic rivalries is due to local groups’ desire to make money by getting into the extractive industries. In another example, Newmont, an American company, mines Ghanaian gold and pays the government part of the profits. Here, Burgis shined the spotlight on an environmental issue: the sodium cyanide spill in Kwamebourkrom that killed aquatic life and posed hazardous living conditions for locals (Burgis, 134). Finally, in the last few chapters, Burgis touched on Cecil John Rhodes’ legacy as the founder of De Beers, blood diamonds, imperialism, and violence carried out by local governments and mining companies in order to protect their interests.
Love and war, two concepts that are so contradictory it is hard to believe they could ever coexist simultaneously in one society. War is a state of conflict, hostility and chaos which reeks havoc on civilizations as opposing forces struggle to defend their cause not matter what the price. Throughout history the world has seen the devastation such conflict can bring; from the gory conquests of the ancient Romans, to the horrific Nazi Holocaust in World War II, to the bloody battles between government forces that raged in Afghanistan. It is in this world of mayhem and cruelty that Pashtun women must carry on their lives. They attempt in whatever possible to find and salvage any kind of love and beauty amidst the turmoil of their warring nation. These women must find ways to stay strong and resist the oppression forced upon them by their patriarchal society which coerces them into hard physical labor as well as demeans their humanity as their status is reduced to nothing more than property (Majrouh XIII, XIV). The song of the Pashtun woman is her escape, her release, and her joy as she unites with other women in her community and sings out against her oppression. Through these landays, or songs, one sees another dimension to the lives of Pashtun women as they transform the misery and grief of their everyday lives into a spirit of beauty as they lament against their oppressors and find ways to love even in a time of war.
Alas, in 1961 Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by a US- sponsored plot 7 months after independence, and replaced him with a “puppet dictator named Mobutu” (Kingsolver). In her book, Barbara Kingsolver surfaces a forgotten part of our nation’s history in the exploitation of the Congo through her main characters, the Price family, who are missionaries sent to the Kilanga village. Through characters’ narratives that “double as allegories for the uneasy colonial marriage between the West and Africa” (Hamilton, Jones), Kingsolver creates a relatable way for her readers to understand the theme she is trying to convey, which is “‘what did we do to Africa, and how do we feel about it?’” (Snyder). Kingsolver began with this theme and developed the rest of the novel around it, just as she does with her other works, and sticking with her trademark technique, she utilizes her book as a vessel for “political activism, an extension of the anti-Vietnam protests” she participated in college (Snyder).
... attention allowed economic exploitation in the Congo and its people devastated by human rights abuses, and even today the lack of international attention has caused many conflicts in and around the Congo. The economic exploitation of the Congo during colonial times robbed the country of wealth which could have been used to develop the land, and the lack of wealth has contributed to Congo’s poor standing in the world today. Lastly, the human rights abuses in the Congo Free State contributed to economic and political troubles during the colonial period and has continued into the present day, as human rights abuses are still prevalent in that region of Africa. Due to the lack of international attention, economic exploitation, and human rights abuses, the Congo Free State was harmful to the Congo region of Africa and its legacy continues to harm that region of Africa.
War demands innovation. The constant political corruption and tension between the Congolese Government and its people have forced both sides to resort to drastic measures. The threat of cannibalism is one of the ingenious war tactics that the people of the Congo have used during times of need. While killing someone with a gun, public executions, or torturing have not gotten the desired results, the Congolese viewed cannibalism as the new method for winning the war. During the Congo-Arab War, the Second Congo War, and the violence that still lives on today in the Congo, cannibalism has been a constant presence, but is used in war rather than in terms of survival or desire of human flesh. Though the act of cannibalism cannot make a dead human more dead, it is viewed as a means to kill the opponent’s spirit. The use of cannibalism for psychological warfare is intended to portray the Congolese soldiers as radical and predatory, though it is not part of their historical culture. Without the constant violence throughout the Congo’s history, cannibalism would never have been used by the Congolese as a psychological weapon against their enemies.
The film The Trojan Women does not depict war as most films do, a grueling brawl on the war front between two forces, leaving men and widowed women in its blood-filled wake. This film goes beyond that typical portrayal of war to focus on the aspects of war that viewers are not used to seeing, the effects of war on the homeland. This film primarily centers on the impacts of war that those still at home must endure, left behind by their loved ones who trade life and limb for the safety of their country and family. The widows in this film must cope with multiple torments of war; losing a loved one to battle, leaving their old life behind, and battling the mental hardship that accompanies these tragic events. The film does not place the emphasis
As Marlow passes through the waters of the Congo, it is easily visible the trouble of the natives. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth half coming out, half effaced with the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.” (20) Show that the holding of these colonies has started. The soldiers have come in and taken the inhabitants and are destroying them and taking from them the one thing they deserve over everything, life. The imperialists seem to not care about the Africans and are just there for their land.