Identity Formation: The Power of Shared Stories

Maliha Haq
Holton
Honors English
19 February 2016
Writing Prompt
The world has existed for over four billion years and the human race is just sprouting. Yet it seems to be turning against itself in the blink of an eye, all because we can’t find peace. Throughout the centuries, man has made acts of war against one another such as the Holocaust. Our stories collectively shape our identities and as a result, we carry a responsibility to society to share them. From those dark days during the Holocaust until today, the idea of identity has always been the same; the fact of being whom or what a person or thing is. The stories that we tell about ourselves shape our lives. These stories can create different ways on how we interact with others, and

An idea struck that from all that he had been through, all aspects of everything changed. He went into the concentration camps having one solid identity and came out with other. In other words, from our memories, experiences and personal stories, our identity can change. Another incident that occurred in Night similarly happened in the Genocide of Rwanda. In Night, Elie wrote, “In the afternoon, they made us line up. Three prisoners brought a table and some medical instruments. We were told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. The three "veteran" prisoners needled in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” Elie said he “became” the number and from that moment on, he had no other name. This was a significant moment about his identity because he had lost himself. When the Nazis tattooed the label on his arm, not only physically but mentally his identity was lost forever. In the article about the genocide of Rwanda, it talks about the 800,000 deaths of Tutsis by the Hutu extremists in only the span of 100 days. “The killings then spread throughout the countryside as Hutu militia, armed with machetes, clubs, guns and grenades,

If not in the first person, the knowledge is granted down by every generation. The Terrible Things specifically as a whole reflects the importance of the need to share their experiences to shape history no matter the circumstances of the audience, for a sole purpose; to educate for the future. Bunting starts the story by explaining that forest animals lived in peace with one another until the terrible things came. First, the Terrible Things came for things with feathers and the rest of the animals let them take them away without hesitation, just being glad it wasn’t them. As the story progresses one by one the terrible things took each set of animals, leaving the white rabbits as the last set. Eventually, the terrible things took them also; accept one little rabbit got away. “‘I should have tried to help the other rabbits,’ he thought. ‘If only we creatures had stuck together, it could have been different.’ Sadly, Little Rabbit left the clearing. He’d go tell other forest creatures about the Terrible Things. He hoped someone would listen.” Eve Bunting, the author of this allegory, wrote this to educate children about the Holocaust in an undisturbed way. The little rabbit came to the understanding that he was the only witness left to warn any other potential victims of this crime. There is not a reason to withheld information that could make a difference. The Holocaust is one of these things. If the bystanders joined together sooner and acted