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Religion as a coping method
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In her memoir Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, Immaculée Ilibagiza endures horrific tragedies as everyone around her is viciously killed by Hutus during Rwanda’s genocide. In the course of just three months she loses almost everyone that she loves except her oldest brother, Aimable. However, despite everything that she goes through, Immaculée forgives the Hutus that wronged her and changed her life forever. Immaculée did not forgive for the good of others but rather for herself. It would do her no good to hold on to her negative feelings for the rest of her life as they would continue to eat at her. With the help of her extreme devotion to God she was able to let go and move on with her life, but without forgetting what had happened to her, her family, and many of the people that were close to her. Without her love for God, she would not have survived living in the bathroom for so long. It was very hard for her to forgive those that trespassed against her, and almost unimaginable to readers that she had the ability to do so, but it was the right thing for her to do. Even when Immaculée was younger and her life was virtually perfect growing up she was a devout Roman Catholic and felt close to God. “I loved praying, going to church, and everything else to do with God. I especially loved the Virgin Mary, believing that she was my second mom, watching out for me from heaven. I didn’t know why, but praying made me feel warm and happy” (Ilibagiza 6). Praying to God was always second nature for Immaculée and a part of who she was. At a young age she agreed with her father when she was told that one could never pray too much. She worshiped her parents almost as much as she worshiped God and learned to have a go... ... middle of paper ... ...e words to share with him, which just goes to show again exactly how strong of a person she was. Immaculée answers the guard’s bewildered questions with a very simple, yet powerful, line to end the final chapter: “Forgiveness is all I have to offer” (Ilibagiza 204). She probably never said something so true again in her life. After spending so much of her energy and emotions in not allowing herself to go around with hatred in her heart, she has nothing left. Forgiveness is a coping mechanism for her, and has left her feeling empty inside when it is all over. After all that she went through, Immaculée was able to find a way to have closure without any more violence because she did not wish to perpetrate the cycle. Works Cited Ilibagiza, Immaculée, and Steve Erwin. Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2006. Print.
Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness spoke to me about the question of forgiveness and repentance. Simon Wiesenthal was a Holocaust prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He experienced many brutal and uneasy experiences that no human being should experience in their lifetime and bear to live with it. Death, suffering, and despair were common to Simon Wiesenthal that he questioned his own religious faith because he asks why would his God allow the Holocaust happen to his people to be slaughter and not do anything to save them. During Simon Wiesenthal time as a Jewish Holocaust, Simon was invited to a military hospital where a dying Nazi SS officer wanted to have a conversation. The Nazi SS officer told Simon his story of his life and confesses to Simon of his horrific war crimes. Ultimately, the SS officer wanted forgiveness for what he done to Simon’s Jewish people. Simon Wiesenthal could not respond to his request, because he did not know what to do with a war criminal that participate in mass genocide to Simon’s people. Simon Wiesenthal lives throughout his life on asking the same crucial question, “What would I have done?” (Wiesenthal 98). If the readers would be on the exact situation as Simon was
According to Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, between 1880 and about World War I, the vast majority of Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians came to the United States populating neighborhoods in New York and the Lower East Side is the best example. One thing, which was common to the immigrant experience is that, all immigrants come to the United States as the “land of opportunity”. They come to America with different types of expectations that are conditioned by their origins and families. But every immigrant comes to America wanting to make himself/herself into a person, to be an individual and to become somebody. In this case, the author showed in Bread Givers, Sarah’s desire to make herself into something and bring something unique to America, which only she can bring. It is an effort to understand the immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants, from a woman’s point of view. The book shows that it was a challenge for Jewish immigrant children, particularly females, on the account of the intensity of their family’s connections and obligations that was so critical for the immigrant communities. This was true for the immigrants who came to settle in the neighborhoods like the one Sarah and her family settled in.
...he shows us her character, not by how she gives herself respect, but by the continued respect that she gives to others: even her tormenters. Her secret shame was kept inside, and it was an impossible burden to bear. She was brave.
In the poem pride, Dahlia Ravikovitch uses many poetic devices. She uses an analogy for the poem as a whole, and a few metaphors inside it, such as, “the rock has an open wound.” Ravikovitch also uses personification multiple times, for example: “Years pass over them as they wait.” and, “the seaweed whips around, the sea bursts forth and rolls back--” Ravikovitch also uses inclusive language such as when she says: “I’m telling you,” and “I told you.” She uses these phrases to make the reader feel apart of the poem, and to draw the reader in. She also uses repetition, for example, repetition of the word years.
"My Children are black. They don't look like your children. They know that they are black, and we want it recognized. It's a positive difference, an interesting difference, and a comfortable natural difference. At least it could be so, if you teachers learned to value difference more. What you value, you talk about.'" p.12
"Rwanda Genocide 20 Years On: 'We Live with Those Who Killed Our Families. We Are Told They're Sorry, but Are They?'" The Guardian. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.
In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.
Ronald Reagan once said, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.” I read the book, Dancing in the dark by Morris Dickstein. This book was about the great depression, and the impacts it had on American life. The traditional thought of poverty, people dying of hunger and people lying in the roads, has been erased. America has abolished poverty by the traditional standards but the thought of poverty and what it is has changed. In America we consider poverty to be spending all your money on bills, so you have no money left for food to feed your family. We consider poverty to be just being poor. One-Third of our population makes less than $38,000. This is not enough to be able to be above the poverty line. Anything below this “line” is considered being poverty. How do they decide this line? They take the cost of a very basic diet, and they multiply it by three, for a family of three. That being said, One-half of the jobs in America pay below $38,000 a year, so no wonder we are losing the war on poverty.
When the Rwandan Hutu majority betrayed the Tutsi minority, a destructive mass murdering broke out where neighbor turned on neighbor and teachers killed their students; this was the start of a genocide. In this paper I will tell you about the horrors the people of Rwanda had to face while genocide destroyed their homes, and I will also tell you about the mental trauma they still face today.
...appened because of a variety of reasons; long struggle of the Hutu, knowing that they were different and a bane aspiration to being able to be placed in an important place in society, holding a good position in government or in Church, for example. However, greed was not the reason for the killings. Perpetrators were poor, as poor as their victims were and neither the killings started in the poorest regions of Rwanda (Stratus, 2006). Now, focusing on religion to Rwandans Religion became so important because they became aware of “something bigger than themselves”, understanding that with God everything is possible, they realised that their life must had a meaning. Faith was obviously their food, the source of the strength that kept motivating them to commit the “work”. Now, they forgive, now they ask for forgiveness and once again, the power of religion is upon them.
There is perhaps no greater joy in life than finding one’s soul mate. Once found, there is possibly no greater torment than being forced to live without them. This is the conflict that Paul faces from the moment he falls in love with Agnes. His devotion to the church and ultimately God are thrown into the cross hairs with the only possible outcome being one of agonizing humiliation. Grazia Deledda’s The Mother presents the classic dilemma of having to choose between what is morally right and being true to one’s own heart. Paul’s inability to choose one over the other consumes his life and everyone in it.
Parents tell their children to think first and act second. Most people forget this as illustrated in Yann Martel’s satire “We ate the Children Last,” written in 2004. It starts out with an operation and humans are given a pigs digestive tract to cure cancer. Because the operation made people eat garbage, they gave it to the poor At this point everybody wants to have this operation. When people started going cannibalistic, the government puts them together to eat each other. This started out as a good thing by curing cancer. After that everybody from the poor to the people administering the operation didn’t pause long enough to consider the consequences. Real world examples of people not pausing to consider the consequences are seen frequently, whether, it be on a small or big scale. Yann Martel is saying that
Whatever sins man commits in his lifetime, he is punished for them. If only he repents for his sins, can he be forgiven and at least he can die in peace. God forgives them only when they repent for their sins. The story also presents another example of the Christian belief in sin and punishment, which is based on the strict principles of repentance and forgiveness. In the story, Karen is a poor but beautiful girl.
A New Vision of Reality All throughout history human societies have been built and destroyed. The sand is destroyed. When destruction was within a society rather than from outside influences. that society may have survived if problems had been recognized and resolutions to those problems applied. In today's age, society is not only.
Mariamma Ba’s So Long a Letter and the role women and impact of western culture on Islamic women in post-colonial Senegal: A critical analysis of Aissatou.