An individual’s identity is intricately woven from the experiences they have and the values they hold. In a sociocultural context, one’s identity is constructed through “their interactions and relationships with others” (Fraser 1). Individually, one’s identity is established through their values and experiences. Sometimes, these two facets of identity are at odds, leading to conflict between self-perception and societal expectations. Examples of such conflicts can be seen in the characters from Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and Simple Recipes, by Madeleine Thien. In Homegoing, Gyasi describes the experiences of two sisters, Effia and Esi, and multiple generations of their descendants as they try to navigate through life in the oppressive era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. In Simple Recipes, Thien provides an intimate view into the life of the daughter of an immigrant family struggling to …show more content…
Moreover, both stories accentuate the necessity to resolve such conflicts through the authors’ vivid depictions of the consequences of failing to do so. In Homegoing and Simple Recipes, Gyasi and Thien make use of various literary techniques, including symbolism, metaphors, and imagery, to explore the profound physical and emotional turmoil that arises as a consequence of an individual's failure to reconcile the conflict between societal and individual perceptions of one’s race and heritage. Thien and Gyasi skillfully utilize symbolism to vividly depict the consequences of failing to resolve the conflict between societal and individual perceptions. In Effia’s chapter, Gyasi uses the dungeon and Effia’s necklace to symbolize Western society’s perception of Effia. Those of the same culture and race as her, like her sister, who has the same necklace, are oppressed and enslaved; they consider women like her not even worthy of being
The meal, and more specifically the concept of the family meal, has traditional connotations of comfort and togetherness. As shown in three of Faulkner’s short stories in “The Country”, disruptions in the life of the family are often reinforced in the plot of the story by disruptions in the meal.
Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes” is a story of an immigrant family and their struggles to assimilate to a new culture. The story follows a father and daughter who prepare Malaysian food, with Malaysian customs in their Canadian home. While the father and daughter work at home, the mother and son do otherwise outside the home, assimilating themselves into Canadian culture. The story culminates in a violent beating to the son by his father with a bamboo stick, an Asian tool. The violent episode served as an attempt by the father to beat the culture back into him: “The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brothers back” (333) Violence plays a key role in the family dynamic and effects each and every character presented in the story
Something that has always fascinated me is the confrontation with a completely different culture. We do not have to travel far to realize that people really lead different lives in other countries and that the saying "Home sweet home" often applies to most of us. What if we suddenly had to leave our homes and settle somewhere else, somewhere where other values and beliefs where common and where people spoke a different language? Would we still try to hang on to the 'old home' by speaking our mother tongue, practising our own religion and culture or would we give in to the new and exciting country and forget our past? And what would it be like for our children, and their children? In Identity Lessons - Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American I found many different stories telling us what it is like to be "trapped" between two cultures. In this short essay I aim to show that belonging to two cultures can be very confusing.
Immigrants come to America, the revered City upon a Hill, with wide eyes and high hopes, eager to have their every dream and wild reverie fulfilled. Rarely, if ever, is this actually the case. A select few do achieve the stereotypical ‘rags to riches’ transformation – thus perpetuating the myth. The Garcia family from Julia Alvarez’s book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, fall prey to this fairytale. They start off the tale well enough: the girls are treated like royalty, princesses of their Island home, but remained locked in their tower, also known as the walls of their family compound. The family is forced to flee their Dominican Republic paradise – which they affectionately refer to as simply, the Island – trading it instead for the cold, mean streets of American suburbs. After a brief acclimation period, during which the girls realize how much freedom is now available to them, they enthusiastically try to shed their Island roots and become true “American girls.” They throw themselves into the American lifestyle, but there is one slight snag in their plan: they, as a group, are unable to forget their Island heritage and upbringing, despite how hard they try to do so. The story of the Garcia girls is not a fairytale – not of the Disney variety anyway; it is the story of immigrants who do not make the miraculous transition from rags to riches, but from stifling social conventions to unabridged freedom too quickly, leaving them with nothing but confusion and unresolved questions of identity.
Perhaps one of the biggest issues foreigners will come upon is to maintain a strong identity within the temptations and traditions from other cultures. Novelist Frank Delaney’s image of the search for identity is one of the best, quoting that one must “understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors . . . to build our identities”. For one, to maintain a firm identity, elderly characters often implement Chinese traditions to avoid younger generations veering toward different traditions, such as the Western culture. As well, the Chinese-Canadians of the novel sustain a superior identity because of their own cultural village in Vancouver, known as Chinatown, to implement firm beliefs, heritage, and pride. Thus in Wayson Choy’s, The Jade Peony, the novel discusses the challenge for different characters to maintain a firm and sole identity in the midst of a new environment with different temptations and influences. Ultimately, the characters of this novel rely upon different influences to form an identity, one of which being a strong and wide elderly personal
In conclusion, all three stories are unique in their use of culture. Each uses clashes in culture or a unique cultural setting to convey a message. In each story, this culture gives us a unique perspective into other people's lives and the conflicts they face. The way the conflict is handled is a decision left to the individual, who is guided by his cultural upbringing. Each culture handles the problem differently giving us a multitude of different points of view. Three of such perspectives are examined by Everyday Use, A & P, and Blue Winds Dancing.
Rather, it is about exploring the ‘possibility of finding nourishment and sustenance in a hybrid cultural/culinary identity’ through re-creating a family ritual that connects ‘cultural and the culinary’ (Beauregard 59) and sets the stage for a changed relationship between Muriel, her mother and Naoe.
Equality in American Democracy American democracy changed drastically after the Civil War. One of the major changes in American democracy was equality. Today, American citizens are more equal than the Americans before the Civil War. Major movements, events, and government decisions changed the way people view equality today. Some of these changes improved the equality between American citizens, but others only increased the inequality.
Moving from the unpleasant life in the old country to America is a glorious moment for an immigrant family that is highlighted and told by many personal accounts over the course of history. Many people write about the long boat ride, seeing The Statue of Liberty and the “golden” lined streets of New York City and how it brought them hope and comfort that they too could be successful in American and make it their home. Few authors tend to highlight the social and political developments that they encountered in the new world and how it affected people’s identity and the community that they lived in. Authors from the literature that we read in class highlight these developments in the world around them, more particularly the struggles of assimilating
This essay will focus on how the novel Passing by Nella Larsen engages with the theme identity. Before proceeding, it is worth defining identity in order to understand how that definition does and does not work in the analysis of Passing. According to the Oxford dictionary, identity means ‘the fact of being who or what a person or thing is’, it is ‘the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is’. A person retains a sense of self identity, or a sense that they belong in a culture or people. The characters in Passing do not adhere to this definition. Larsen explores the complex issue of racial identity and identification in her novel Passing. The novel not only refers to the sociological occurrence of blacks passing as white peoples, but it signifies the loss of racial identity. Even though they are trying to tolerate identities appointed to them by society, they have lost a sense of belonging; they are detached and isolated from their race. With the abrupt ending of the two protagonists failing, Larsen illustrates that ‘passing’, while useful in order to gain acceptance, ultimately limits a person’s independence to the extent of death.
In the world of literature nothing is more compelling than reading a story and feeling as though you yourself are witnessing firsthand the events and character’s struggles unfold, due to the interactive language and intricate details the author incorporates into their writing. It is through Alice Walker’s conversational style of writing, and vivid use of symbolism that she is able to give an elaborate description of the family culture gap in the story allowing the readers to explore the concept of African- American heritage. These writing techniques also play a major role in keeping the readers engaged from start to finish. This is especially evident in Walker’s short story “Everyday Use”. Walker has skillfully honed her craft and by integrating
This article, Life as a Maid’s Daughter by Mary Romero, takes the reader through the life a girl named Teresa. She lived a unique life, because she was able to see the differences ways in which different races and social classes of people live in America. Teresa and her mother Carmen are lower class Mexican-Americans, and the people that Carmen is a maid for are upper-middle class white Americans. Throughout her life Teresa learns about different aspects of herself (i.e. race, social class, gender, and family) through interactions with her biological family and the families of the employers.
Due to the colonial ideas of heteronormativity and traditional family roles, Caribbean people, much like Chandin, forced themselves to embody these ideals (Rosenthal 3/20/17). “But evenings, sitting quietly in the living room with his new family, he had a very definite place. The Reverend had a chair that he alone sat in, as did Mrs. Thoroughly, and Lavinia invariably lay on her back or stomach on the very same portion of rug… near her mother. Chandin found that… [his] chair became an antidote to the chaos of his uprootedness” (Mootoo 31). With this depiction of the family member’s place in their living room, Mootoo suggests that European family’s heteronormativity places family members in ridged and fixed locations in the family hierarchy. As Chandin feels that he is integrated into this family system, he feels more accepted into the European way of life. Because of this acceptance, he further distances himself from the society in which he formerly belonged. With the acknowledgement of the changes caused by the heteronormative family roles, one sees that the family roles reinforce European images of how society should look (Rosenthal 3/20/17). This reconfiguration of the home makes it a more disputed and contentious place for those that do not parallel with the roles of heteronormative families (Rosenthal 3/22/17). Because the home becomes a disputed place, it
In Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, the omniscient narration of the lives of the descendants of Maame, an enslaved woman, depicts slavery’s lasting legacy of suffering and fragmentation. The pain and suffering that it inflicts is inherited across generations, as slavery and its vestiges rupture the humanity of anyone that experiences it. This rupture is evident through the physical and mental scars caused by the fire and the Firewoman, as much like fire, slavery wrecks and ravages anything and anyone that it touches, and its scars are very much lasting. The fire, therefore, serves as a metaphor for slavery, while the Firewoman’s enduring and haunting presence throughout the novel represents one particular repercussion of slavery, and one that can also be felt through generations. The Firewoman, in this case, represents ruptured mothering, as slavery perpetually damages and alters the meaning and the practice of motherhood. Furthermore, the Firewoman’s haunting nature and the
A main theme in this novel is the influence of family relationships in the quest for individual identity. Our family or lack thereof, as children, ultimately influences the way we feel as adults, about ourselves and about others. The effects on us mold our personalities and as a result influence our identities. This story shows us the efforts of struggling black families who transmit patterns and problems that have a negative impact on their family relationships. These patterns continue to go unresolved and are eventually inherited by their children who will also accept this way of life as this vicious circle continues.