Freedom is highly subjective as its meaning can change from person to person. History is defined in many ways by the quest for freedom: physical, spiritual, and mental. But how does one know what authentic freedom truly is? Sometimes the individual creates a situation where they are a prisoner and don’t even know it. Without a Name by Yvonne Vera, a woman named Mazvita is raped outside of her village, which begins a journey in which she tries to free herself from her trauma by erasing its memory. She finds her freedom hindered not only by outside forces but her own mind. She in effect becomes her own jailer. True freedom, she discovers can be gained only by unlocking her memory.
Mazvita believes that forgetting is the only way towards freedom, but it ends up trapping her. Lavelle writes that Yvonne Vera uses predominantly two words to articulate the rape: “whispering’ and ‘silence’ (Lavelle 110). Vera writes, “The silence was a treasure. Mazvita felt a quietness creep from the earth to her body as he rested above her, spreading his whispered longing over her” (Vera 35). ‘Whispering’ is used in order to represent the violence of the soldier. Mazvita dissociates herself from her rape both physically and mentally. The ‘silence’ becomes her way to deal with the rape where it says, “she gathered the whispering into a silence that she held tightly within her body (Vera 28). She felt a sense of dismemberment as she let go and dissociates herself from her past. It provided a way to escape the trauma, but it was temporary. Without realizing it, Mazvita begins to take a self-destructive pathway away from freedom.
Mazvita becomes mentally unstable as she continues to repress her memories. She subsequently continues to live as though it...
... middle of paper ...
...ee from these shackles she needed to confront the truth and speak out.
Works Cited
Lavelle, Ruth. "Without a Name: Reclaiming That Which Has Been Taken." Sign and
Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera. By Robert Muponde. Harare: Weaver, 2003. 109-14. Print.
Samuelson, Meg. "Re-membering the Body: Rape and Recovery in Without a Name and
Under the Tongue." Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera. By Robert Muponde. Harare: Weaver, 2003. 93-100. Print.
Toivanen, Anna-Leena. "Remembering the Nation's Aching Spots: Yvonne Vera's
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Vera, Yvonne. Without a Name. Without a Name and Under the Tongue. New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. 5-116. Print
There were many events that happened in the past which people were fighting for their rights and freedoms. In the novel “When The Emperor Was Divine” by Julie Otsuka, she uses this novel to tell the readers about the importance of freedom and human right. In the story, she did not mention the name of the main characters, but the characters that involve in this novel is a Japanese family who get arrest by the American because of their ethnicities. First, their father got arrested by the American because the American doubted that this man was a spy from Japan. Then their whole family got arrested into the Japanese Concentration Camp in the desert. They were ordered not to go through the fence of the camp or else they will get kill by the soldiers who guarding the camp. This means that their freedoms were taken away by the camp. In the story, the girl’s personality was changed because of this camp. She starts to realize that this “camp” was nothing but a jail. So she started to give on her life and not to care about anything. She used to eat with her family, but now she never did; also she started to smoke cigarette in her ages of 14 to15. Also their human rights were being taken while their were in the camp. They were being force to admit to America for their loyalty. It makes all the Japanese people to feel low self-esteem for their identity. Therefore, the author uses this novel to show the changing of this family by the lack of freedom and human right.
Viramontes, Helena. "Miss Clairol." Literature and Gender: Thinking Critically through Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Eds. Robyn Wiegman and Elena Glasberg. New York: Longman, 1999. 78-81. Print.
Sandra Cisneros's writing style in the novel The House on Mango Street transcends two genres, poetry and the short story. The novel is written in a series of poetic vignettes that make it easy to read. These distinguishing attributes are combined to create the backbone of Cisneros's unique style and structure.
Does the book Memoirs of a Woman Of Pleasure have either cultural, social or literary value, thus declaring it not obscene? Or is it a work i...
Based on Vera’s presentation, several factors seem to be relevant to her case. Vera’s reports indicate that she is experiencing faulty thoughts centered around a distortion of her responsibility to protect her mother, as evident by her compulsion to complete time-consuming and distressing rituals to ensure her safety. She also appears
Bailey, Carol. "Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid's "girl" and Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton Spice." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. 10.2 (2011): 106-123. Print.
Divakaruni, C. B. (1995). The disappearance. Compact Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth. 584 - 589
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Madden, Diana. "Wild Child, Tropical Flower, Mad Wife: Female Identity in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. Ed. Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
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The mystery surrounding slaves among the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria, especially as regards outcasts is quite weighty, much like the fate of the Dalits of India. The reluctance of many writers, until recently, to broach this topic betrays the sensitivity of the issue. Buchi Emecheta’s bravery in tackling this topic is marred, in The Bride Price, by the rather, unwarranted death of Akunna, the heroine. Criticisms against Emecheta though apt, do not consider her positive portrayal of slaves and outcasts in her two novels, The Bride Price and The Joys of Motherhood. The incisive juxtaposition of the brutality and mediocre of the freeborn against the benevolence, affluence and influence of the so-called slaves/outcasts is the concern of this paper.
This paper aims to investigate some aspects of postcolonialism, feminism, as well as symbolism, allegories and metaphors. For this purpose I have chosen the novel Disgrace (1999) by J.M Coetzee. The story takes place in Cape Town, in post-apartheid South Africa. David Lurie is a white man and works as a professor of English at a technical university. He is a ‘communication’ lecturer and he teaches ‘romantic literature’ too. Lurie is divorced two times already and one gets the impression that he is not really satisfied with his job. His "disgrace" comes when he makes attempts to seduce Melanie Isaacs, one of his students, against her will. This affair is then remitted to the school authorities and a special committee is convoked to judge his actions.