Binti, The Daughter of a Harmonizer. “All things are connected, like the blood that unites us. We do not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves,” the nineteenth-century tribe leader, Chief Seattle, once said. The short novel Binti, written by Nnedi Okorafor, demonstrates the idea of culture within a tribe called the Himba. The protagonist, Binti, leaves home and goes on a long, treacherous journey through the universe. She ends up creating harmony and joining two worlds that previously showed violence toward each other. Numerous individuals state that Binti is the daughter of a Himba tribe. She embodies this culture with her long red skirts, jingling anklets, and body and hair covered …show more content…
Before Binti, the world was in a state of fear and hatred. All humans feared the Meduse, and all Meduse thought humans were violent. Binti expresses this feeling when she hides from the Meduse in the text where it states, “The loud bang of something hard and powerful hitting the door made me yelp.Evil thing, I heard the one called Okwu say. Of all the voices, that one I could recognize. It was the angriest and scariest. Then the female voice said, Open this door. No!” (Okorafor 42). The Meduse wants Binti to open the door she fearfully hides behind, but Binti refuses with the thought of what could happen if she did. This idea frightens her as the “angriest and scariest” Meduse calls her evil. Binti twitches with the “loud bang,” horrified that if she opened the door to this other world, she would be connecting two things that, if connected, would have a horrific end. The Meduse and human worlds see each other as violent, with no intention of ever becoming interconnected. Humans are scared of the Meduse, and the Meduse wants to kill humans. Okwu, the main Meduse, expresses this feeling by saying, “Humans only understand violence.Humans must be killed before they kill us” (Okorafor 43). The relationship between Meduse and humans is unstable. The Meduse believe that humans “only understand violence,” but the Meduse contradict their own beliefs by killing all of the …show more content…
People in Binti’s culture become harmonizers from a young age, taking these practices to succor and fuse relationships with others. Binti expresses her skills by saying, “And so I became a master harmonizer by the age of twelve. I could communicate with spirit flow and convince them to become current” (Okorafor 31). Binti has been a harmonizer since a very young age. She uses her harmonizing skills to create balance and community within the Meduse and human world. Binti eases the tension between these two worlds and connects them. Part of Binti’s culture is being a harmonizer. Before Binti, the Meduse wanted to kill all humans, but now the Meduse have learned to stay peaceful because of Binti. Binti uses these master harmonizer skills, learned from a young age, to interact with Oomza Uni and impact their beliefs and teachings. One of the Oomza Uni leaders wants to make everyone feel welcomed and says, “We of Oomza Uni wish Okwu to stay behind as the first Meduse student to attend the university and as a showing of allegiance between Oomza Uni governments and the Meduse and the renewal of the pact between human and Meduse” (Okorafor 79). Binti is a mathematical harmonizer. Oomza Uni is a prestigious college interested in Binti and her specialties. She impacts Oomza Uni to change their ideas and behaviors. Oomza Uni wishes to “Renew[al] the pact” for the
Trauma, abuse, displacement, and feelings of alienation have, and is still plaguing the Aboriginal community. Author Eden Robinson and playwright Constance Lindsay Skinner address the displacement, mistreatment, and abuse the indigenous population has faced, and still faces, in Monkey Beach and Birthright. Both Eden Robinson's novel Monkey Beach, and playwright Constance Lindsay Skinner's Birthright deals with characters who are struggling with trauma and haunted with scars from the past. The authors detail these events and bring the reader into the “shoes” of the characters through characterization, imagery, dialogue, and through revealing intimate memories of the characters. These literary techniques enable the reader to see the parallel between the cyclical, ambiguous state of nature, and the ambiguity in humans and how there is a perpetuating, intergenerational cycle of violence caused by abuse and the mistreatment of the Aboriginal.
The chapter I read opened my eyes to Culture and Conflict. The story discussed conflict between Bina and Kevin, and their relationship with Binas parents. Binas parents were unimpressed that Bina decided to marry a man from a different culture, which is an untraditional act. This caused conflict between Bina and Kevin’s relationship. Kevin promised Bina that he would try and practice a more Indian lifestyle, but over time these promises started to fail. This put tension on their relationship and often made Bina feel self-conscious about her relationship. In the end Bina came to realize she could practice still practice her culture, Kevin’s family’s culture and their new Canadian culture.
...heir novels, The Round House and The God of Small Things. Both of these authors present ancient religious and cultural traditions – namely stories of the windigoo and the concept of Love Laws – as deciding factors in how the characters in their novels interact with each other and how the plots develop. Past events, Pappachi’s disappointment and Linda Lark’s abandonment, are shown to be important to the way that characters live their lives in both of these novels. In both The Round House and The God of Small Things historically prevalent struggles such as the ones between native and foreign religions and the ones between white people and non-white people are shown to be incredibly influential on the ways that the characters of the present view the world and those around them. In both of these works the authors show that the past is a massive influence on the present.
The constant struggle present in the novel is the conflict between the native world and the white world. It is a struggle between community and isolation, between the natural and material. Silko uses the characters in the novel to show the positive and negative influences of the contact of cultures. Specifically, the characters Tayo, Emo, and Betonie are prime examples of the manifestation of the two worlds and the effects it has on each characters actions, dispositions and beliefs.
Sun Gods, wolf people, and moons who snatch people up from the sky and dispose of their body in a nearby tree. These are just a few images that are present in the novel Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey by Jamake Highwater. This novel presents a traditional perspective on a unique American Indian Culture. It is filled with themes that are common to the American Indian Culture such as magic, personification of nonhuman subjects, loyalty, coming of age and the hero’s journey, and cultural identity. Highwater uses many of these themes to give the reader insight into his unique cultural background.
His writing is very informal as he studies this tribe and also compares and contrasts the group of Pygmies to Africans in a local town (newer tribe). He takes the BaMbuti tribe (pygmies) who are perhaps a 10,000-year-old tribe, and he compares them to a group in the Bantu village, who lives right next to the forest and are a more recent tribe. He begins his writing by introducing the readers to the pygmies. He goes through and introduces multiple families and their family members, making it more real. He introduces Ekianga and his multiple wives, Kenge, and others.
An important theme in Potiki is the enduring idea that creating and sharing stories as a central part of being human is important. It is a significant theme because the novel is heavily imbued with Maori culture, in which the stories and spoken teachings are given prominence, and also because it is a popular belief that people need narratives to give meaning, structure and value to their lives. This theme is displayed resolutely and poignantly in Potiki’s plot, characters, setting and symbolism, as the people of a small rural New Zealand community rediscover themselves through stories spoken and found in Maori carvings. The idea that humans need narratives is the core theme in Potiki, and it is used also to link other themes and aspects of the novel; it is in this way that we know the idea of storytelling is an intrinsic part of the novel’s structure.
Were Dash’s audience to return to the South Sea islands eighty years after “Daughters of the Dust” they might find the Gullah people and their lives similar to those of the Willow Springs of Naylor’s novel. Although nearly a century spans between them, these two people nevertheless share many traits. Many of the residents of Willow Springs answer to a nickname given them as a child; similarly, Viola Peazant reminisces about the nicknames given to children in Ibo Landing. Members of both communities, generations from Africa and steeped in “modernity,” still come to the traditional herbalist for help in matters of the body and spirit: Eula uses Nana’s medicine to contact the soul of her deceased mother; Bernice and Ambush come to Mama Day to heal Bernice when she becomes ill, and later for help in conceiving a child. Both Nana Peazant and Mama Day draw their knowledge from a life lived on their respective islands and their strength from their ancestors, whom they visit and tend at the village graveyards. And like Nana Peazant, Mama Day struggles to maintain a tie with her family members who have left the island and immersed themselves in the mainstream culture.
...d and left with little cultural influence of their ancestors (Hirschman 613). When the children inadvertently but naturally adapting to the world around them, such as Lahiri in Rhode Island, the two-part identity begins to raise an issue when she increasingly fits in more both the Indian and American culture. She explains she “felt an intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new”, in which she evidently doing well at both tasks (Lahiri 612). The expectations for her to maintain her Indian customs while also succeeding in learning in the American culture put her in a position in which she is “sandwiched between the country of [her] parents and the country of [her] birth”, stuck in limbo, unable to pick one identity over the other.
Born and raised in a family of storytellers, it’s no wonder that this author, Louise Erdrich became a prolific writer. Louise was born in Little Falls, Minnesota. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, near the Chippewa Reservation with her mom, who had Native American roots and her dad who was of German descent. Her parents encouraged and challenged her at an early age to read, also to write stories and even paid her a nickel for each one that she wrote. Lorena Stookey states that Louise Erdrich’s style of writing is “like William Faulkner, she creates a fictional world and peoples it with multiple narrators whose voices commingle to shape her readers’ experience of that world” (Stookey 14). Louise writes this moving story “The Shawl” as she is haunted by the sorrows of the generations of her people, the Anishinaabeg. I initially saw this tale as a very complex reading, but after careful reading and consideration, saw it as a sad and compelling story.
The vast majority of sound used in the film is non-diegetic, especially the musical ideas, which is
the tribe went through a set of four worlds until it would come to inhabit the one we live in today.
...toward the close of the novel that "He had only heard and seen the world as it had always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time" (246). Ironically, though these transitions, changes in the specific vernacular or ritual may be significant from generation to generation, the underlying theme remains constant: we are inseparable from the universe. "I already heard these stories before... only thing is the names sound different" (260). Within the self imposed boundaries of the text, each story creates new space for thoughts and emotions which are common to the human condition. Perhaps because the story houses the possibility for our ultimate destruction or redemption, Silko describes the story, its creation, its meaning, as the defining moment of humanity.
Eden Robinson is a Haisla writer who was born at Haisla Nation Kitimaat Reserve on 19th January 1968 (“Eden Robinson” 2007). She has a Haisla father and a Heiltsuk mother and spent both her childhood and her adolescence in the Reserve (“Eden Robinson” 2007). Robinson obtained a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of Victoria and also earned a master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia (“Eden Robinson” 2007). Monkey Beach is her first novel and was published in 2000 (“Eden Robinson” 2007).
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, the protagonist, Gogol, struggles with his cultural identity. He is an American-born Bengali struggling to define himself. He wants to fit into the typical American-lifestyle, a lifestyle his parents do not understand. This causes him tension through his adolescence and adult life, he has trouble finding a balance between America and Bengali culture. This is exemplified with his romantic relationships. These relationships directly reflect where he is in his life, what he is going through and his relationship with his parents. Each woman indicates a particular moment in time where he is trying to figure out his cultural identity. Ruth represents an initial break away from Bengali culture; Maxine represents