Resilience, And Maturity In A Little Piece Of Ground By Elizabeth Laird

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War, Resilience, and Maturity: A Mutual Relationship

Recounting her life in the Middle East, Elizabeth Laird shows the terrors faced in Palestine due to Israeli occupation. Describing the experiences of various characters throughout the book, and emphasizing on the Palestinian point of view in this conflict, Elizabeth Laird created the book A Little Piece of Ground in the hopes of teaching readers an important moral. Laird uses the symbolism of Hopper’s ground, Karim’s direct and indirect conflict with the Israelis, and Hopper’s losses through Israeli dispute to describe the theme of resilience. This set of developed elements in the book suggests that Laird portrays war as a mutual developer of resilience, which affects the maturity of a person. …show more content…

The first way that Elizabeth Laird displayed this was in chapter 6, where the Aboudi family was driving to their olive farm. Along the way, the Aboudis were stopped at a checkpoint. As Lamia, Karim’s mother said, the Israelis wanted “‘To humiliate them.’” (Laird 39). Humiliating Palestinians of many ages as they were forced to strip, “‘In front of their families, and strangers.’” (Laird 39). This shows resilience for both Karim and his father Hassan as from the father’s perspective, Hassan could have resisted and fought back against the Israelis, but this wouldn’t have actually solved that much as he would have sacrificed the protection of his family by conducting those actions. However, the father made the right decision as he wanted to protect his family and he faced utter humiliation in order to achieve this. Resilience means the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and this is shown in the passage as the father doesn’t even speak of the occurrence after it happened and he was resilient in the way that he recovered quickly and became strong. This was resilience by Karim because Karim had always hated the Israelis and had a strong urge to fight back, however in that scenario he was mature enough not to be completely overcome by fear and hatred and try to retaliate against the Israelis. This led to the safety of his family and proves that Karim was gaining resilience and maturity because of his constant experience in a conflict

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