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The “F Word” is an essay about an Iranian girl’s struggle with finding who she is, in a foreign land known as the U.S. It acknowledges her inner struggle with an outward showing character of herself that she holds, her name. During the essay the reader learns about how the girl fights her inner feeling of wanting to fit in and her deep rooted Iranian culture that she was brought up to support. Firoozeh Dumas, the girl in the book, and also the author of the essay, uses various rhetorical tactics to aid her audience in grasping the fact that being an immigrant in the U.S. can be a difficult life. To demonstrate her true feelings to the audience as an immigrant in the U.S., she uses similes, parallelism, and even her tone of humor.
The first rhetorical device that is addressed countless times throughout the essay, is the use of similes. Firoozeh uses
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various similes in her essay to express, that growing up with an Iranian first name is not easy, like when she uses the simile, “My first and last name generally served the purpose as a high brick wall” (pg 740). This addresses how much of a struggle it is for her to deal with her name, she feels that it kept people from wanting to become friends with her as a child, and kept people from giving her job opportunities as an adult. Moreover, she feels that when people would notice her name at any age, it would scare them off, only on the grounds that her name was different. The second rhetorical device that is presented frequently, is Firoozeh’s use of parallelism.
She uses parallelism to give people another perspective on how she felt and still feels about being an immigrant in the U.S., so that more people will be able to understand her struggle and be able to relate to it. One of the sentences in the book in which she uses parallelism is, “It made sense at that moment, perhaps by the logic employed moments before bungee jumping” (pg.740). In this sentence Firoozeh compares making the decision to change her name to Julie, to deciding to go bungee jumping. This emphasizes that she had trouble after making this decision and maybe even regretting making the decision because her inner emotions were conflicted. One side of her wanted to just be a normal girl from American while the other side of her wanted to show her heritage and be who she legitimately was. When she references this through the parallelism of someone going bungee jumping, it causes the reader to more easily understand how Firoozeh felt throughout the whole process of changing her name to Julie as a young
girl. The Third rhetorical device that Firoozeh uses throughout the whole essay is her humorous tone. Firoozeh is able to use humor in a topic that is difficult to handle for some readers. With her use of humor Firoozeh is able to open up to her audience easier and share her true feelings without making the essay sound somber or gloomy. The one sentence that I feel grasps the tone in the best way is, “the room was momentarily silent as all these sick people sat united in a moment of gratitude for their own names” (pg. 741). Firoozeh is able to pull a laugh out of the reader after saying this, but is also able to enable the reader to think about the fact that it ought to be difficult to cope with numerous people judging her or not being able to pronounce her name right. Moreover, it causes the reader think about how much judgment Firoozeh gets from her name being a bit different. Firoozeh does such a fantastic job of getting her point across without just saying exactly what she is feeling. Her ability to cause someone laugh, but at the same time think the way that she wants them to think is incredible. Her ability to have people witness an immigrant’s point of view without going into much detail is amazing. Firoozeh does such a wonderful job of using rhetoric in her essay and is amazingly accurate at getting the audience to realize how immigrants genuinely feel when they immigrate to the U.S. at a young or at an older age.
The female, adolescent speaker helps the audience realize the prejudice that is present in a “melting-pot” neighborhood in Queens during the year 1983. With the setting placed in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, the poem allows the audience to examine the experience of a young immigrant girl, and the inequality that is present during this time. Julia Alvarez in “Queens, 1963” employs poetic tools such as diction, figurative language, and irony to teach the reader that even though America is a place founded upon people who were strangers to the land, it is now home to immigrants to claim intolerance for other foreigners, despite the roots of America’s founding.
Funny In Farsi: written by Firoozeh Dumas is a memoir about an Iranian girl that came to America with her family, where they settled in Southern California. Throughout the story, the author shares stories about herself and what it was like to grow up in the United States. Out of many books, this one explains what it means to be an American from the author's perspective using her own experiences and comparisons. Her father Kazem is a very optimistic, encouraging, and clever man that raised his children to be kind-hearted and goal oriented; especially his daughter, Firoozeh.
I chose this word because the tone of the first chapter seems rather dark. We hear stories of the hopes with which the Puritans arrived in the new world; however, these hopes quickly turned dark because the Purtains found that the first buildings they needed to create were a prison, which alludes to the sins they committed; and a cemetery, which contradicts the new life they hoped to create for themselves.
Neil Gaiman – Mr. Gaiman starts his speech with a flashback to the beginning of his career before working his way to his claim. Gaiman then uses examples from his career as grounds to support the claim he made earlier in the speech before going in to some personal values that he feels that his audience (artists) should hear. Throughout the rest of the speech Gaiman uses his firsthand experiences to enforce each personal value and idea that he introduced earlier in the speech before going into his
Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong somewhere? Do you know what it feels like to be told you don’t belong in the place of your birth? People experience this quite frequently, because they may not be the stereotypical American citizen, and are told and convinced they don’t belong in the only place they see as home. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Anzaldúa gives the reader an inside look at the struggles of an American citizen who experiences this in their life, due to their heritage. She uses rhetorical appeals to help get her messages across on the subliminal level and show her perspective’s importance. These rhetorical appeals deal with the emotion, logic and credibility of the statements made by the author. Anzaldúa
Moreover, they made fun of her name with many mocking names started with letter “F.” While reading the story, the readers as well as listeners can actually see and understand Firoozeh’s feelings in particular and immigrants in general. Actually, I am an international student, and I come from Vietnam. I also have that bad experience when Americans cannot say my name, and that makes me sympathize with Firoozeh.
This book addresses the issue of race all throughout the story, which is while it is probably the most discussed aspects of it. The books presentation is very complex in many ways. There is no clear-cut stance on race but the book uses racist language. The racist language durin...
In “My Two Lives”, Jhumpa Lahiri tells of her complicated upbringing in Rhode Island with her Calcutta born-and-raised parents, in which she continually sought a balance between both her Indian and American sides. She explains how she differs from her parents due to immigration, the existent connections to India, and her development as a writer of Indian-American stories. “The Freedom of the Inbetween” written by Sally Dalton-Brown explores the state of limbo, or “being between cultures”, which can make second-generation immigrants feel liberated, or vice versa, trapped within the two (333). This work also discusses how Lahiri writes about her life experiences through her own characters in her books. Charles Hirschman’s “Immigration and the American Century” states that immigrants are shaped by the combination of an adaptation to American...
With the help of these rhetorical choices that the author made, helps the reader to understand why we enjoy telling stories and how it is connected to the cognitive effects of a narrative. For example, if your friend is complaining that how he overwhelmed and exhausted from studying for midterm. From your own experience, you know how it feels like. That is how you have empathy with him and you share your own story about your past experience and might be able to give suggestions that you have done in the past and that worked out for you, so you can help your friend in
Roethke uses a few different literary modes to help create his imagery. Metaphor and similes are figures of speech in which a word or phrase tha...
In conclusion, the use of simile and metaphor throughout the novel bare the evidence that
... they are trying to enforce and protect. She is a part of the same people as all the men, but they do not see her this way. They are trying to cast her out. “…but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine…” Our narrator is an intellectual feminine immigrant who’s self image allows her to see that she is in fact the very same as the men; she is an American. The very idea of being an ‘American’ relates directly to immigration; the United States of America was founded by immigrants exactly like the narrator; the “beautiful absurdity” is the blindness of the men about who they truly are when she already knows “…and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I no longer had to run…”. She is in a safe place hidden from the Ras’s and the Jack’s, right now she is invisible.
In “With a Little Help from My Friends”, Firoozeh Dumas uses figurative language to demonstrate what her life was like in America.
Metaphor criticism would be my rhetorical method of choice. I selected metaphor criticism after reading the prompt above and saw an abundance of metaphors such as “stunning glimpse”, “dizzying height” and “journey to the top” just to name a few.
Culture is a major influence in not only the way we speak, dress, and act; but also a way we view the world. The extent of which culture influences ones’ views is dependent on many things; such as that of personal experiences as well as how one might view others, stereotypes, and even themselves. In different works such as “By Any Other Name”, “Legal Alien”, and “Multi-Culturalism Explained In One Word: HAPA”; we explore the different insights of not only multiple cultures, but almost entirely different worlds’ with the amount of variation between each story. I have personally viewed the different ways ones’ views might be affected, of which they all correlate to the same core message: that of which shows how culture is one of the biggest ways