Copper Sun Compare and Contrast Essay! The book Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper is an exciting and emotional story about an African girl named Amari and her journey from Africa to America. Amari is a young girl from a lovely village in Africa then taken as a slave and working on a plantation for a really horrible plantation owner, named Mr. Derby. Amari is raped and treated horribly from the white men every day. She has no family and wants to give up hope, she wants to die. First, Amari’s journey starts off on a smelly, ruggedy ship where she is unclothed and raped every night, then she is taken to a plantation in the American Colonies, working for the Derby family where she is beaten and abused from her plantation owner, because …show more content…
First of all in her hometown in Africa she is not a slave and has a family who loves her. She is not treated in an abusive manner and is actually laughing and happy in that period of time. She loves her village, Ziavi in Africa and her friends, especially her brother, Kwasi who makes her laugh and feel happy about life. Then all heck breaks loose and the white men came to Africa to kill and harm her village and her people, including Amari. The white men kills her family and her brother, Kwasi, which leads Amari to have nobody to love and no one to over her in return. She is now treated as a slave and is taken to a horrible ship on the Middle Passage where she is beaten and smacked all day long, and raped every night by the white men. The ship is smelly with the scent and look of blood. The ship is very different in Africa because in the ship she is treated like a slave and is not happy and full of hope. Actually, Amari wants to give up hope and does not want to live anymore. That makes the difference in her beloved hometown in Africa, where she is laughing and full of hope and the smelly, old ship where she is now a slave and beaten and smacked every day and night, and where she wants to give up hope very
As I researched the novel I also learned that the author, Shenaaz Nanji, became a refugee after the expulsion of the Indians of Uganda. This knowledge about the author’s personal experience was a defining factor in how I related to the novel and the impact it had on me. Knowing that she went through the same thing that Sabine experienced in the novel made the story so much more than just a book.
Sharon M. Draper’s Copper Sun had many impactful quotes that affected the characters and their ideas, most of them revolving around hope, as the message of the novel is hope is necessary for one to live and be motivated. Early on in the book, Afi was preparing Amari for the slave trading, telling Amari, “Find beauty wherever you can, child. It will keep you alive,” (Draper 64) basically telling Amari not to focus on the unpleasant parts in her experiences. The quote affects Amari many times throughout the duration of the novel, one of the first at the Derby plantation. At the plantation, Clay forced Amari to bed with him, and Amari was disgusted. As an attempt to distract herself, during their nightly encounters, Amari would think of her
However, instead of allowing the corruption and grief of losing a significant figure in her life completely consume her, Leah embraces a new culture and turns to another male figure, her husband Anatole, for guidance. With new surrounding influences, Leah encounters various forms of separation, whether it be from her birthplace, father, or husband, and accepts all the drawbacks and loses that come along with the isolation. At the same time, Leah also challenges herself to overcome the loss and succumb to the loneliness that could potentially bring her closer to a new aspect of life never explored before. Through it all, Leah turns her experiences with exile into bittersweet memories sprinkled across the time span of her life for each rift allowed her to obtain a sense of self identity during periods of time free of human contact or, in Leah’s case,
Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later
The setting of the Indigo Plantation has a negative along with positive influence on her. Firstly, the plantation negatively impacts Amniata as she becomes accustomed to slavery which will drastically change her outlook on life, “That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future” (267). This illustrates how Amniata perspective is altered. She has come to realize that she lacks the control she once had on her own life, and that as a slave she is someone who is not considered to be worthy of respect, or basic human rights. On the other hand, despite the negative influence of the plantation, it also has a positive impact on Aminata. She is able to acquire useful knowledge through Georgia and Mamed that will help her to survive later on in life, "Georgia was teaching me how to survive in the land of the bukra but maybe Mamed could teach me how to get out...(216)". Aminata endures many hardships on Appleby 's plantation, but simultaneously she is able to meet people such as Georgia and Mamed who teach her valuable skills such as reading and medical treatments, which will enable her to survive in the future and be more successful. Their lessons are things she will never
“The buyers of slaves had arrived. The other women and I were striped naked. I bit my lip, determined not to cry. But I couldn’t stop myself from screaming out as her arms were wrenched behind my back and tied,” sorrowfully cried Amari. The character, Amari, from the book Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper, is 15 years old and was taken away from her homeland along with some members of her African tribe. They are now being taken against their will to different parts of the world to become slaves. Amari meets a strong and independent women, Afi, who keeps Amaris hope strong and increases her will to stay alive.
Jacobs, Harriet, and Yellin, Jean. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Jacobs, Harriet. "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Mentor, 1987.
After reading the slavery accounts of Olaudah Equiano 's "The Life of Olaudah Equiano" and Harriet Jacobs ' "Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl", you gain knowledge of what slaves endured during their times of slavery. To build their audience aware of what life of a slave was like, both authors gives their interpretation from two different perspectives and by two different eras of slavery.
Jacobs, Harriet A.. Incidents in the life of a slave girl. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
Reynolds, Mary. The American Slave. Vol. 5, by Che Rawick, 236-246. Westport , Conneticut: Greenwood Press, Inc, 1972.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
War ravaged the land and tore people apart emotionally and physically. One recurrence that came about during the war was the raping and “ruining” of women. To be ruined meant that a woman was raped and/or tortured so severely that she would no longer be capable of having sex. In a culture that values the fertility of its women, this lead to the breakdown of many communities. A perfect example of this breakdown would be in the case of Salima and Fortune. Salima was taken into the bush and raped for 5 months and when she returned home her husband, Fortune, turned her away. This violence committed against Salima caused her to be forced from her community, and it also forced her to take up work at Mama Nadi’s. Here she has to endure a change of identity in order to do the work required of her and to come to terms with her past. At the end of the play, Salima dies and states the haunting words; “You will not fight your battles on my body anymore”(94). These last words sum up just how intrusive the war has become in the lives of everyone in its path and also represents a clear shift in Salima as an individual. Instead of the woman who just wanted her husband back at the end of the play, we are left to contemplate a
Throughout “Araby”, the main character experiences a dynamic character shift as he recognizes that his idealized vision of his love, as well as the bazaar Araby, is not as grandiose as he once thought. The main character is infatuated with the sister of his friend Mangan; as “every morning [he] lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door…when she came on the doorstep [his] heart leaped” (Joyce 108). Although the main character had never spoken to her before, “her name was like a summons to all [his] foolish blood” (Joyce 108). In a sense, the image of Mangan’s sister was the light to his fantasy. She seemed to serve as a person who would lift him up out of the darkness of the life that he lived. This infatuation knew no bounds as “her image accompanied [him] even in places the most hostile to romance…her name sprang to [his] lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which [he] did not understand” (Joyce 109). The first encounter the narrator ex...
Both “Araby” and “Eveline” are characterized by melancholic, even depressive mood. In the first case, the sadness associations are developed by the motifs of darkness and silence that reinforce the boy’s psychological state. The boy says that “All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves” (108) which means that he wants to become invisible, to disappear, and darkness and silence are helpful for him alleviating his pain: “I was thankful that I could see so little” (108). In “Eveline”, the mood is also melancholic and depressive, but this time the feeling of melancholy is combined with nostalgia and a fear of the uncertain future. It reveals itself in Eveline’s memories of her deceased mother, her brothers, her friends, in her looking at the things associated with her previous life: “Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided” (1). And what concerns the tone, in both “Araby” and “Eveline” it may be described as serious though not solemn as the narration lacks too eloquent expressions, and the context concerns more daily routine than some elevated