The tenth chapter of G. Willow Wilson’s The Butterfly Mosque, illuminates Willow’s transformation from an outsider of her own homeland to an accepted entity of her self-made realm of religion and culture. For the majority of her life, Willow had been unsuccessfully seeking the sense of normalcy that accompanies inclusion. Because she covered up her fascination in the unexplainable, Willow never felt accepted by her family until they appreciated her beliefs at the engagement party by bonding with Omar’s family. Willow depicts the memorable blending of culture and family in “Arrivals and Confessions”: “…my family and Omar’s family agreed to love one another for no other reason than that we had asked them to… it no longer deeply mattered to …show more content…
me whose rules I followed, Arab or American or eastern or western, and the words themselves faded in significance. I had caught hold, and seen others catch hold, of something that could not be touched by geography. Alan Moore calls it “the very last inch of us”, that immutable integrity.
To live beyond the threshold of identity, to do so in the name of a peace that has not yet occurred but that is infinitely possible- this is exhilarating, necessary, and within reach” (117). Through Amu Fakhry’s laughter at Willow’s father’s galibayya or relatives attempting to speak foreign languages, America and Egypt bonded to become a combination of cultures that Willow can finally recognize as home. In multiple ways, Willow and Omar’s marriage has come to symbolize that “immutable integrity” in itself. Without titles like “Egyptian” or “American”, humans are capable of loving other cultures regardless of the media’s warped portrayals of other nations. Willow’s inspired style and tone demonstrate how astonishingly incorrect the media is. Not all Middle Easterners are barbaric just as not all Americans are intolerant and Wilson passionately finds simply living as a human rather than a human classified by geography and culture as “exhilarating, necessary, and within reach” because she has. Willow’s marriage to Omar is not merely about love, but also “’immutable integrity’” because after living in a world of fighting, hatred, and exclusion, Willow’s family and Omar’s family fall in love with a peace and mix of cultures that rise above the rules of Arab, American, eastern, and Western that is possible
for all. Omar and Willow are solely the gateways through whom people learn to live and love without the impurities of hatred insinuated by media.
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.
Naomi Nye was born to a German-American mother and a Palestinian-American father. However, she normally writes from her Palestinian-Arab perspective. In several of her poems within The Heath Anthology—“Ducks,” “My Father and the Figtree,” and “Where the Soft Air Lives”—Naomi Nye reminisces about her Muslim heritage and childhood as it correlates to her present identity. In addition, she incorporates the effect of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on herself and on Arab culture in her work. Ultimately, Naomi Nye’s poetic work should remain in The Heath Anthology as her style demonstrates how historical events and a deep-rooted heritage can enrich a sense of identity and culture.
Critics have already begun a heated debate over the success of the book that has addressed both its strengths and weaknesses. The debate may rage for a few years but it will eventually fizzle out as the success of the novel sustains. The characters, plot, emotional appeal, and easily relatable situations are too strong for this book to crumble. The internal characteristics have provided a strong base to withstand the petty attacks on underdeveloped metaphors and transparent descriptions. The novel does not need confrontations with the Middle East to remain a staple in modern reading, it can hold its own based on its life lessons that anyone can use.
Joyce, James. “Araby”. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 427 - 431.
Joyce, James. “Araby.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter Eighth Edition. Eds. Jerome Beaty, Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W.Norton.
Salwa, a successful banker and real estate agent, thought she wanted the American dream. It had been one of the reasons Jassim's fast and unexpected proposal years earlier in Jordan had seemed so attractive. He was in love with her and she was in love with the idea of the life he offered. She came to America as a new bride with stars and stripes in her eyes, where life was all that she'd dreamt it would be. Easing effort...
James Joyce's use of religious imagery and religious symbols in "Araby" is compelling. That the story is concerned somehow with religion is obvious, but the particulars are vague, and its message becomes all the more interesting when Joyce begins to mingle romantic attraction with divine love. "Araby" is a story about both wordly love and religious devotion, and its weird mix of symbols and images details the relationship--sometimes peaceful, sometimes tumultuos--between the two. In this essay, I will examine a few key moments in the story and argue that Joyce's narrator is ultimately unable to resolve the differences between them.
The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson is an emotional, yet thought provoking memoir that holds the reader's attention from start to finish. Simplistic clarity, and honest wit is used to tell her story while demonstrating the complexity of the world, and the problematic way different cultures see each other. Although at times I found it to be anti-climactic her message still shone through and left me thinking about it long after. This memoir allows the reader to feel as though they are on Wilson’s journey, and succeeds in spreading a message that needs to be told.
Joyce, James. "Araby." 1914. Literature and Ourselves. Henderson, Gloria, ed. Boston, Longman Press. 2009. 984-988.
Employing irony, dark humor, and personal anecdotes, Sayed Kashua wrote a fictional narrative that explores the politics of identity, masquerading, and crossing in a region undergoing a nationality crisis. Language, culture and history, too, play pivotal roles in the varying levels of social and cultural capital in a society with a dominating judaistic force. In navigating both real and imagined Israeli communities, Kashua and his main protagonist in Dancing Arabs find themselves trapped in an identity paradox: they are too Arab to be considered Jewish, yet too Jewish to be considered Arab.
Hamid’s fiction deals with varied issues: from infidelity to drug trade in the subcontinent and, in the light of contemporary developments, about Islamic identity in a globalised world. His first novel, Moth Smoke (2000) won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2000. His other novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Decibel Award and the South Bank Award for Literature. This book serves as a testament to his elegant style as he deftly captures the straining relationship between America and Pakistan.
Eventually Lamis realizes all the things she still loves about her Iraqi culture and she stops thinking that “being Arab was an obstacle in her life,” (125). She eventually even thinks she is silly for trying to decided between two different cultures and two different societies, when she now knows she can blend the two. She realizes how severe it was to give up her culture, “Had she really once considered substituting these for others and doing away with her heritage, no longer seeing, hearing or speaking, and consequently ceasing to breathe?”
...m Innocence to Insight: 'Araby' as an Iniation Story." Chapter 10. The St. Martin's Guide to Writing. By Rise Axlerod and Charles Cooper. Vol. 8. N.p.: n.p., 2008. 536-38. Print.
Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as manifestation humanity’s multi-faceted creativity. Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, on our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in a relationship that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
Living in Israel, Saeed is constantly swayed by the will to live by shadowing his Palestinian identity or by showing his nationality to appear trustworthy to his comrades. Ironically, it is when Saeed finally reveals his identification with Palestine and is imprisoned that he is awakened to a true feeling of national loyalty and subsequent freedom (Habibi, 132). Habibi uses this literary picture to show how, even in times of conflict and oppression, the greatest individuality and nationalism will