The theme of Abramovic’s photograph can be applicable to the distortion in the minds of Ngugi, Orwell and Tan. The lady in the photograph looks puzzled and disturbed as the hand stops her from achieving true understanding of her world. In the same way colonization distorts the relation Ngugi shares with his language, the relation Orwell shares with his conscience and the relation Tan shares with her mother tongue. The obstructing hand from the photograph is symbolic of the colonial power that replaces Ngugi’s mother tongue by enforcing English as the official language thus pushing Ngugi away from his culture and identity. Colonization also represents the hand from the photograph that stops Orwell from doing what he desires to do rather than what the job demands of him.…show more content… Similarly Tan can be seen as similar to the woman in the photograph as Tan struggles to comprehend her relation with the two languages she speaks as a bilingual child. She tries to distance herself from her culture, but eventually she is able to see from her “both” eyes and embrace her heritage. Through Ngugi and Tan’s distortion of self-image and clouded perception of the world, it can be seen that the distortion was caused when the relation with language got entangled. When Gikūyū was taken away from Ngugi, he could no longer picture himself in the world around him and in the same way Tan could not fully understand how her cultural inheritance shaped her identity until she discovered the importance of her mother’s language. Thus language is the tool that helps humans comprehend their identity and gain clarity of the world around them. But when does the hand causing distortion in the photograph move out of the line of
