I walked my way weeping around the neighborhood. The sun had a gloomy face on it. The world wasn’t in peace.
Two and a half years ago, I faced one of the most challenging events anyone could ever face: to relocate and move from my home country, Jordan, to the United States. The difficult times that I’ve faced throughout this move have shaped my personality and, I believe, have changed my life forever. The many difficulties that I was keen to overcome were mainly concerned about me being able to speak English fluently, and learn about the new culture. The first barrier that I was determined to overcome…
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Tracing individual stories of suffering and strength, we unmask the intergenerational trauma of slavery in North America, of how Black people are directly impacted by the brutality of white supremacy and capitalism. In Beloved, Toni Morrison employs personal narratives through the power of fiction to underscore the intergenerational trauma African Americans experienced from chattel slavery. From Baby Suggs, Sethe, to Denver, the stories of three generations of Black women are intertwined with the…
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storytelling, with personal reflection by the author Tim O’Brien, seen through his own semi-autobiographical character, Tim O’Brien. Composed of short, fantastical stories that O’Brien repeats, changes, and claims are true only to later reveal they are false, reality is continually questioned in the text. Instead, O’Brien focuses on memory and fantasy, utilizing a number of different perspectives to convey an ironic national and self-awareness of new wars that conveys both personal as well as national…
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An American family has changed drastically over time; however, the American Family has the same fundamental values and issues that still linger underneath the surface of the ever changing culture of the American Family. These issues and values are seen through Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisins in the Sun, in how they both deal with dreams and the same issues like money throughout the two plays. Moreover, it has been every family's dream to achieve the American…
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rational arguments and emotional ones, and organized essays and structurally deficient ones. Active reading means learning to annotate, to reflect on what you read, and develop personal responses in order to prepare yourself for writing topics ● Our own interpretation and evaluation of the text will be conditioned by our personal experiences, background, attitudes, biases, and beliefs. In other words, even as the class attempts to construct a common reading, each member of the class is also constructing a somewhat different meaning…
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(Cheung 116). At the same time, she envies the slave girl and compares herself to her. She does so as a desperate attempt of assessing her own worth. Kingston notices the difference in Brave Orchard’s demeanor when recalling the slave as she observes, "My mother's enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl" (Kingston 96). They discuss the cost of Kingston’s birth in comparison to the purchase of the slave girl in which Brave Orchard was blunt. She goes to the extent of expressing disbelief in…
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online videos capture a glimpse of real life, they often overlook the human element. Weaving together the intricate story will demand a precise and concerted effort to engage with this element. My affiliation with the Center of Political Research at the Catholic University of Andres Bello (UCAB) as well as my informal affiliations will allow me to work directly with the community and delve into the contemporary social issues such as poverty, crime, inequality, and health which have helped fuel the…
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approach to grief is by surrounding himself with the rituals of death. Through the novels readers are introduced to a moving portrait of characters both male and female whose characterization as well as their relationships to Matt are explored. The relationships between Matt and Mr. Ray, Matt and Chris as well as the characterization of Candy Man is used by Reynolds as a counter narrative to the negative perception of black males in society. By doing this, Reynolds is able to shed light on the negative…
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Authorial Voices in Octavia Butler’s Kindred Butler’s text not only address the concept of racial identity, but also tackles the concept of authorial control. Ashraf Rushdy notes that the Neo-Slave Narrative genre as a whole began to come about as a response to William Styron’s book Confessions of Nat Turner. This novel spark the conversation regarding who should be able to retell these histories, and Rushdy notes one of the most problem aspects of Styron’s novel: “its presumption of assuming the…
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1924 and 1948 as well as across national borders and cultures. Levy’s novel, written more than fifty years after the first Windrush arrival, creates a common narrative of nation and identity in order to understand the experiences of Black people in Britain. Small Island—structured around four competing voices whose claims of textual, personal and historical truth must be acknowledged—refuses to establish a singular articulation of the experience of migration and empire. In this essay, I focus on…
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