Husain Haddawy’s The Arabian Nights and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men - Revealing the Conflicts, Desires and Dreams of the Collector
"For the translator, who stands astride two cultures, possesses two different sensibilities, and assumes a double identity" —Husain Haddawy
Magic, love, sex, war, gods, spells. These are all common ingredients in the folktales of almost every culture. Many people say that folktales are windows to cultures. That might be so. Often readers do not realize, though, that folktales also reflect aspects of the collectors. Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men and Husain Haddawy’s The Arabian Nights, in addition to offering insight into southern African-American culture and Arabic culture, reveal the collectors to the audience; the collectors’ desire to reconcile with their past, to be accepted by their reader as legitimate representatives of that culture whether by being an insider or both insider and outsider to the culture, and to be heroic cultural interpreters with the goal of educating and informing the reader.
There are many reasons and motivations behind Hurston’s compilation of African-American folktales, but one that is often overlooked is her personal need to reconcile her intellectual, White, Barnard-educated life with her traditional roots in Eatonville, Florida. In her introduction Hurston writes:
From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then ...
... middle of paper ...
...nd the present culture of the audience, which they intended to reach. Haddawy and Hurston sought acceptance from the reader and thus emphasized the legitimacy of their works whether by establishing themselves as an insider or as both an insider and outsider to their respective cultures. Moreover, by proving the ‘superior’ authenticity of their works in comparison to previous works, they offer themselves as ‘heroes,’bringing forth insights of the culture of their youth to the reader. Indeed, The Arabian Nights and Mules and Men are not only collections of magical folktales: They reveal the inner conflicts, desires and dreams of the translator and collector themselves.
Works Cited
1) Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).
2) Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy, ed. Muhsin Mahdi (New York: Norton, 1990).
Mascots are beloved figure heads for sports teams everywhere almost every sport team has a mascot of some kind; that said, sometimes instead of bring people together it can cause a rift between two cultures. Such as Washington’s D.C.’s football team the “Redskins” often the word redskin was a derogatory word used against the Native Americans and while it may seem as though paying homage to the Native American community the overall stereotyped actions of the fans themselves as well as the sugarcoating of the previously racial slur has done little to bring the two cultures together and instead created a larger disconnect between white and Native American. The name Redskin should be retired and replaced so that rather
One of the cases found in the novel by Cynthia Crosson-Tower dealt with a little girl by the name of Jessica Barton. Although still a small child, her foster family had an issue trying to raise her in which she gave them behavioral issues and she would not react to them and was hard to ...
...ers' evolution from mother and student into a leading voice against the merchandising of Native American sacred symbols -- and shows the lengths to which fans will go to preserve their mascots." In keeping all the Native American Mascots in schools, colleges, and professional sports teams we are showing a lack of respect. The Native Americans have voiced the lack of honor these names are bringing to them. "The fact that history has ignored the incredible pain we have inflicted on Native Americans does not now give us the right to ignore their largely muted call." Americans need to take a step back think about how they would feel if there ritual and or sacred tradition was misused. "We feel that we are being put in a position of sacrificing our dignity and pride and will never be treated as equals in white society as long as the use of Indian symbols continues."
Hurston begins the essay in her birth town: Eatonville, Florida; an exclusively Negro town where whites were a rarity, only occasionally passing by as a tourist. Hurston, sitting on her porch imagines it to be a theatre as she narrates her perspective of the passing white people. She finds a thin line separating the spectator from the viewer. Exchanging stances at will and whim. Her front porch becomes a metaphor for a theater seat and the passers
Whenever young Hurston engaged in dialogue with her black peers, they would talk to her in ebonics and she could only respond in a formal register (27). This contrast in use of language automatically connotates that her black peers as less intelligent, polite, and proper which she covertly implies is blackness. Whereas she antithetically appears more intelligent and fit with virtue through her use of proper English which she assigns to whiteness. By the same token, Hurston not “stumbling and spelling words out” like her classmates while reading outloud to Miss Johnstone and Miss Hurd further differentiates her from connotations carried with colored people and also implicates that the inner whiteness intrinsic to her is what essentially makes her more important than her pigmented equals (35). By not partaking in the hard cussing of her environment and maintaining proper English in a community absent of it, Hurston is metaphorically shouting that she “stand[s] apart” from black-hood and marks her for success
Hurston, Zora Neale. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Writer’s Presence: A Pool of Readings. 5th ed. Ed. Robert Atawan and Donald McQuade. Boston:Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 166-170. Print
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891. Her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, when she was three years old. Eatonville, Florida was one of the very first all-black towns incorporated in the United State. Her parents were John and Lucy Ann Hurston. Her father was a Baptist preacher while her mother was a school teacher. Her mother passed away in 1904, her father remarried and her father and stepmother send her away to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. Her father and stepmother stopped paying her tuition which resulted in her being expelled from school. She worked as a maid to a lead singer in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan Theatrical company. She was offered a scholarship to attend the prestigious Barnard College, where she was the college’s first black student. She earned her B.A in Anthropology. The memories of her self-segregated community stayed close to her heart, which lead her to oppose segregation in schools in the 1950’s against the rising tide of the civil rights movement. Hurston wrote “The Gilded Six-Bits” after her first divorce, the story influenced her life greatly as an African American in the Harlem Renaissance. During the Harlem Renaissance black artists explored their culture and showed pride in their race, through music and literature. “The Gilded Six-Bits was a magazine story published in 1933 by Bertram Lippincott. In “The Gilded Six Bits” Hurston gave an insight into human nature: which suggest that if patient and forgiveness is learned in any relationship, it can lead to a rewarding life. The story have three main characters, they are Joe Banks, Missie May Banks and Otis Slemmons. Joe and Missie May Banks are newlywed couple who live in an all-black rural communi...
Jack Shakley’s “Indian Mascots- You’re Out” published on the op-ed page of the LA times, he impacted readers about the argument over professional and college sport teams whose mascots are using Native American names. Shakley is the former chair of the Los Angeles city/county Native American Commission. The author describes the history of using Indian mascots and how it hurt a group of people. He wants readers to know that it is necessary to remove Native American names and mascots from college and professional teams. Jack Shakley uses three strategies to present his argument to show his attitude to remove Indian mascots in teams.
Many races are unjustly victimized, but Native American cultures are more misunderstood and degraded than any other race. College and high school mascots sometimes depict images of Native Americans and have names loosely based on Native American descent, but these are often not based on actual Native American history, so instead of honoring Native Americans, they are being ridiculed. According to the article Warriors Survive Attack, by Cathy Murillo (2009) some “members of the Carpentaria community defended Native American mascot icons as honoring Chumash tradition and the spirit of American Indian Warriors in U.S. history and others claimed that the images were racist stereotypes” (Murillo, 2009). If people do not attempt to understand and respect Native American culture, then Native American stereotypes will become irreparable, discrimination will remain unresolved, and ethnocentrism will not be reprimanded.
Reimbursement policies prevent the total integration of telemedicine into health care practice (Prinz, 2008). Today, there is no overall telemedicine reimbursement policy in the federal health care system (HRSA, 2011 & OAT, 2003). As a result, reimbursement for telecare has been limited and somewhat haphazard. It’s up to each state to specify what telemedicine services, if any, are eligible for Medicaid reimbursement (HRSA, 2011 & OAT, 2003).
Norris, Margot. "Blind Streets And Seeing Houses: Araby's Dim Glass Revisited." Studies In Short Fiction 32.3 (1995): 309. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
In Feminism and Fairy Tales, Karen E. Rowe asserts that “popular folktales” have “shaped our romantic expectations” and “illuminate psychic ambiguities which often confound contemporary women.” She believes that “portrayals of adolescent waiting and dreaming, patterns of double enchantment, and romanticizations of marriage contribute to the potency of fairy tales” makes “many readers discount obvious fantasy elements and fall prey to more subtle paradigms through identification with the heroine.” As a result, Karen Rowe contends “subconsciously women may transfer from fairy tales into real life cultural norms which exalt passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice as a female’s cardinal virtues suggest that culture’s very survival depends upon a woman’s acceptance of roles which relegate her to motherhood and domesticity.” It is undeniable that numerous folk tales implant male chauvinism into women’s minds and thus convey an idea that woman should obey and depend on men. However, Rowe neglects the aspect that many other folk tales, on the contrary, disclose the evil and vulnerable sides of man and marriage and thus encourage women to rely on their own intelligence and courage other than subordinating to man. The Fairy tales “Beauty and Beast” and “Fowler’s Fowl” challenge Rowe’s thesis to some extent and exemplify that some fairy tales motivate women to be intelligent and courageous and to challenge patriarchy.
In conclusion, Hurston was a modernist writer who dealt with societal themes of racism, and social and racial identity. She steps away from the folk-oriented style of writing other African American authors, such as Langston Hughes, and she addresses modern topics and issues that relate to her people. She embraces pride in her color and who she is. She does not hate the label of “colored” that has been placed upon her. She embraces who she is and by example, she teaches others to love themselves and the color of their skin. She is very modern. She is everybody’s Zora.
...a woman trying to find an identity through her heritage. All of these stories give us examples and show us what life in this period would be like for the characters. They give details that show the readers the world around them.