Professor Goldblatt
Hugo Thommasson
TR 8:00-9:30AM
Comparative Literature R1A
First Draft, Final Essay
The Belly of the Atlantic: The degrading identity of a narrator trapped in between two worlds
Fatou Diome’s first novel, The Belly of the Atlantic, tells the coming-of-age of a young Senegalese female living in Strasbourg after she emigrated from the island of Niodior. Reflective of the author’s own life, the fictionalized narrative recounts the experiences of Salie. After growing up in a community in which strict traditions require women to submit to men, at a young age Salie decides she will educate herself although not enrolled in school. The schoolteacher Ndétare quickly discovers her academic and motivational abilities and decides to guide her through her education. Later, Salie moves to France and she is progressively shun out by her family, except by her brother Madické who is constantly seeking to go to France to play soccer professionally. Salie is quickly overcome by the lack of identity her immigration has caused her. She is constrained between both Europe and Africa, which she can’t call home. Through this disconnectedness the narrator suffers, and Salie’s identity progressively becomes that of exile. How, then, does the novel illustrate the degrading identity of the narrator trapped between two worlds?
The narrator portrays her degrading identity through her cultural detachment from Europe and Africa. The novel does not only tell the story through the exile she has suffered. At times, the narrator’s nocturnal writing offers the reader her inner thoughts, but it also displays her initiative to confide within her exile through nostalgia and lyricism. An analysis of multiple passages - regarding writing and geogra...
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...racy, and writing, initially helps her gain a certain basic level of identification where she feels comfortable expressing herself with pen and paper. Nevertheless such interactions limit the extent to which she can truly have her own identity, more notably on a cultural and familial aspect. In fact, Salie is trapped between her imaginative world of writing, and the world in that she suffers from alienation. As the story ensues Salie progressively loses grip on her past, which is portrayed when she nostalgically recalls the songs she heard and sang during her childhood.
Because this novel is reflective of Diome’s life, one may expand on the fact that Diome had a difficult childhood where she was vastly an outsider, but where her self-education, and determination, helped her spearhead towards success and ultimately write her first novel: The Belly of the Atlantic.
When reading two passages, one by M.F.K. Fisher on the French port of Marseilles and the other by Maya Angelou on the small town of Stamps, I noticed that the passages had some similarities but where entirely different in their effect and the handling of language resources. While Angelou and Fisher organized and constructed their passages similarly, the persona and rhetoric of the authors are opposite.
The poem “Exile” by Julia Alvarez dramatizes the conflicts of a young girl’s family’s escape from an oppressive dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to the freedom of the United States. The setting of this poem starts in the city of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which was renamed for the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo; however, it eventually changes to New York when the family succeeds to escape. The speaker is a young girl who is unsophisticated to the world; therefore, she does not know what is happening to her family, even though she surmises that something is wrong. The author uses an extended metaphor throughout the poem to compare “swimming” and escaping the Dominican Republic. Through the line “A hurried bag, allowing one toy a piece,” (13) it feels as if the family were exiled or forced to leave its country. The title of the poem “Exile,” informs the reader that there was no choice for the family but to leave the Dominican Republic, but certain words and phrases reiterate the title. In this poem, the speaker expresser her feeling about fleeing her home and how isolated she feels in the United States.
“From Lieutenant Nun,” a memoir written by doña Catalina de Erauso, tells an intriguing story of a young Spanish female and her advantageous journey through Spain and the New World. Her family intends for her to become a nun but, that is not the life she seeks for herself. Therefore, she breaks away from the convent in hopes of finding somewhere to make her fortune by passing as a male. Catalina’s story is noteworthy because it gives readers another perspective of exploration focusing on self-discovery during the seventeenth century emphasizing how passing as a male is the only thing that secured her ability to explore. In the memoir, Catalina repeatedly reminisces about clothing and, whether she consciously or unconsciously does so, she allows the reader to see that this is an important aspect of her exploration. Throughout Catalina’s journey, clothing plays an increasingly important role not only in her travels but, also her personal life because it symbolized ones status, role, gender and privileges.
“I like to repeat that I write neither in French nor in Creole. I write in Maryse Conde,”1 (“Liaison dangereuse,” 2007) is a statement that could not be less accurate for the Guadeloupean writer. Writing in French is especially problematic for post-colonialist Francophone authors; using the language of the colonizer while attempting to dismantle cultural and linguistic hierarchy seems to be an act of futility. To be sure, Conde, the author of Crossing the Mangrove, apparently writes in the French language but she capably deconstructs the notion that a language must be necessarily tied to the culture and history it traditionally represents. Through careful practice of intertextuality (the shaping of one text's meaning through reference or application of a previous text) and narrative experimentation in Crossing the Mangrove, Conde demonstrates that objectivity in every sense is impossible. Using the French language is not an act of capitulation to the colonizer and acceptance of all things “French” in the same way that one person's retelling of an event is not the ultimate truth. In Crossing the Mangrove, Conde presents the strange and dark history of Francis Sancher from multiple perspectives and simultaneously works in aspects of the Western literary canon (specifically, William Faulkner). This emphasis on literary and real-life incoherency is iterated by the symbolic motif of trees and their roots throughout the novel. In analyzing Crossing the Mangrove, it is evident that the amalgamation of intertextuality, shifting narrative perspectives, and the motif of trees and their roots contextualizes the fragmented nature of diasporic identity. Truly, it i...
Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present Mary/ María’s, the narrator, recollection of the time when she was nineteen and met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador, for the first time. The forth and fifth parts, chronologically, go back to her tragic experience when she was seven years old and then her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her romance with José Luis, twenty years after she met José Luis. And finally the epilogue consists a letter from José Luis to Mary/ María after her trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue’s principal protagonists, María/ Mary. With a close reading of the text, I argue how the forth chapter, namely the domestic abuse scene, functions as a pivotal point in the Mother Tongue as it helps her to define herself.
Middle Passage’s protagonist , Rutherford Calhoun, shows that identity is a dangerous “middle” experience for the African American offspring that endured the middle passage. As a survivor of a unknown place and subject to total isolation of his own personal experiences we find Rutherford searching for meaning. The novel questions the structure of human and literary identity by testing the power of duel oppositions and abstraction to portray the meaning of experience: "Our faith in fiction comes from an ancient belief that language and literary art all speaking and showing-clarify our experience" (Being 3). By questioning the African-American experience, Johnson radicalizes faith and is able to show the complexities of experience and change. Johnson’s examination into identity, which we can see as both human and textual, depends mainly on the appropriation for its literal and pensive methods. This contradictory space of ...
... a border be it physical or psychological. Examining both novels as well as doing secondary research into the Canadian border, will also help in understanding Canadian identity. A deep analysis of the two novels will also overcome the constellations of the symbolic imagery that is narration which will dramatize semantics of belonging, loss, and absence that is within the definite of the historically bound and personal context of Canadian experience.
• AW’s work is deeply rooted in oral tradition; in the passing on of stories from generation to generation in the language of the people. To AW the language had a great importance. She uses the “Slave language”, which by others is seen as “not correct language”, but this is because of the effect she wants the reader to understand.
Short stories have particular settings to supplement their themes. The eerie catacombs during a carnival in “The Cask of Amontillado” supplement the themes of revenge, and deception, which the protagonist takes responsibility in; whereas in “Hills Like White Elephants”, the atmosphere around the Spanish train station emphasizes the themes of miscommunication between characters and their evasion of responsibilities.
The notion of the author has often been disputed when it comes to critical literary studies. The argument centers around one basic question: Should the author be considered when looking at a text? There are numerous reasons given as to why the author is important or why the ...
The ocean is what connects the people of the Caribbean to their African descendants in and out of time. Through the water they made it to their respective islands, and they, personally, crafted it to be temporal and made it a point of reference. The ocean is without time, and a speaker of many languages, with respect to Natasha Omise’eke Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic. The multilingualism of the ocean is reminiscent that there is no one Caribbean experience. The importance of it indicates that the Afro-Caribbean identity is most salient through spirituality. It should come to no surprise that Erzulie, a Haitian loa, is a significant part of the migration of bodies in Ana Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. Ana Maurine Lara’s depiction
In the story, the narrator is forced to tell her story through a secret correspondence with the reader since her husband forbids her to write and would “meet [her] with heavy opposition” should he find her doing so (390). The woman’s secret correspondence with the reader is yet another example of the limited viewpoint, for no one else is ever around to comment or give their thoughts on what is occurring. The limited perspective the reader sees through her narration plays an essential role in helping the reader understand the theme by showing the woman’s place in the world. At ...
Antoinette’s occupation of a hybrid position dismantles the stable binary of white/black, colonizer/colonized. Hybridity interrogates and deconstructs the western hegemonic assumption of stable subjectivity and meaning. Destabilising the notion of the self and the Other as envisioned by the western grand narratives hybridity proposes that the self is constructed by multiple ideologies and multiple discourses at the same time. Antoinette’s frustration and instability stem from her inability to belong to any particular community and culture. As a white creole, she oscillates between the European world of her ancestors and the Caribbean culture into which she is born. The fact that she is born in Jamaica as a white creole with a European background problematizes her identity belonging to neither of them fully thereby creating a hybrid status. Rhys through Antoinette’s ‘in-between space’ or a ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha argues, takes a position that identity is ambivalent and crucially challenged in the hegemonic colonial setting.
In this essay I am going to consider Spivak’s theory and perspectives of the subaltern in terms of Kazuo Ishiguro’s two novels A Pale View of Hills and Never Let Me Go. I will be considering Spivak’s theories of “post-colonialism”, “essentialism” as well as revising her essay on “Can the Subaltern Speak?” I will be focusing on defining the subaltern characters and their role in Ishiguro’s novel and how they deal with their status as subaltern or whether they are even aware of this constraint that they are faced with. As well as considering the narrative power that Ishiguro has given them in his novels simply by giving them a “voice”. A further aspect to be considered in this essay is the role of memory and trauma in the creation of the subalterns
The settings in his writings are similar because they are dark and eerie. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, the setting is described