Elemeno as a Mixed-Race Identity in Senna’s Caucasia
In Caucasia, Birdie and Cole are juxtaposed as a white-passing mixed person and a visibly black mixed-person, but they are drawn together by their mixed race identity and their shared world: Elemeno. They both experience pressures from blackness and whiteness to conform, and Birdie especially struggles to exist in either category. Senna uses the various aspects of Elemeno to highlight this sense of alienation felt and to examine racial identity outside the context of the black and white. Elemeno the language is critical to Elemeno as an identity, and contrasts languages and dialects of real communities in ways that reflect the mixed-race experience. The Elemeno people and their invisibility
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From an early age, Birdie is immersed in black culture and identifies as black. Various people refer to her as white, or try to invalidate her blackness and, while she does become very insecure at points, she never thinks of herself as white. This can be seen like times when she goes to Nkrumah, Ali throws a spitball at her and says “’what you doin at this school? You white?’” (43), and when a white girl is murdered, after an exchange with her mother reveals “It struck me as odd that my mother hadn’t warned Cole not to go to the park, just me. ‘There are perverts, crazies, dirty old me, and they want little girls like you.’” (67). But in addition to these events, she also recounts many incidents where black individuals, including her father, shame biracial couples or mixed race people. “My father laughed a little and said, nudging Cole, gesturing toward the [interracial] couple: ‘what’s wrong with that picture?’ ... She didn’t seem to remember the right answer – or perhaps she didn’t care – but I did and, throwing my hand in the air like Arnold Horshack, piped in from the backseat, ‘diluting the race!’” (73). Her father, her strongest connection to blackness, accepts her as a black person but rejects her in many ways as a mixed person, which is harmful as she comes to terms with a mixed …show more content…
Many characters, including Deck, Redbone, Cole, and Birdie, “blacken” their speech to fit in, and in Decks case to affirm their identity. Sandy benefits multiple times from her language, for example when the Marshes allow her to rent the house, “-an educated voice. They heard her accent, so like their own, and knew she would do just fine,” (150). Elemeno further reflects this trend of a group being defined and understood through their language. Birdie describes Elemeno as “a complicated language, impossible for outsiders to pick up – no verb tenses, no pronouns, just words floating outside time and space without owner or direction” (6). The inability for outsiders to understand Elemeno differentiates it from the language of black radicals and of WASPs – both are understood and can be spoken by others – whereas Elemeno is exclusive to the Elemeno people. Sandy describes Elemeno words as “achingly familiar, but just beyond ones grasp.” (7) while Deck describes the language as “high speed patois” (7). Both descriptions leave an idea of the language being a derivation of something known, unintelligible but only barely, just as someone of a mixed racial background may be so similar but still falls completely outside the ‘pure’ racial
Languages are formed through a structure of sounds in a way the college structure is formed. By piecing together a sentence, it can form a picture a lot like the collage pieces together to form an idea. From a page of Sista Tongue “Garrans da haole tourist at da haole tourist at da same counta going pay mo money fo rent one car. Despite its widespread use as a marker of local identity, HCE also carries negative connotation.” (Kanae) is on one page next to each other. A person may have trouble forming the words of their mother-tongue and their identity feel weak. The lines that cut through Lisa Kanae’s words can represent that broken identity. This can be shown from a quote “Reinecke points out that the formation of a Creole language met the need for a ‘medium of commu-nication between numbers of non-English speaking groups” (qtd in Kanae), the line cuts between ‘formation of a’ and ‘Creole language’ and the word ‘communication’ is cut in between to fit into another line. This shows the meaning of Lisa Kanae’s message in a visual form that Creole language is made up of different languages: English, Cantonese, and Hawaiian, to make one language. This collage form also emphases certain words and sentences. It is very similar to how bilingual people code-shifts from one language to another. I often switch between English and Cantonese with my parents to convey my message in a way the collage form Lisa
She described seeing herself as a reflection of her sister even before they had mirrors; she thought they were the same. As she began to experience outside socialization and public schooling she became more aware of the way people outside her family viewed her in respect to race, and began dressing and acting more “black” in order to be treated the way she felt she should be. From a young age she felt a special connection to her ethnicity, the culture and especially the music of her father’s ancestors. As their family began to fall apart, Birdie and her sister, Cole, would drown out the racial slurs their parents blurted at each other by playing in a made up
Janie’s first discovery about herself comes when she is a child. She is around the age of six when she realizes that she is colored. Janie’s confusion about her race is based on the reasoning that all her peers and the kids she grows up with are white. Janie and her Nanny live in the backyard of the white people that her Nanny works for. When Janie does not recognize herself on the picture that is taken by a photographer, the others find it funny and laughs, leaving Janie feeling humiliated. This racial discovery is not “social prejudice or personal meanness but affection” (Cooke 140). Janie is often teased at school because she lives with the white people and dresses better than the other colored kids. Even though the kids that tease her were all colored, this begins Janie’s experience to racial discrimination.
Race, in the common understanding, draws upon differences not only of skin color and physical attributes but also of language, nationality, and religion. Race categories are often used as ethnic intensifiers, with the aim of justifying the exploitation of one group by another. Race is an idea that has become so fixed in American society that there is no room for open-mindedness when challenging the idea of racial categories. Over the years there has been a drastic change with the way the term "race" is used by scientists. Essentially, there is a major difference between the biological and sociological views of race.
All characters have their own dialect and their ways of speaking differ slightly" (Hansberry 40).They speak a real language of their community, a language that is unconventional. They speak a common dialect in the black communities (Hansberry 40).
I classify my race, ethnicity, and culture as a white, Irish-Italian- American, woman. My mother was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and my paternal grandparents are from Sicily, Italy. I imagine being first generation Irish and second generation Italian helps me relate with my ethnicity.
“She was black as she could be, twisted like driftwood from being out in the weather, her face a map of all the storms and journeys she’d been through. Her right arm was raised, as if she was pointing the way, except her fingers were closed in a fist. It gave her a serious look, like she could straighten you out if necessary” (Kidd 70).
This stage of my adolescent life was very memorable. This was the time when my life was becoming more complicated as I struggled to find my own racial identity, and constantly questioning myself, “Who am I?” “Where do I belong?” while facing the pressure of “fitting in” as a biracial teen in prejudicial Asian society.
Often, people of color feel as if the only way they are to succeed is by rejecting their identity completely, or “code-switching” which means to downplay certain aspects of their identity. For example, black people refraining from using African American Vernacular English around their white counterparts in order to assimilate into white culture, as seen in ABC television show Black-ish where Dre’s son Jack is made aware of the difference between using the n-word around other black people and public, or even in the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, where the main character Gogol tries for so long to ignore his Bengali heritage, to the point of being embarrassed by his parents enough to not want them to meet his white girlfriend, Maxine. This struggle or sense of duality or “two-ness” is defined by W.E.B. Du Bois as double consciousness. In his essay The Souls of Black Folk he discusses the idea that African Americans, and by extension all people of color experience a kind of “double c...
Race: The Power of an Illusion was an interesting 3 part film. After watching this, it made me questioned if race was really an illusion or not. It is absolutely taboo to think that the one thing that separates people the most may be a myth in itself. “We can 't find any genetic markers that are in everybody of a particular race and in nobody of some other race. We can 't find any genetic markers that define race.” (Adelman and Herbes Sommers 2003). Racism is something created in the U.S made to create supremacy for the creator. Racism is not just the way someone thinks, it is something that has is manifested in our society to separate us and can be traced to our everyday activities.
Racism is often considered a thing of the past, with its manifestation rarely being acknowledged in the United States today. Race: The Power of an Illusion, is a documentary that addresses the legacy of racism through its significance in the past, and its presence in society today. To understand racism, it is vital to understand the concept of race. Race is a social invention, not a biological truth. This can be observed through the varying classifications of race in different cultures and time periods. For instance, in the United States, race has long been distinguished by skin color. In nineteenth century China, however, race was determined by the amount of body hair an individual had. Someone with a large amount of facial hair, for example,
Maya Angelou’s excerpt from her book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” reveals the challenges facing a young black girl in the south. The prologue of the book tells of a young Angelou in church trying to recite a poem she has forgotten. She describes the dress her grandmother has made her and imagines a day where she wakes up out of her black nightmare. Angelou was raised in a time where segregation and racism were prevalent in society. She uses repetition, diction, and themes to explore the struggle of a black girl while growing up. Angelou produces a feeling of compassion and poignancy within the reader by revealing racial stereotypes, appearance-related insecurities, and negative connotations associated with being a black girl. By doing this she forces the
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston breaks from the tradition of her time by rejecting the idea that the African American people should be ashamed or saddened by the color of their skin. She tells other African Americans that they should embrace their color and be proud of who they are. She writes, “[A socialite]…has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges,” and “I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (942-943). Whether she feels “colored” or not, she knows she is beautiful and of value. But Hurston writes about a time when she did not always know that she was considered colored.
When two cultures meet, there is usually a disagreeable point. Either one tries to dominate the other, or both struggle for acceptance. This is shown by Eulalie’s behaviour in the presence of her in-laws and the reaction of Ato’s family upon knowing of his bride. Eulalie’s disgust at the ways and manners her fiancé’s family relate with her points out the theme of clashing cultures. Eulalie considers many of Ato’s family customs backwards and is disdainful of many of them. She also makes ignorant statements about the African women and culture. She states that all palm trees are the same, and she declares that knowing the difference does not really matter. The woman’s nonchalant act of smoking and excessive drinking displeases Ato’s family and even Ato himself. Ato’s family, on the other hand, displays the prejudice of thinking of African-Americans inferior because they are descendants of slaves. They think it is strange for Eulalie to have no tribe or surname, likening her to a “tree without roots.” When they hear that Eulalie is an African by descendant, the women in the house start weepi...
Throughout I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, racism is a frequent obstacle that non-whites had to overcome. When Maya is young, she doesn’t recognize the racism and discrimination as well as her grandmother does. As Maya gets older, she begins to recognize and take notice to the racism and discrimination towards her and African Americans everywhere. Maya may not recognize the racism and discrimination very well at her young age, but it still affects her outlook on life the same way it would if she had recognized it. The racism and discrimination Maya faced throughout I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, affected her attitude, personality, and overall outlook on life in a positive way.