The novel, I the Divine, by Rabih Alameddine, is about a woman by the name of Sarah Nour El-Din. Rabih wrote this novel in a series of first chapters with the goal of establishing a sense of never passing the first phases of Sarah’s life. Sarah was named by her grandfather after the actress Sarah Bernhardt. She is the daughter of a Lebanese doctor and an American woman whose marriage was going wonderfully well until her birth. The fact that they didn’t conceive a male child, was the main factor in their unsuccessful marriage and subsequent divorce. Her father, Mustapha, ended up remarrying a traditional Lebanese woman to fulfill his needs. Sarah was subjected to two different cultures. Therefore, she was having problems with her religious …show more content…
Families should forgive their kin. The author enforces the idea that no matter what faults a family member could do, family will always be there to support. In her childhood, Sarah was a rebellious kid. She started disobeying her religion and culture by playing soccer, wearing inappropriate clothes, and playing pranks on her stepmother. As she stated: “One night, I went into the linen closet, took out the bags, and placed them in the cats’ litter box. The next night, I put them back between the sheets in the closet” (Alameddine, 35). She was a tomboy, and in her father’s eyes, a disappointment to her family. She even said: “He began to see me as a lot of cause, an embarrassment to the family.” (35) As she grew up, she disregarded everybody’s advice, especially her stepmother’s. She was different from her sisters in that she failed to learn how to cook and sew. Her deviation from the Lebanese culture contributed to her unsuccessful adolescence and tragic …show more content…
Although he left his parents and was homosexual, his family never denied him, but indeed, they accepted him the way he was. After Lamia’s psychotic tragedy, Ramzi was present to comfort his dad. For Mustapha, having Ramzi around, gave him a certain relief and made his mind stray away of the occurrence. As Sarah said: “When my father saw Ramzi, he cried like a baby, hugging his son, shaking uncontrollably, which only increased the flow of tears of the family” (129). This illustrates how forgivable their family is. Finally, Sarah’s sister, Lamia, committed forbidden mistakes. She was a nurse who hated her job and ended up killing seven of her patients. Sarah said: “By the time the dust settled, it turned out that she had killed seven patients and was suspected of one more death, though the authorities could not prove the last” (147). It was an ultimately tragic experience. Her family was enduring the hardships of dealing with her psychotic breakdown. However, they were always there to support her after this
She lived in constant paranoia; finding it hard to make amends and rebuild trust with friends and
...eemed to combine assimilation of American culture with that of her long lasting Jewish traditions. She has turned down and shunned away from countless Jewish traditions, for hatred of her father. As the story ends it seems that her relationship with her father strengthens and in turn her religious traditions also strengthen. The father is yet another way to view her struggle with her Jewish teachings and religious traditions. Sarah's love for her father strengthens, then so does her will to accept her Jewish upbringing. Sarah is now an American women who also carries the burden and responsibility of her Jewish past. Throughout all her life she had struggled to accomplish all her goals, and in doing so she had ruined her most important goal of fatherly acceptance. As she is proud of completing all her dreams, she has also accomplished a peace of mind with her Father.
Sarah and her mother are sought out by the French Police after an order goes out to arrest all French Jews. When Sarah’s little brother starts to feel the pressures of social injustice, he turns to his sister for guidance. Michel did not want to go with the French Police, so he asks Sarah to help him hide in their secret cupboard. Sarah does this because she loves Michel and does not want him to be discriminated against. Sarah, her mother, and her father get arrested for being Jewish and are taken to a concentration camp just outside their hometown. Sarah thinks Michel, her beloved brother, will be safe. She says, “Yes, he’d be safe there. She was sure of it. The girl murmured his name and laid her palm flat on the wooden panel. I’ll come back for you later. I promise” (Rosnay 9). During this time of inequality, where the French were removing Sarah and her mother just because they were Jewish, Sarah’s brother asked her for help. Sarah promised her brother she would be back for him and helped him escape his impending arrest. Sarah’s brother believed her because he looks up to her and loves her. As the story continues, when Sarah falls ill and is in pain, she also turns to her father for comfort, “at one point she had been sick, bringing up bile, moaning in pain. She had felt her father’s hand upon her, comforting her” (Rosnay 55).
Whenever Sira, Aminata’s mother went to help women deliver their babies, Aminata would go along too. She would watch and help her mother, eventually le...
Sarah was the sixth child. Even at a young age she showed great independence and focused many of her efforts on justice. She was very intellectual and because of this, her father paid particular attention to her over the other children. He is said to have frequently declared “if she had been of the other sex she would have made the greatest jurist in the land” (Birney, 1970, p 8). Sarah was also very personable, empathetic and car...
At first she has difficulty comprehending Sarah's patience with a master who has sold off three of her children. Likewise, she observes that Isaac Greenwood "was like Sarah, holding himself back, not killing in spite of anger I could only imagine. A lifetime of conditioning could be overcome, but not easily."
Both Laila, the lucky girl with breathtaking beauty, whose luck suddenly vanishes, and Mariam, the unlucky and illegitimate daughter, whose luck goes from bad to terribly worse, become dynamic and complex characters. This transformation is brought about by the gradual revealing of Hosseini’s motivation. In fact, Hoesseini is evidently motivated to reveal the truth, and let the emotional and physical realities of Afghani women’s lives be known to the
The next testimonies are from the mother of the abducted wife who pleads for the authorities to find her missing daughter. Along the way the wife’s mother notes that her daughter is beautiful to be noticed, “Her complexion is a little on the dark side, and she has a mole by the outside corner of her left eye, but her face is a tiny, perfect oval (306). Also, that the daughter, Masago, is very bold for a woman her
The main psychological impacts were self-stigma, increased stress, and depression. Self-stigma occurs when the family members except mental illness stereotypes to be true. When self-stigma occurs caregivers tend to feel embarrassed about the person’s mental illness, feel as though they are looked down on because a family member has a mental illness, and feel the need to be hide it in order to have people continue to treat the family the same (Girma,Dehning, Mueller, Tesfaye, Froeschl, Moller-Leimkuhler , 2014). In the movie the little sister Ellen and primary caregiver Gilbert are the most effected by the self-stigma. The most predominant ...
That trigger led her down a path of self-discovery and healing. By trying to help these kids she had to separate the child from the disorder, and in the process she was able to do the same for herself. Only by taking the drastic step of abandoning isolation, what was in her mind her safety zone, and reaching out to society for help and friendship was she ultimately able to free herself from her disorder.
Devoted to Faith Faith is a word that people toss around or use lightly. It is quite rare to find people who live their life carrying the weight of their faith. Avi Duncan, an advocate for her faith, is one thoroughly dedicated, intelligent, and family oriented individual. Through her raw words and powerful actions she lives out her conviction. To live by words and stick to the book without straying away, takes strength and passion that not every person obtains.
To begin with, Marjane has encountered with internal conflict caused by external conflict—since a child. For instance, Marjane claims, “ My faith was not unshakable.” (10) This example conveys Marjane’s easy influence to discard any of her beliefs due to the Islamic Revolution. In fact, the Islamic Revolution was a reason for a lot of Marjane’s internal conflict. For example, Marjane reveals, “I really didn't know what to think about the veil. Deep down I was very religious but as a family, we were very modern and avant-garde.”(6) This illustration represents Marjane’s confusion on her spirituality. Also, this demonstrates Marjane deciding if her modern lifestyle is appropriate even though it's different from her religion. To
“The Harem Within” is a life story that portrays Mernissi’s childhood experiences while growing up in her family house in Fez, Morocco. Fatema Mernissi was a daughter of wealthy landowners and agriculturalists family. Even though she was raised in indulging and a privileged neighborhood, detached from the poverty most Moroccans experienced, her childhood was spent in the limits of her household shape. Mernissi was raised in a “classical domestic harem”, which abides of extended family and was designed to keep the women sheltered from men outside of the family and the public in general. Occasionally, this exceedingly limitation nurtured feelings of frustrating separation and isolation. Mernissi’s upbringing in this habitat influenced her progress as a scholar and writer.
However, this death gives way to the birth of Ezili, the deity which will make possible the constant transmigration across centuries and places and who will voice the three women’s experiences. Hopkinson renders the birth of Ezili by making her words salient in the text in bold typesetting. I’m born from song and prayer. A small life, never begun, lend me its unused vitality. I’m born from mourning and sorrow and three women`s tearful voices.
Throughout “Araby”, the main character experiences a dynamic character shift as he recognizes that his idealized vision of his love, as well as the bazaar Araby, is not as grandiose as he once thought. The main character is infatuated with the sister of his friend Mangan; as “every morning [he] lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door…when she came on the doorstep [his] heart leaped” (Joyce 108). Although the main character had never spoken to her before, “her name was like a summons to all [his] foolish blood” (Joyce 108). In a sense, the image of Mangan’s sister was the light to his fantasy. She seemed to serve as a person who would lift him up out of the darkness of the life that he lived. This infatuation knew no bounds as “her image accompanied [him] even in places the most hostile to romance…her name sprang to [his] lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which [he] did not understand” (Joyce 109). The first encounter the narrator ex...