Audre Lorde Analysis

 From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde:

“My mother was different from other women, and sometimes it gave me a sense of pleasure and specialness that was a positive aspect of feeling set apart. But sometimes it gave me pain and fancied it the reason for so many of my childhood sorrows” (p.497).

“But it was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t stop white people from spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else” (p.498).

    Her parents made a lot of decisions for their family in terms of what is right and wrong. I feel that even though she thought her mother got upset and mad at her a lot it was to protect her. Her mother even lied to her about people spitting into the wind. I think her mother said that because it was easier to explain that to a child than to say it is on purpose because of our race. That is horrible that even children who have not even learned much about the world yet or been it very long are being punished for the color of their skin. It is not right to do to anyone no matter the color of their skin, but I just felt shocked when I read this part. I felt so bad for her mother and her being so embarrassed and not being able to walk down the street without being humiliated. Her mother was so distraught, and it caused her pain to rehash the situation in which she could not protect her family because of the color of her skin.

Word Count: 280

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nien Cheng Analysis

     Nien Cheng was imprisoned under the Communist rule of Mao Zedong who started the Cultural Revolution. The guards are constantly pushing and tormenting Nien to confess. It is not until reading further that I understood what they wanted her to confess. They wanted her to follow everything Mao Zedong’s rules and anything that he says is right. The Red Guards’ tormenting turns into torturing and punishing. She is put in restricting handcuffs and put in a small dusty solitude box with no windows. The guards told her as long as she does not confess the handcuffs stay on her. She is not able to eat or drink and would not confess because she feels that she has done nothing wrong. As portrayed throughout the reading Nien is stubborn and stuck strongly to her faith and beliefs. Nien’s hands swelled, oozed pus, and blood she wrote, “I prayed to God to help me recover the use of my hands” (p.124). Another example when she writes, “It seemed there was no alternative to relying on...
Read more

Introduction Analysis

From Norton Book of Women’s Lives, Introduction, Edited by Phyllis Rose: “It is a shock now to realize how much autobiographical work by women  The New Yorker  published in the fifties. […] It seems ungrateful to suggest that the context to some extent ‘emasculated’ its women writers” (15). “Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, perhaps the fullest and most candid biography of a woman writer up to its time, revealed astonishing details about Woolf’s asexual marriage, affairs, with other women, and insanity” (18).      In analyzing the introduction, I want to establish the definition of emasculate is to make someone or something weaker or less effective. As portrayed in these two quotes and throughout the introduction, numerous women are not able to share their personal parts of their lives with the world due to the fact that males had the power when it came to publishing. This in turn deprives women of their ability to share their experiences with other ...
Read more

The Prime Life: Simone De Beauvoir Analysis

       Ms. Beauvoir has not experienced freedom before she starts her writing at the days of her freedom. She was amused and in awe about the little things that she considers to be freedom. For example, she writes, “I was free to come and go as I pleased. I could get home with the milk, read in bed all night, sleep till midday, shut myself up for forty-eight hours at a stretch, or go out on the spur of the moment” (p. 54). She showed her excitement in all the little things in life that she had the freedoms to do now. It seemed as if she did not have any freedom before this so when she reached this point she would eat, dress, and have a relationship with whom she pleased. Ms. Beauvoir explains, “these duties did not even prove a burden to me since I felt that by performing them, I was involved in a new sort of game: I was playing at being a grownup” (p. 54). She was doing all these adult activities for the first time and was surprisingly excited to be doing them. Thes...
Read more