Mrs. Sen Essay Example

Mrs. Sen Paper Sassouni English 10 H Mrs. Tunick 11 September 2011 When moving from one country to another, most people face difficulty in combining both cultures, and fail to adapt to their new country. In the book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, the protagonists are often placed in an uncomfortable or unknown position. The reader is able to judge the characters based on how they act during their uncomfortable position. In the short story â€Å"Mrs. Sen†, Mrs. Sen is unable to find the right balance between her original Indian heritage and American culture, while the protagonist in â€Å"The Third and Final Continent† is successful in striking the best balance between the two cultures. In the short story, â€Å"Mrs. Sen†, Mrs. Sen only displays her Indian heritage through view of India as well as her material Indian possessions because she did not want to leave in the first place. Throughout the story, Mrs. Sen expresses her love for the fish in Calcutta, India. While the fish from her local grocer is indeed fresh and reserved for her, She constantly remarks that the fish is not as fresh in America. We will write a custom essay sample on Mrs. Sen specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Mrs. Sen specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Mrs. Sen specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer For Sen, the fish isn’t just food, it’s a piece of India. She is showing that, in her mind, India will always be superior to America. She didn’t choose a new country as well as a new fish. Moreover, Mrs. Sen displays her culture through her traditional cutting blade and her saris. She constantly is using the blade because it reminds her of gatherings with fellow Indian women. She holds on to these gatherings because in America, she is a prisoner in her own home, lacking social relationships. At the same time, her saris are symbolic of her Indian customs and how she will never stop â€Å"wearing† them. Furthermore, the story ends with Sen attempting to drive to the market to purchase the fish, but she crashes the car in the process. Sen attempting to buy the fish is a symbol for her attempt to finally â€Å"buy† into American culture. By ending the story with a crash, Lahiri shows that for some immigrants, assimilation will not be possible. As a result, Sen will stay miserable and uncomfortable in America. While placed in an unfamiliar America, Mrs. Sen proves that a balance between her original heritage and her new culture is not possible for her because she lacks the opportunities to assimilate. In the short story, â€Å"The Third and Final Continent†, the protagonist shows that assimilation to America is possible by eventually achieving a perfect balance between Indian and American Cultures. For his flight to America, he purchased â€Å"The Student Guide to North America†, even though he was no longer a student. By reading the guide, the protagonist shows that he is willing to and plans to learn how to adapt to his new society. He later successfully makes adaptations due to his determination to assimilate to America. Although the protagonist proves to welcome American culture, he does not forget his roots in his Indian heritage. He proves his preservation of Indian customs through food: â€Å"In the end I bought a small carton of milk and a box of cornflakes. That was my first meal in America. I ate at my desk. I preferred it to hamburgers or hotdogs†¦ at the time I had yet to consume beef† (Lahiri 88%). Although the protagonist does not show that he is Hindi, he still feels that he should not eat beef, because it is part of his past culture. The protagonist keeps the customs of his past culture because a shared custom gives a sense of unity to other Indians for the protagonist. By the end of the story, the protagonist recognizes his balance between his two cultures: â€Å"We are American citizens now, so that we can collect social security when it is time. Though we visit Calcutta every few years, and bring back more drawstring pajamas and Darjeeling tea, we have decided to grow old today. I work in a small college library. We have a son that attends Harvard University. Mala now longer drapes her sari over her head†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Lahiri 99%). The balance translates into a more complete life for the protagonist and his family. By deciding to grow old in America happily, Lahiri shows that assimilation was possible for the protagonist because he had the materials and opportunities to be successful in his assimilation. The protagonist is able to achieve a favorable balance of his original heritage and American culture by eventually assimilating to America, while still keeping some of his original Indian customs. In the short story, â€Å"Mrs. Sen†, Mrs. Sen fails to accept American culture by only expressing her Indian side while, the protagonist in â€Å"The Third and Final Continent† achieves a balance of both of his cultures. The assimilations translate into a miserable life for Sen, while the protagonist of â€Å"The Third and Final Continent† eventually obtains a complete life. For Sen, it was impossible for her to assimilate, partly because she originally had no intent on mixing cultures and partly because she is an Indian woman, who is not given the opportunities and sources to assimilate to America. The protagonist of â€Å"The Third and Final Continent† on the other hand, is able to prove that with the right opportunities, assimilation is possible and favorable. Making such a drastic culture change leaves immigrants in a difficult position to assimilate.

Whirling Logs The Navajo Sandpainting essays

Whirling Logs The Navajo Sandpainting essays According to Navajo tradition, the Whirling Logs sandpainting was a religious item. The Navajo people used the sandpainting in healing ceremony. Also, the Navajos referred to the sandpainting as an iikaah meaning an opening for the gods to enter and leave. The sandpainting was an essential device in the healing ceremony that could last up to nine days. A singer, who also was a medicine man, performed the healing ceremony. During the ceremony, the medicine man directed other Navajos in creating the sandpainting on the ground to illustrate an allegory within the healing ceremony. The sandpainters used crushed stones, flowers, gypsums, and pollen to create and complete the sandpainting in one day. Then, they destroyed it later that night in order to dispel evil and restore health. In the Whirling Logs sandpainting, the Navajos depicted a story of Tsil-ol-ne, a hero who went on a long journey. Tsil-ol-ne floated on a hollow log traveling down the river, which is known as the San Juan River today, and there he learned ritual ceremonies to cure sickness and how to farm. When Tsil-ol-ne turned to his home, he shared all new ideas with his people. The sandpainting got its name as Whirling Logs due to the hero and his logs which were trapped in a whirlpool where the San Juan River and Colorado River meet, and he was rescued by the gods. In the center of the sandpainting is the whirling cross with Yeis, who are the gods of the Navajos, seating in pair on each of the four ends. One is a male dressing in black with a round head mask, and the other is a female dressing in white with a square head mask. The Yeis taught Tsil-ol-ne how to farm and grow seeds. At the four corners of the whirling cross, starting from the top right corner clockwise, there are plants: corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. Figures around the four ends of the whirling cross, clockwise, are also the gods: Talking God, the teacher and the elder of other gods, w ...

Literary Analysis Of White Teeth By Zadie Smith Essay

Literary Analysis Of White Teeth By Zadie Smith - Essay Example She is currently a Fellow at Harvard University in the US. Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes. -Zadie Smith, White Teeth If World War II and the knowledge of oppression it represents are absent from all too many postcolonial studies, fifty-five years after its ending, the event and its lingering effects have found a critical position in the remarkable novel White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, Britain's most celebrated postcolonial prodigy. In White Teeth, the last days of that war mark the beginning of an escape from the nightmare of belonging to someone else and chart a journey to somewhere else. White Teeth proclaims a declaration of independence not only from the haunting and constraining memory of the war's catastrophes and racist oppression, but from the very idea of belonging. After centuries of colonial oppression and decades of postcolonial depression and anger, White Teeth imagines the grand finale of Empire as the construction of a multicultural, multiclass British bazaar. Acknowledging its colonial history and debt to postcolonial studies, the novel creates a set of unanticipated mutating connectio ns among historical and imagined events and identities interwoven among first-, second-, and third-generation postcolonial citizens of Britain. (Mike Storry, Peter Childs 53) The end of World War II meets the creation of a new Britain when a younger generation seizes the monocultural ground of Englishness on which their racialized conditions originated. As this younger generation remaps the future of their interrelated history, the narrative and political effects of their takeover represent a response not only to postcolonial critics, but to British women writing the end of Empire. Born in 1975, of a Jamaican mother and English father, in the epicenter of "British racism of the 1970s and 1980s, "Zadie Smith writes White Teeth as a rebellion against her confinement in the role of marginalized victim in an ongoing history of oppression. Neither she nor her characters will accept their places as objects of an interminable and global racist plot. (Nasta 11) Instead, she insists that "her own education at a comprehensive school and then at Cambridge shows that"life changes, my family is a picture of change"). The novel's hyperkinetic romp across interracial, multiethnic London veers from the marriage of working-class Englishman Archie Jones to biracial Jamaican Clara, from his friendship with his Bengali Muslim army mate, Samad Iqbal, to their children's entanglements with the Jewish Chalfen family. As their children hip-hop unimpeded through London's jumble of social and cultural identities, White Teeth understands, toys with, and then refuses inclusion in the "official racism of Britain in the 1970s". These characters and the whole of White Teeth will not play into the hands of Enoch Powell's racist rhetoric-"the triumph of barbarism over civilization". Powell's rallying cry against the postwar waves of postcolonial immigration reverses that slogan used by colonial conquerors and also by the Allies in their war against Nazi conquest-th e triumph of civilization over barbarism. But Powell's slogan also exposes what all