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Do You Have A Strong Sense Of Cultural Identity?

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Cultural identity is described as the feeling of belonging to or identifying to a group. It is part of a person's self-conception and self-perception and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture. According to the Social Report, having a strong sense of culture identity makes a person more likely to feel a sense of belonging. People with a strong and defined cultural identity typically show positive outcomes in terms of education, happiness, health (Lo 6). They are more likely to have social support systems to depend on for support, as well as to feel a sense of trust with people within those support systems (6). In the story, …show more content…

Thought out the story, the young girl was imagining different scenarios of what could have actually happened to her to bring herself to become pregnant. The scenarios painted her aunt in a good light. That showed the disconnect from Kingston and the rest of her family. She felt bad for her aunt and the fact that her family pretended that she didn’t exist. “I have believed that sex was unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that "aunt" would do my father mysterious harm” (Kingston 4). Even though the young girl didn’t commit the crime, you still get a sense that she has a dislike for the way her culture is and how they can disown their own. Kingston’s cultural identity becomes strong at the end because she learned something new about the way it works, but she moved away from …show more content…

Nye, the author, reveals how her father would always incorporate or mention the fig tree in all his folktales he uses to recite to her. She states, “Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.” (Nye 1) referring to her father’s obsession with mentioning the fig tree. In this poem it is obvious that the fig tree holds much importance to the father (Teresa 1). The father had shown a certain dedication to the fig tree because of what it represented to him (1). The importance of cultural identity in this story is that the father is proud of his culture and being Arabic, and he wants his children to adopt that pride in who they are and what culture they are a part of. This story was all about teaching and passing down what the father had inside of him. The fig tree may not have been an actually fig tree, but what it symbolized was powerful. The reader also gets a sense that the child in the poem becomes aware of her cultural identity and begins to have pride of it. The revealing of the fig tree in the end could be representing the new found pride and knowledge of the child and her new found

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