Things Fall Apart Reflection

In When We Fight, We Win by Greg Jobin-Leeds it says that “comparison can block compassion both for others and for ourselves.” I agree with such statement; I think that listening is a skill you learn throughout time. One can pretend to listen without really getting anything out of the conversation that one is having with that other person. In the Compassionate Listening workshop, I got to do it with Rachel Kurland and I sit and listened to her talking about the moment her friend treason her. I tried to understand her plight, why would she not cut that friendship off, I understood she loved her friend, however, I could not resist bringing my biases to our conversation. I asked myself, why is Rachel, such a good, loving, and smart person,

Finally, Sara took the courage and effort by deserting her own culture to assimilate the new culture. Sara knows the only way for her to assimilate the American culture is to leave her cautious father and went to college to become a teacher, which is her dreams. So, At age of seventeen she left her family and rent a basement lived by her self. By escaping her father¡¯s shadow she is like a bird free from a cage that she can breath the fresh air of the new world. Eventhough she lived in the little room with dilapidated furniture, but at least she can be herself- to pursuit of self-identity.

She feels that this can help her battle her depression and rid of it. But actually it’s making it worse. Not only is her silentness angering her family, it’s withholding her from breaking through depression. The best way to beat depression is by sharing and talking with someone. Maya’s mom gets to the point that Maya is not needed in St. Louis anymore and ships her and Bailey back with Momma in Stamps. Maya proceeds to only talking with Bailey. Until she was introduced to a lady named Mrs. Bertha Flowers. This lady took Maya in and can be described as Maya’s therapist and teacher. She was the only lady that actually liked and understood Maya. They bonded well together through books and poems. Mrs. Flowers would often give Maya assignments on specific poems and how to recite them. With Maya seeing Mrs. Flowers constantly, she broke out of her depression. Maya states,”I was like, and what a difference it made. I was respected for just being Marguerite Johnson” (Angelou 101). After battling many obstacles in her young life, with time, she manages to overcome them. Maya has developed resilience at such a young which will benefit her later in life.

Maya Angelou and Amy Tan discuss religious problems and culture differences in their literature. The authors have captured these differences by their past experiences of friends and family. Both authors come from a diverse culture, but both face the same harsh society of the American culture and beliefs. The Author's both tell about situations in their short stories of being outcasts and coming from different racial backgrounds and trying to triumph over these obstacles. Angelou and Tan both have a very unique writing ability and style in their short stories.

Maya Angelou’s essay is describing her eighth grade graduation and the racism that was prominent at that time. With an explanation of the roles at graduation, she begins excited for her own graduation but as she listens to the speech of a white man, she becomes angered with the racial discrimination that was hinted at in his speech. In the midst of her anger, she regained hope from the black valedictorian’s speech and proudly stated that her race still continued to live happily even with the limited opportunities that were given.

Maya Angelou is a leading literary voice of the African-American community. She writes of the triumph of the human spirit over hardship and adversity. “Her style captures the ca-dences and aspirations of African American women whose strength she celebrates.” (Library of Chattanooga State, n. d.) Maya has paved the way for children who has had a damaged

My room-mate had a single story of Africa; a single story of catastrophe”. Adichie also tells how growing up in Nigeria reading only American and English children’s books made her deaf to her authentic voice. As a child, she wrote about such things as blue-eyed white children easting apples, thinking brown skin and mangos had no place in Literature. That changed as she discovered African writers.

A race war between whites and blacks has blighted American history since colonial times. In her essay “Graduation,” Maya Angelou recollects the experience of her eighth grade graduation in the 1930s to examine the personal growth of humans caught in the adversity of racial discrimination. Through narrative structure, selection of detail, and use of imagery, Angelou encourages young blacks to follow their ambitions with pride, despite what the “white man” thinks of them.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest of them all? I ponder over this question as I stare vacantly at my reflection. It shows myself at the age of four, wobbling back and forth like a rocking chair, nerves and empty thoughts racing through my mind as I stand at the very front of the line on the first day of kindergarten. It shows myself ten years from now in a stable job as a successful lawyer on a more busy than average day. It shows me my struggles, my doubts, my anxieties, and my failures. It shows me my successes, my euphoria, my dreams, hopes and aspirations. It shows me my teachers, my peers, my culture, religion, my friends, my mother, my father, my brothers. Myself. I see the world,

Mrs.Flowers is everything that embodies a poised, powerful, and bold, southern African American women in Maya’s life. She is looked at as a mentor to Maya through a period in her young life. As an educated and wealthy women, everyone aspires to be her, especially Maya. Bertha Flowers introduces Maya to the importance of education with books and the introduction of sociable relations with others. The gravity of how much Mrs.Flowers means to Maya can only be explained in this interaction were Maya gushes, “ She was one of the few gentle women I have ever known, and has remained throughout my life the measure of what a human being can be (Caged Bird 92). We can see that Angelou recalls even from her childhood and now to adulthood in writing this book that Mrs.Flowers has truly changed her life with a goal of someone she can aspire to be one day. If we follow this relationship further we can see how Mrs. Flowers has been her saving grace, following her rape she has given Maya an outlet to find her voice. This outlet is reading, she gives Maya books on top of books to read, but the catch is that Maya must read every book, every paragraph , every word out loud. Maya struggles immensely with this predicament, but learns that it is much easier reading someone else's words first and then formulating your own won’t be so burdensome.

A whole race of people changed their identity throughout time, while facing unspeakable difficulties they accomplished a change. Maya Angelou is a beautiful writer whose identity is wrapped inside of her literary accomplishments, but was shadowed by the color of her skin. In her piece “Graduation” she portrays the beauty of a race once

She succeeds and becomes the first African American woman to work on San Francisco street cars. Going back to school, she didn’t really feel like she belonged. At one point of her life, Maya feared she was a lesbian and decided to experiment with having boyfriends etc. She encounters two brothers, and decides to be in a relationship with one of them. After realizing that it is not satisfying her, she ends it. Three weeks later, she finds out she’s pregnant. She ends up giving birth to a son, and is so amused by the baby that she is afraid to even touch him. However eventually, her mother makes her sleep on the bed with her son to prove to her that nothing will happen to him, and from then on, she wasn’t afraid anymore. This book was a very detailed view of Maya’s life, especially because it was an autobiography and she was the author. I found out so much that I never knew about her, and I was very interested. She had such a hard life, but still managed to make it a life worth living, and worth

Most Native American cultures give women the highest regards and utmost respect. In many modern works of literature, women are not only independent, but often become the heroes of the story. However, were one to look to novels such as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which depicts the African Ibo society, where women’s role are little better than the Greeks. Women were to submit to their husbands, bear their children, and little else. Some cultures, such as many Latin American works of literature, do not have a clearly defined role for a woman. Instead a woman filled the role necessary to progress the

Maya Angelou describes what her life with her grandmother is like while constantly being discriminated against her race. She then found her father, and he leaves Maya and Bailey off to their mother’s house. There, the mother’s boyfriend rapes Maya. After suffering from psychological shock, Maya then moves back to her grandmother’s. As a teenager Maya gets nervous about her sexual identity and tries to discover it. Through these harsh times, the naïve and softhearted Maya grows to become a strong, independent woman.

The novel Things Fall Apart was written in English language by the late Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It was first published in the year 1958 by Heinemann Educational Books. This literary piece is one of the most widely read and studied ever happened in the history and one of the African novels written in the English language and to receive global critical acclaim. Things Fall Apart is recognized as one of a classic literature or literary work and is said to be taught and read everywhere by the Anglosphere or rather in the English-speaking countries.