What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith Compared to Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer.
1743 WordsJan 19, 20137 Pages
What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith
Compared to Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer.
Carolynn Hanson
ENG125: Introduction to Literature
(ABG1239A)
Instructor: Corey King
October 15, 2012
When comparing and contrasting the poem What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith with the short story Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer. The poem and the short story are both great examples of the difficulty of life between different ethnic backgrounds. The Poem What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith is more recent than the short story Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer they are written during different time frames and their stories are unique within their time frame.
Both the poem and the short…show more content… The feeling of not belonging, the feeling of being different, and unique is best stated by Patricia Smith What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl, “first of all, it’s being 9 years old and feeling like you’re not finished, like your edges are wild, like there’s something, everything, wrong” (pg 267 Clugston).
When comparing and contrasting the poem Patricia Smith What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl to the short story Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer you see that the these two young black women want to be accepted in the world around them. The girl in the poem is trying to change her image by once again quoting “like there's something, everything, wrong, it's dropping food coloring in your eyes to make them blue and suffering their burn in silence. It's popping a bleached white mophead over the kinks of your hair” (pg 267 Clugston). Where as the short story states that
nobelprize.org states that Nadine Gordimer “Born in Springs, South Africa, 20/11/1923. Daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer. Has lived all her life, and continues to live, in South Africa. Principal works: 10 novels, including A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter, July's People, A Sport of Nature, My Son's Story and her most recent, None to Accompany Me. 10 short story collections, the most recent Jump, published 1991, and Why Haven't You Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972, published 1992.