The Individual American Experience Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Individual the Statesn Experience - Essay ExampleOrtiz expounds on the influence of language in forming ones identity in an essay called The voice communication We Know. In it, he counters the notion that English is only unifying factor in the American Experience. Ortiz was raised in an Acoma-speaking family. The power of these years upon his creative self-concept is clear. finally he defines American as some permutation of pretense and dispossession. He recalls his fathers skill as stone mildewer with sandstone and mud to build pueblos - the time, persistence, patience, and the belief that the walls might stand ever (188). He believed working with his father influences his writing (189). Both are methods of continuity. Both are ways in which a people may hold some to themselves (187). Although writing is his profession, building is always his trade.McBride challenges common and popular notions of insular identities based on simplified racial categories in his book called The Color of Water a Black Mans Tribute to His White Mother. He counters the notion that racial difference is the defining factor in the African American experience. His dominant narrative is that of self-discovery done the rediscovery of ancestry. Ultimately he defines American as a combination of eclecticism and hardship. This book is written uniquely. Chapter by chapter, it toggles between his mothers experiences of ontogeny up in America with his own. His mother details the strict rules of Orthodox Judaism and how they affected her (16). Although his mother is lily-white, she lives in a black world and refuses to acknowledge her whiteness (37). James lives in a home of orchestrated chaos (66). He sees his house as a combination three-ring circus and zoo. He describes some of his siblings - his sister Helen, the rebel Rosetta, the resident cigarette of the house his brother Dennis, the civil rights activist and artist with aspirations of becoming a doctor. The whites at his moth er Ruths school hated Jews, and in public, James be bob ups ashamed of his white mother (98). 1n 1941, Ruths Bubeh died. Ruth decided to return to New York (155). Her father tried to get her to stay she refused. He told her that if she married a black man, she could never come home again. In 1992, while standing in front of a synagogue in Suffolk, James acknowledges his own connection to the synagogue and to Judaism (189). Abu-Jaber reveals tensions between American and Jordanian cultures in a work called The Language of Baklava a Memoir. In it, she counters the notion that one Americanizes in some sterile standardized way. For example, her father learns to get strangers greeting men and women alike with the same greeting Hey, bud As such, she I grows up thinking of all Americans as Bud (34). Abu-Jaber tells the story of growing up in upstate New York with periodic transplants to Jordan. Her dominant narrative seems to be stories of being raised by a food-loving Jordanian father an d Bedouin tents. She completes her work with recipes illuminating American and Jordanian and painting the complex portrait of her displaced father who cooked as a method of continuing the past with the present. Ultimately she defines American as being like her fathers relationship with food. His daughters knowing how to feed themselves and others in ways that help define them as people.Drawing from my own personal