The Norton Book of Women's Lives: Reflections

  Word Count: 432 From Meatless Days by Sara Suleri “‘They’re sweetbreads and they’re cooked with kidneys, and they’re very good.’ Natives should always be natives, exactly what they are, and I felt irked to be so probed around the issue of my own nativity” (731). “I had to go back to where I belonged and - past a thousand different mealtimes - try to reconstruct the parable of the kapura ” (732). “And so as an older mind, I fault myself for not having the wits to recognize what I already knew. I must have always known exactly what kapura are, because the conversation they provoked came accompanied with shocks of familiarity that typically attend a trade of solid information” (735). Sara Suleri’s narrative is entirely about her and her culture’s relationship with food. Therefore when her knowledge of a popular food is questioned she believes it to be an attack on her nativity. Her culture and her experience within it was often defined by her experience of food, as was her childhoo...

  Word Count: 648 From Motherwit by Onnie Lee Logan “So one morning befo’ day I woke up, somethin told me in my sleep. Next time you have yo’ white babies, get the blue-sealed Vaseline and rub it around their lil eyes real good befo’ you put the silver nitrate in” (494-5). “So I’m lettin out one a my secrets. I don't want to bury em. There’s so much that I don't want to die with. Not sharing it with somebody. That's what give me the idea to do a book because I have so much experience in here that I want to explode. I was not taught to do that. God give that to me” (487). “And that is I'm with my patients at all times with a smile and keepin her feelin good with kind words … Most of the doctors when they do say somethin to em its so harsh … Some of em say that if they wasn't strapped down there they would get down and come home. Alot of women are left totally alone. And plenty of em have had their babies right by themselves” (485). It is very obvious that Onnie is ...

  Word Count: 548 From The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Nisa “A man, when he marries you, he doesn't marry you for your face, he doesn't marry you for your beauty, he marries you so he can have sex with you” (649). “Mm, today you will just lie there, but tomorrow, I will take you. If you refuse, I'll pry your legs open and take you by force” (648). “Because when you first menstruate you don't tell anyone. A child who begins to menstruate isn't supposed to talk” (650). “We lived and lived, the two of us, together, and after a while I started to really like him and then, to love him” (652).   The !Kung culture is dramatically different from most other places in the world at the time since they still lived on the hunter and gatherer system rather than the agricultural system. Because of this traditional thought, they also had a very traditional way of thinking about the roles of men and women especially in relationships but also in the societal rules that were ...

  Word Count: 500 From The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston “The adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask. You get no warning that you shouldn’t wear a white ribbon in your hair until they hit you and give you the sideways glare for the rest of the day” (456). “I didn't say you were ugly. You say that all the time. That's what we’re supposed to say. That's what Chinese say. We like to say the opposite” (467). “I was at that moment telling her my list, and in the telling, it grew. No higher listener. No listener but myself” (467). “Not everybody thinks I'm nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife” (465). This narrative in many ways reminds me of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan because the main theme in both of these stories are the miscommunications caused by cultural differences between how the parents were raised and how the children were raised. Most of Maxine Hong Kingston’s troubles were caused by this divide. Since her mother was raised within...

Word Count: 450 From West with the Night by Beryl Markham “They are here, all are here, unseen and scattered, but sharing with us a single loneliness” (526). “I spend so much time alone that silence has become a habit. Often, except for Ruta and Farah, I am alone at safari headquarters day after day, night after night, while the hunters, following a herd that I have found or waiting for me to find one, are camped miles away. At dawn they expect the sound of my Avian, and it always comes” (527). “All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost soul seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer” (529). Markham’s writing starts off with her flying her plane looking for the hunters she works with. They have been caught out in a flood and she is desperately searching for them. Eventually she finds them and returns them to the camp. This...

  Word Count: 454 From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen “Lulu has explained to her husband that there is nothing up by the houses to be afraid of but all the same he dares not come” (226). “The years in which Lulu and her people came round to my house were the happiest of my life in Africa” (228). “Lulu came in from the wild world to show that we were on good terms with it, and she made my house one with the African landscape, so that nobody could tell where the one stopped and the other began” (227). In her memoir, Dinesen has a very strong connection with nature even more than humans. She is constantly referring to animals like humans. For example she calls the giant forest hog a “rare person to meet” (220). But most importantly she believed Lulu, an antelope she adopted, to be a part of her family, not unlike the way dogs are. However, like the hog she mentioned in the memoir, she refers to Lulu as if she was a human from Africa. She says that “Lulu was a young antelope of the bu...

Word Count: 398 From Totto-chan by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi “The ‘tea party’ was a wonderful farewell gift that Ryo-chan left the children. And although none of them had the faintest idea then, it was in fact the last game they were to play at Tomoe before the children parted and went their separate ways. Ryo-chan went off on the Toyota train. HIs departure coincided with the arrival of the American airplanes. They finally appeared in the skies above Tokyo and began dropping bombs every day” (476). During war, opposing sides often forget the humanity of the people they are fighting. This narrative is a beautiful example of what Japan was like during World War II and how the Japanese were affected. The children enjoyed their music classes and learned to embrace doing new things. Even so Totto-chan, like most children, was not always perfect. She was kicked out of her role in the play because when another character would beat her, she fought back and refused to stay still like the play called ...

  Word Count: 446 From Landscape for a Good Woman by Carolyn Kay Steedman “Children she’d grown up with had died in the 1930s: ‘They hadn’t enough to eat’” (721). “Such reworking of past time is new, infinitely surprising; and against it I must balance what it felt like then, and the implications of the history given me in small doses; that not being hungry and having a warm bed to lie in at night, I had a good childhood, was better than other people; was a lucky little girl” (724). Carolyn’s family was not rich by any means but they were pretty well off, especially in comparison to the standard of the time. Carolyn grew up directly after World War II when everyone was still recovering and trying to move on. Her mother was a huge influence on her throughout her childhood. She provided in the way that she could but made her believe that she was better than others and that her father was the issue. Looking back Carolyn understood that her father was not to blame for their money iss...