Compose Yourself:Writing & Identity in Douglas, Williams & Walker :: essays papers

Compose YourselfWriting & Identity in Douglas, Williams & handcart For the last several years, whenever I teach an introductory composition signifier I use an anthology of essays called Fields of Writing.One of the strengths of this collection is the exemplary diversity of its selections, and among the beaver of these are many essays by Afri quarter Americans.I assign a outcome of these in the course, but four in particular I lease found to be consistently useful in teaching staple ideas about composition. These four are Frederick Douglasss Learning to Read & Write, Patricia Williamss On cosmos the Object of Property,and two by Alice Walker, Beauty When the Other Dancer is the egotism and Am I Blue? Each of these essays conveys a different side of the important link between literacy and identity, between the ability to express adeptself and the emergence of knowing oneself. Let me explain what I mean by scratch line with the oldest essay among this group, Learning to Read & Write by Frederick Douglas. <--if supportEmptyParas--<--endif--Douglass essay is a short excerpt from his Autobiography.It describes the laborious process he had to go by in order to teach himself how to read and write.Douglas informs us that, in the commence of his education, his schoolmarm had begun his instruction, but in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband, not and ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one else. Thus Douglass situation becomes one in which he not but has to be his own teacher, he also has to, as he says, indemnify to various stratagems in order to outflank the considerable thrustance to his accomplishment of literacy.Douglass essay first teaches the students that, in circumstances which in fact resist the formation of an identity--in this case, Douglass identity as a freely literate human being--then literacy and specifically writing is the only way to carve out a space for ones own thought s. If the words that define you all belong to others--to his mistress and master--then his sense of his own identity is at the mercy of their words, and can, to a definite extent, only be expressed in their terms. As Douglas goes on to fountainhead out, it isnt until he is at least partially literate that he can fully conceive the nature of his lack of an independent identity. Without his own language, he has no way to see himself as separate from the world constructed by the language of those who control him.