Women's Writing Worldwide

 Word Count: 253 Parker Greene From Meatless Days by Sara Suleri " … 'Sara,' said Tillat, her voice deep with the promise of surprise, 'do you know what kapura  are?' I was cooking and a little cross 'Of course I do,' I answered with some affront. '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. But Tillat's face was kindly with superior knowledge. 'Not sweetbread,' she gently said. 'They're testicles, that's what kapura  really are.' … " (pg. 731) Sara is from Karachi, Pakistan where her father is a journalist and her mother is a Welsh-born teacher. Sara grows up having learned many things from her mother, but mostly learned about the different foods she grew up eating. One time her friend Tillat decided to tell Sara that kapura is not actually sweet...

 Word Count: 287 Parker Greene From Motherwit by Onnie Lee Logan " Back in the days when my mother was a midwife they didn't do anything about lacerations then. What could they do about it? " (pg. 487 ) The evolution of technology is a fascinating concept. Laptops, computers, cell phones, and the internet are all devices that we seemingly rely on to function. They have become essential for communicating with the rest of the world. This same logic may be applied to the medical field. The world of science has greatly evolved, as I am sure it will continue to do so during my lifetime and beyond. This reading brings light to the fact that medicine was not always how it is now. Logan's experiences as a midwife makes this very clear. She mentions how she has a small bag with a few items; an orange stick, scrub brush, a sterile cord, and silver nitrate. She also mentions her efforts to keep things sterile by cleaning materials and wearing her hair back. Her materials and ste...

 Word Count: 267 Parker Greene From Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Nisa " Another time we were walking together in the bush, I said, "Mommy …carry me!" She said yes, but my father told her not to. He said I was big enough to walk along by myself. Also, my mother was pregnant. He wanted to hit me, but my older brother Dau stopped him, "You've hit her so much, she's skinny! She's so thin, she's only bones. Stop treating her this way!" Then Dau picked me up and carried me on his shoulders. " (pg. 638) Nisa and her family were apart of the !Kung tribe, which was a hunter gatherer tribe located in the Kalahari Dessert in southern Africa. Nisa is being taken off of breast feeding fairly recently but still wants to be nursed by her mother. Nisa lives in a rather harsh life environment seeing that she is raised in a hunter gatherer tribe where they have to hunt for food and live in the wilderness. At such a young age you would think t...

 Word Count: 222 Parker Greene From The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston " " …You're always believing what those Ghost Teachers tell you. Look at the size of the jaws!")… " You get reparation candy, " she said. " You say, 'You have tainted my house with sick medicine and must remove the curse with sweetness.' He'll understand." " (pg. 453) Maxine Hong Kingston was the eldest daughter of Chinese immigrants to the Unites States, being raised with both American and Chinese cultures. Maxine's parents were still accustomed to the Chinese culture, while having to learn how to live in American culture, making Maxine go to the drugstore to ask for reparation candy for making the wrong delivery. Maxine's mother is talking to her and telling her to go to the drugstore to lift this "curse" that has been put onto them, but this is something that her parents were accustomed to because of China, but America did not work t...

 Word Count: 245 Parker Greene From West with the Night by Beryl Markham " Quite plainly I was to have no larger runway, and just as plainly, there was a reason for it. Blix would not ask me to chance a landing in a spot like that unless other possibilities had first been explored. By now I was pretty sure I could land if I had to, but not at all sure I could get off again in the same space. There was no wind to check a landing nor to aid take-off. I had to think. " (pg. 520) Beryl Markham was indeed an adventurous woman who had a huge love for flying. Beryl had a flight instructor teach her how to fly and taught all of the ways to avoid disaster, but I wonder how she was feeling during this situation. As we see in the quote above Beryl is looking at the runway Blix and Winston had made was a small runway, giving her minimal room for error while also having to land on rough terrain. Obviously she goes in for the landing as we see, but we do not get to know what was going thro...

 Word Count: 236 Parker Greene From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen " Kamante brought her up on a sucking-bottle, and he also shut her up at night, for we had to be careful of her as the leopards were up round the house after nightfall. So she held to him and followed him about. From time to time when he did not do what she wanted, she gave his thin legs a hard butt with her young head, and she was so pretty that you could not help …  " (pg. 222) Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen talks a lot about the wildlife around them and how life changes for the better when you have a pet. Isak talks about how the only pet they have really had are Scotch Deerhound dogs around the house, until they rescued Lulu a young female bushbuck antelope. Isak first saw Lulu being sold on the side of the road but was uninterested at the time, until that night when Isak had a bad feeling about the young bushbuck antelope thinking of the negative care of the animal. After that as the quote above shows Kaman...

 Word Count: 231 Parker Greene From Totto-chan by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi " … Ryo-chan was sort of guardian angel who always came to the rescue and helped when anyone was in trouble. Ryo-chan could do anything. He never said much, and only smiled, but he always knew just what to do. When Totto-chan fell into the cesspool, it was Ryo-chan who came to her resuce straight away, and washed her off without so much as a grumble.  ' Let's give Ryo-chan a rousing, send-off tea party. ' said the head master. " (pg. 474)  Totto-chan is broken up into three parts where we get to learn that Tomoe, the school that the children attended for a while, was a school that wanted to try new learning methods and made sure that the community was tight knit. The quote above is showing how even the relationship between the students and staff are in Tomoe which is much different than most schools we think of today, with the lack of care for most students. The fact that the kids would be throwi...

 Word Count: 261 Parker Greene From Landscape for a Good Woman by Carolyn Kay Steedman " From a cotton town, my mother had a heightened awareness of fabric and weave, and I can date events by the clothes I wore as a child, and the material they were made of. Post-War children had few clothes, because of rationing, but not only scarcity... " (pg. 716) Carolyn Kay Steedman grew up in a lower class family where the mother had dreams of a bigger lifestyle and the father had the opposing view from the mother. Growing up in a lower class family can have many negative effects on children and we see here that Carolyn barely had many clothes and could remember specific dates by what she was wearing because of the lack of clothes she owned. I grew up in a lower class family also and I understand what it is like to not be able to get new clothes for a while so you have to keep wearing things that might not fit correctly. I think that Carolyn Kay Steedman understood that she was in a fam...

 Word Count: 212 Parker Greene From Diary by Anne Frank " … Our many Jewish friends are being taken away by the dozen. These people are being treated by the Gestapo without a shred of decency, being loaded into cattle trucks and sent to Westerbork, the big Jewish camp in Drente. … We assume that most of them are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed. " (pg. 280) Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who grew up during World War II under the oppression of Hitler, since she was Jewish. Anne Frank had to live most of her childhood living in hiding from the oppressive Nazi's that Hitler had made specifically to cause genocide and gain more control for Germany. The feeling of stress, anxiety, and loneliness seem to be the most apparent emotions displayed from her diary and I know that I and many others feel a lot of these feelings at some point, but I wonder how it was dealing with these and fighting for your life everyday by having to be super careful. Anne Frank an...