At the end of the comic strip, I thought that the lady’s reaction to the refugee finally getting his freedom was insensitive. It’s also a slap in the face considering what the refugees taken to the camp had to endure, and the social deprivation the camp had placed them in without compassion. Its terrible to see that the state of immigrant detentions centers in other countries besides the U.S. also make immigrants feel dehumanized, especially in a country I didn’t think had such an outlook on immigration to have these centers be more resemblant to prisons. But I think Ahmed did an effective job in conveying that through these comics. As someone who didn’t know much, it made me more aware of treatment of refugees in Australia. And the illustration is fairly recent too. Overall, it did well as an outlet for education while trying to do so in a rather untraditional way.

All throughout “A Small Place”, Kincaid highlights how “used” Antigua has been, and how that has impacted life in the country. She talks about the effects of colonialism, how even after Antigua gained it’s independence, it still had Queen Elizabeth’s birthday as a national holiday (though from what we can read, the Queen wasn’t really a hero); she talks about how government officials have used the country’s resources for their own personal gain and not really being there for the people of Antigua; and she talks about how the perception of Antigua as a paradise (though she does regard Antigua’s natural beauty) is false because of the amount of social issues still in Antigua’s existence. The highlighting of all these things prove to be convincing, at least to me, in showing how Antigua is not a perfect place and is actually far from it. It also makes me re-evaluate how I think about traveling to Jamaica as a U.S. citizen, though I have family there and can see first hand how life is for them. But overall, the read is powerful in it’s use of the rhetorical strategies like ethos, pathos, and logos, and though I’ve never been to Antigua it gives me a different outlook on how to view not just it but other countries in the same or similar situations as the island in their social, economic, and/or political issues.

One thing that stands out in these chapters is the attempts of Julius to draw no attention to his injured hand from having been mugged. He didn’t report the mugging to police, nor did he even ask the old man walking past him after the incident to call 911, nor did he say to Moji what really happened to him when she asked about the hand—instead, he mumbles to her about “slipping on a threshold[.]” (218). I don’t know why he, instead of seeking physical help—or emotional, being that he was a victim of this assault, –he chooses to keep his pains to himself. Maybe it correlates to the pain that other black people, whether they were enslaved or free, faced in America of which he references in multiple different occasions. Maybe it’s his way of finding commonality with their suffering, considering the multiple ways he has felt outcasted due to his mixed race. (Not just from situations in America but also abroad like in Nigeria). But either way, it seems he finds more strength in keeping his own issues to himself—though it can very well be more complex than this.

In the segment where Julius was talking about how he couldn’t remember his bank card code–though he had used it several times in his recent trip to Brussels– I thought of how peculiar he is as a character in this book. Like, “how could you forget the code you were dependent on for getting money the whole month prior?” But as he got into how the quick loss of memory was a product of “stage fright,” I remembered how that can happen in situations for us too like on a test or being in front of a large crowd of people. In this sense, as someone said in one of our class discussions, we can see aspects of his character we can relate with. His anxiety having forgotten the initial check book made him a little fearful of what the bank teller would do because of this. But in the end it didn’t seem to have been such a critical error for the bank teller. In page 147, we are told how the teller just shrugs off the situation. And so with this, we can see how Julius can relate to us who are outside the story, while still having traits that make him unique as a character.

At parts in the play, I thought Mrs. Gersham was crazy in that she was saying that she and Dr. Kerry had a relationship in the past and that they were romantic with each other–yet Dr. Kerry had no memory of those moments; she kept saying how she knew who he was on a personal level–yet Dr. Kerry couldn’t recall ever meeting her. And despite the various conspiracies that Mrs. Gersham was bringing up, Dr. Kerry still played along to an extent, or at least seemed to entertain her theories. I thought maybe this was his way of knowing her and that he decided that though she had no appointment, he would still see her anyway (and even intrigued to do so because of his attraction to her). But it was a plot twist to know that after all, they did know parts about each other in that Mrs. Gersham knew Dr. Kerry was a socialist and that Dr. Kerry knew that Mrs. Gersham was his sister– despite Dr. Kerry denying to have ever known who Mrs. Gersham was in the very beginning. Also, on another note, despite the time (though I do not know about race-relations in England in the 1900s), race wasn’t really brought up save a few moments that weren’t dwelt upon (besides the ending). And so, in this way, maybe Nkosi was trying to highlight other things such as character mentality while not so much giving the stage to the topic of race, despite the apartheid in South Africa and hostility to blacks in America (which we know about) of his time. Overall, the play was full of twists and turns and was intriguing to read.

“Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

I remember writing that question in my notebook when I got to

the U.S.

Because I wanted to write.

Because what will others inherit from me?”

The last part of this segment stands out because it points to a question of legacy. From the poem, we know that the narrator’s family (assumably Kapil’s) experienced the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Their stories of what they went through has traveled down the line of generations to Kapil, of which she writes about now. The title suggests that Kapil wishes to have had the Partition Line reversed that had caused the lives of around 2 million people to die as it created a new boundary and spark wide scale violence. The legacy of this Line has made it’s way to Kapil, who, if she has heard about it from her mother’s account, hadn’t experienced it herself. But with this story, she writes about the effects the Line had on the lives of her family to not just people in her own family who can possibly read it, but to others outside the family–her wider audience as a writer–as something about it’s legacy she too passes on. The poem can correlate to a saying that (along these lines) says that if we know what has happened previously in history, we are less likely to do them again–being that we can see the outcome of that part of history. And so, just like how the effects of slavery and racism is learned about in America, Kapli passes on how the effects of the Partition Line affected her and her family. And with this, she voices a part of history that she may feel a duty in relaying to future generations to not have it recur once again, and that her audience feels the emotional weight of what it had on numerous lives including her own family.

Yeah, along the lines of your point, Manto doesn’t use flowery language in the story but when description is given, it helps us just enough to get a picture of what is going on. He uses words concisely and it’s impact on how the plot-building is conveyed helps build interest in the storyline (though the storyline itself is kind of bitter).

In the passage where the young men found Sakina, I was expecting something bad to happen to her at the hands of them. In a lot of movies and even some real world examples, there have been men who took advantage of young girls and women, and that was something I was predicting would happen to Sakina by them. I thought they had other intentions than to safely return Sakina to her aged and worried father despite having given her a jacket to cover herself and food and milk. But seemingly, they did bring her back to the camp as they promised Sirajuddin and other times with other women and children. However, Manto injects the part where Sirajuddin asked if they found her, and yet did not tell him they did. And then, she is found unconscious by railroad tracks and is carried to the camp hospital. So we don’t know if the young men really did have the good intentions they portrayed to Sirajuddin to have had earlier. But at least Sirajuddin’s character seems like a light in midst of the dark events going on in the story.