Term Paper on "Coming of Age Theme"

Term Paper 3 pages (1063 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Coming of Age -- Struggles of Identity, Politics, and Ethics

Coming of age is not merely a personal struggle, defined by changes in one's body and the structure of one's social life, as adolescence often is viewed in America. Viewed from an international and multicultural perspective, coming of age is also defined by an adolescent's cultural and political context. For example, in her memoir Persian Girls, Nahid Rachlin depicts her young life in Iran as being defined by her gender and her culture's limiting view of femininity, despite the fact that Rachlin was born during the pro-Western reign of the Shah. It is not simply in the fundamentalist-controlled regimes, like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that female oppression can occur. The horrors of this regime are compellingly depicted in the educational scenes of Mohsin Makhmalbaf's film "Khandahar" where young girls are told that they can no longer study, and upon puberty they must veil their faces, equating a silencing of the self with becoming a woman. But in her father's household, Rachlin is presented with an equally stark equation of being an adult woman and being a good housekeeper and little else:

Mohtaram joon, when are you going to learn to run the household well?" he'd say. "Look at the way you shop. We either don't have enough fruit or we have too much of it; the porch is full of pigeon droppings, and can't you at least tell Ali to clean it? Or get Fatemeh to come and help out? You're a grown woman now, not that little girl I married" (Rachlin 47)

Rachlin suggests that there are more pro-woman aspects to Iranian culture, as envisioned in her aunt's household, but ultimately she chooses studying in America to adopting the life of an Islamic wife and mother, which she regards as a return to an infantile state, rather than truly progressing into adult autonomy. She is inspired by the American films loved by her sister, Pari, rather than the prospect of an arranged marriage and becoming a woman as envisioned in the cultural terms of her father. But to find her adult identity, the young author must leave her native land and family and redefine herself in the terms of a new culture. Unlike, for example, the protagonist of the earlier autobiographical novel a Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih which casts the West as a corrupting influence for its male, African protagonist, specifically in sexual and violent terms, for the young Iranian Shiite Muslim Rachlin, Western influence is positive. Watching American films and receiving American influence through study defines the new sense of adult self in a positive way for Rachlin, while European cultural influences prove the undoing of the naive and pure African. To come of age in Iran, Rachlin sees as no true maturity at all for a woman.

Political influence upon adolescent development is not limited to the female experience. This illustrated in Khaled Hosseini's the Kite Runner. In this novel, the life of the young protagonist and his father is changed irrevocably by the instatement of the fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Once wealthy and respected, the family loses its status entirely upon coming to… READ MORE

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