Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin' in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

-Maya Angelo

And Still I Rise is one of Maya Angelou’s most widely known poems and personally, it has become one of my favourites. Angelou’s “sassy”, “haughty” and defiant oppressor gives a new dimension to the projection of images related to the oppressed. The confidence with which the speaker addresses the concerns and consequences of oppression is commendable. Rhetorical questions such as “Does my sassiness upset you?” “Does my haughtiness offend you?” show how the speaker is not afraid to speak her mind and assert her individuality. She is not the kind who will accept her fate as that which is sealed by her masters. There is no sense of inferiority that the speaker feels while directly posing questions to those who have oppressed her. The use of metaphors such as “I've got oil wells” used to mock the wealthy show the extent to which the wealthy people dominated the less privileged and used their economic assets to exploit them.

Referring to herself as the “hope of the slave”, the speaker brings into light the history of oppression the African Americans have been through. It is in a sense a tribute to the African Americans for all that they have been through, discrimination in all aspects of their life, slavery, racism and segregation. The concerns related to women are also boldly expressed by using stark lines like “Does my sexiness upset you? / Does it come as a surprise / That I dance like I’ve got diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs?” There is a sense of indomitable spirit where the oppressed herself has become the crusader for the oppressed. The history of oppression in America spirals to approximately three decades. The impact of this discrimination and exploitation that generations of families went through is inhumane and traumatic. The mental, psychological, physical and social repercussions of such kind of irrational discrimination are unimaginable. Writings like “Still I rise” are relief to the souls of the families who went through the discrimination and is not just a means of let out but also inspiration among all those who have had similar unpleasant experiences in their lives.

The main theme of this poem centres on hope, how one can overcome all difficulties in life by just standing up and facing the problems with unwavering strength and courage. It is a poem where Maya Angelou not only addresses the African Americans and women but all sections of society that are oppressed in any which way. There is a personal touch to the poem, since Angelou herself has faced so many hardships in her life and the tone of the poem is not passive in the remotest sense. Through the poem we see how Angelou while talking about the hardships she faced in the past asserts herself as a strong African American woman in the present. The repetition of the words “I rise” are of significance as they come after she addresses the oppressors, reminding them that inspite of all that she has been through she still made it to a platform where she can give voice to hundreds of those who were oppressed. The poem is extremely inspirational and empowering. It is a poem that is written like a Victory Song. It is motivating and reminds us that if we respect ourselves then the world will have no control over whom or what we are.

There is beauty in the emotion of the poem that is awe-inspiring and every time you read it, you will take a moment and it will leave a smile on your face.

Homecoming: Questions of Identity and Race

All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoesis the fifth installment of Maya Angelou’s intensely personal autobiographical narratives. It details her return to her African roots. Similar in theme to her other writings, most specifically I Know Where the Caged Bird Sings, the book depicts themes of displacement, home and identity. What distinguishes it from this and other books, however, is the complexity of the presentation of these themes.

The book details Angelou’s return to Ghana, the home of her ancestors. In the 1960s, following the independence of Ghana from British rule, the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah promises a new dream for the once colonized nation. Angelou joins other African Americans returning to the country in order to join this great experiment. In doing so, she expects to find herself among those who share both racial characteristics and a geo-political history. Her identity, so far fluid and unstable, will through this journeybe crystallised and rooted. As she states in her book “We were Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the color of our skin was accepted as correct and normal”. What she encounters, however, is not open arms and warm welcomes. Instead, she is met with a coldness and indifference that she was not prepared to encounter.

Through her encounters with various Ghanaians, Angelou discerned that common racial features were not corollary to common racial history. Angelou faces constant discrimination as an African-American: a hybrid identity. She is denied work except at the minimum wage. A more specific example would be the rude manner in which she is turned away from a radio station by the receptionist when she goes to enquire about a job.

 Race, then is not a simple binary construction of White/ Black, West/East and Occident/Orient. The mechanisms that construct these binaries are of equal importance. The experience of African slaves and of colonized Africans, though they may have inhabited the same geographical area are not the same. Further, the process of emancipation and attainment of civil rights of the two groups is vastly different. Race and racial history were thus not correlated in any way. The Ghanaians that Angelou encounters appear to be aware of that. This could be a possible reason for their rejection of her as a member of their community.

The realization of this fact does, of course, cause the writer unhappiness. On the other hand, it is also freeing. As Angelou states"Was it possible that I and all American Blacks had been wrong on other occasions? Could the cutting treatment we often experienced have been stimulated by something other than our features, our hair and color? Was the odor of old slavery so obvious that people were offended and lashed out at us automatically? Ha what we judged as racial prejudice less to do with race and more to do with our particular ancestors' bad luck at having been caught, sold and driven like beasts?" Section 2 (pages 32-58), pg. 35Was the slavery of the Negroid race due to socio-political motives rather than actual physiological disparities between the two races?

Angelou thus faces the typical problem all diasporic individuals encounter: that of hybridity. She is not wholly African, nor is she American. As an African-American, she exists both within and outside the both the constructions of the colonized as well as of the colonizer. In America, she faced discrimination for being African. In Ghana, she faces discrimination for being American.

Questions of identity also plague her son. This is especially apparent in the fight that she has with him regarding where he should live, how he should live and what cultural norms he should abide by. Identity is thus as much a problem for him as it is for her.

The duality and instability of the hybrid identity is thus brought to the fore in All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes. Race and racial hierarchies are also central themes of this work. A primary example would be the employment of a small boy or servant by Angelou and her housemates. Initially hesitant, she allows him to work for her when she hears that he wishes to further his education and is therefore asking for the job. The education he desires, however, is how to be ‘White’. The boy in fact belongs to a wealthy family. Through his employment in Angelou’s household, his family hopes to educate him in being ‘White’ and thereby constructing the “White mask” that so many “mimic men” adorn themselves in.

Race, racial history and questions of identity are thus beautifully depicted in this masterpiece. Its conclusion truly cements the primary theme of homecoming. While taking a trip to the small Ghanaian village of Keta, Angelou is mistaken by some village folk for an old relative, taken away by slave traders several years ago. The open joy at being reunited with a family member and the love and acceptance she experiences in this guise allows her to experience, if only for a fleeting moment, the homecoming she wished to experience that had so far eluded her. Identity, then, is not merely a set of markers: race, class, religion, nation and creed. That is the identity others construct for you. The identity you construct for yourself will remain stable only if it is constructed through introspection rather than searching for external markers.

Gabriel José García Márquez, Latin-American writer.

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez (1928-2014)

Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, Columbia. Starting by writing columns and stories for a Liberal newspaper, Gabo is now known as one of the most remarkable storytellers of the 20th century. In 1981, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor, the highest decoration France gives to a foreigner. He won a Nobel Prize For Literature in 1982. He recently passed away on April 17^th, 2014 due to lymphatic cancer.

This Latin-American writer has described the dense interlacing of fact and fiction in his labour of love as an author of both fantastic stories and undeterred journalistic records, both of which thought about the horrible colonial ravage and misuse and the resulting rule of merciless dictators in a great part of the Southern Hemisphere in the best way possible.

Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez is known as the Master of Magical Realism. Luis Leal, an internationally recognized scholar defines Magic Realism as “an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles in closed or open structures” (Luis Leal, 1995. p. 119-123). Literature of this type is characterized by components of the fantastic woven into the story with a dull feeling of presentation. The two worlds of the magic and the real are expressed as the living and the dead. Writers like Gabo in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, Luis Borges in Argentina are linked to be using the method of magical realism in their writings. These writers represent the most ordinary events along with fantastic and dreamlike elements in their writings. It blurs the understanding of what is serious or trivial, tragic or comic, unpleasant or over-the-top. Living and dead impart their destinies on the earth and take it as commonplace that life at the outset of things and also the end. These authors have picked Magic Realism as their story procedure to fill such gaps portraying the viscous circle of life and death as one of the significant topics in these works.

He was a believer. Gabo’s brightly coloured, rightly paced, crystal clear expressed style has influenced hundreds of authors around the world. He was a genius at condensing the long war periods, defeats, exploitation of the banana, all in one swift volume, combining it to a whirling century of life-changing prose. For its huge number of incredible components, the 1967 novel for which García Márquez is best known—One Hundred Years of Solitude—catches the practically extraordinary human history of the area with more emotional and good devotion than any strictly factual account. He based his novel in a fictional town called Macondo. When one reads the novel, it is like revisiting the past experiences of the colonised. It seems less magical. It is just plain real. Colombia's interminable and continuous history of fear and civil war that has executed many thousands and rendered millions homeless. At that point the surreal gets to be ordinary and the insane gets to be judicious, that is the well that magic realism draws from.

One Hundred years of Solitude is a masterpiece. He sums up the biblical history of the Buendia's family of generations of rebirth that does not repeat if it is questioned. It parallels the history of macondo with that of Latin- America. It is the advancement, debauchery, remodel of the vitals of human bile in belief system. Garcia refers to the massacres of Santa Marta from 1947 to 1957 as Banana Massacres in his novel. This being the first novel to utilize mysterious authenticity attained a great position in the society. There is an instance in the book when the blood of a dead son travels all through the village to wind up at the feet of his mother. There is also emphasis on the cyclic nature of time. The novel deals with cultural creation and destruction. This work tries to destabilize the fixity created by the colonisers.

The magic realist text reflects in its dialect of narration true states of discourse and cognition inside the genuine social relations of a post-colonial society, a reflection Garcia Marquez thematizes in One Hundred A long time of Solitude as a "speaking mirror.” The “speaking mirror” sustains an inward as well as outward reflection into the language of narration by foregrounding the gaps, foreshortening of history and representation of transcendental regionalism.

There are many criticisms for this piece for being a “colonial hangover” that the whites use to marginalize the fiction of the “other.” Some critics also feel that the term is too limiting.

References-

Slemon, S. (2011, June 11). MAGIC REALISM AS POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE. Retrieved September 1, 2014.

Jones, J. (2014, April 18). Read 10 Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Interviews). Retrieved September 1, 2014.

White, E. (2014, April 18). Others had used magic realism. García Márquez made the technique his own. Retrieved September 1, 2014. 

“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario. Quality and Quantity of her writings are notable. Atwood was attributed for drawing attention to Canadian writers, but she was humble to have highlighted that creation of new presses run by authors was one of the primary factors in the sudden explosion of Canadian writers. Atwood’s books usually engage with the power language exhibits and the importance of storytelling and to convey a person’s viewpoint by writing or speaking. She became well known as a feminist writer in the 1970s.

            ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood is a dystopian novel and brings the tale of a new world of Gilead. Ordered around a young American woman’s escape to Canada, Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ portrays the flight from “Americanness”.  There is a conflict of world views represented by the Christian fundamentalists who take over America on one hand and on the other hand, there are women who suffer outcomes of such fundamentalist governance. In the novel, there is also Atwood’s inter-cultural theme of United States in the cultural opposition to Canada. This particular notion is expressed in gendered terms, that is, American culture is characterized as masculine and Canadian culture as much feminine.

            According to the novel, Handmaid is a term, created by the government of Gilead, used to address fertile women who are made to live in the households of the higher ranked officials whose wives are unable to bear children. The narrator of the novel is a handmaid named Offred. Captured in the world of supervision, strict regulation and punishment, the protagonist is always with hope that she will be reunited with her husband and daughter and gets her freedom. Offred also shows a form of hybridity but in the context of the novel becoming hybrid becomes an important aspect of survival. The social rules imposed by the Gileadean regime would not accept Offred as such and thus forcefully enters into the sectarian role and she must in turn act in a convincing manner to survive. The hybrid character is seen in her status as a survivor.

Everyone’s identity in the novel is questionable and problematic. Though some people who are in powerful statuses are given more privileges than others, everyone is repositioned. Women are divided into classes such as handmaid, wife etc. Women are not allowed to read, work outside their homes or even spend money. They are not technically allowed to do anything that is need of knowledge. The marginalized women and those who are fertile are used to produce children and subjugated by the government and patriarchal society.

            In the Gileadean Society of ‘The Handmaid’s tale’’, though the powerful also live in restricted manner, the handmaids are confined and are sanctioned only to certain outings and ceremonies. If they fulfil the sole purpose of bearing the children of the commanders or other higher ranked officials, they are rewarded by being allowed to stay alive. They are forced to give birth to the children but are not allowed any right over them. Thus their lives are characterised by no freedom and absolute confinement to their houses.

            According to Atwood and her novel, everything is a re-interpretation of something else and nothing represents the truth or reality. Language is also used by Offred in a manner in which she thinks of words and analyses them, using them to distract her and survive in the world.

            Throughout the story there are concepts of rebellion, resistance, and also questions of identity, survival, and hybridity addressed. 

        

           THE PULSE OF MORNING

                                         BY   MAYA ANGELOU

             This poem form a large picture where in the symbolic Anglou rises to become a point of consciousness for afro american people. Although she does not disown her American past, yet there is an unwavering struggle and quest for her roots and origin. This poetry is a kind of process of recalling and remembering her past which is broken and dismembered in fragments, and an effort to show the black women seeking to survive against masculine prejudice at social or psychological level in addition to white’s hatred of black and black’s painful lack of power. To read and respond to her work with understanding is to acknowledge the complex and intricate ways in which the colonial left over influenced her specific background. It would seem as if the intangible sadness of Angelou’s youth bled into her remembered self portrait as if pain had actually attempted to substantiate itself in her appearance.

          Angelou has been figured a national celebrity since the reading of her poem, ' On the Pulse of Morning', at President Clinton's inaugural in 1993. Maya's writings have a way of embracing people and successfully state her thoughts and emotions. "Pulse" is a call for hope and opportunity part of our history. Maya Angelou's poem ' On the Pulse of Morning' relates to diversity, change over time, and equality. When analyzing her poem, we came across stanzas that relate to these topics.

         Her poem has successfully portrayed a sense of diversity. Many lines in different stanzas are related to diversity. Stanza four and five, states, "The singing River,and the wise Rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, the African, the Native American, the Sioux, the Catholic, the Muslim, the French , the Greek, the Irish, the Rabbi, the Sheik, the Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, the privileged, the Homeless, the Teacher. They hear. They all hear the speaking of the tree." They are united by nature, but different due to their culture. In stanza six a lot about diversity has been acknowledged. The people who once helped Maya, do not anymore. It also says that we arrived from the Indians.

          In the course of history, elements of society have changed. Examples through Maya's work are, "The dinosaur, who left dried tokens Of their sojourn here... Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny." (stanza 1). The dinosaur, as you well know are now extinct. They have left their "dried tokens" or their fossils here when they were once here. They left them here for us to find. For the different groups to find. The dinosaurs were "lost in the dust..." and it was hard for people to find, but now over the years, the dinosaurs fossils have been found. Also the slave black African Americans have come from the ancient homeland of Africa. The slaves were once hear and now the United States passed a law that slavery was to be abolished. Over time people places and all things have changed, for both good and bad.

            Equality, is an important concern in the world today. "Women, chidren, men, Take it into the palms of your hands..." (stanza 8) Our society can be a loving one with equality for men, women, blacks, and whites. Rich or poor we all have the same opportunities in our country. No matter when in history we all appear. People think that people that are not like them come from other planets, but we are all members of this planet. No matter how strange we appear to be to others. "History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not to be lived again. "(stanza 7) We learn from the past. The discrimination should not happen again, nor the inequality.

             Maya was successful in relating her poem to diversity, change over time, and equality. She was a very talented writer, and this poem clearly is a contribution to today's Civil Rights Movement.

                                   

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings -Maya Angelou

Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

-Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (Marguerite Annie Johnson) was born on April 4th 1928. She was of the African-American origin. Angelou was reputed to be a multi-talented and multi-faceted dancer, actress, author, writer and singer. In the entirety of her life, she has printed a complete of seven autobiographies, many works of poetry, 3 books of varied essays, and, and was attributable with a formidable listing of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over a period of fifty years. The first of her many autobiographies is titled I Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). It tells us about her tumultuous life up to the age of seventeen. It was her pioneering work that brought her international recognition and acclaim. The details of Angelou's intriguing yet rocky life delineate in her seven autobiographies and in various interviews, speeches, and articles cared-for be inconsistent. Angelou died on the morning of May 28th 2014, consistent with a family statement.



This accredited work of Angelou, is an appropriate and most appropriate example of the Nationalist feeling of belonging, and literature. The way in which this book is written, isn’t in a way that would fuel jingoistic movements, but instead of that that would make her establish an identity with her nation as well as assist the others in doing so, too. The first in an exceptionally long seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates and depicts the conversely persistent strength of character and a love of literature that will facilitate her to overcome racism and trauma. The book begins with a three-year-old Maya and her older brother being sent to Stamps, Arkansas. They are sent to live and grow up with their grandmother and ends once Maya unexpectedly becomes a mother at the young age of sixteen. Throughout the course of her autobiography as a Caged Bird, Maya with the help of literature and its nationalist representation, transforms from being a victim of racism with a personality overridden with inferiority complex into a self-assured, dignified young lady sufficiently capable of responding to injustice and prejudice. Many critics and reviewers often tend to categorize Caged Bird as a form of autobiographical fiction simply because Angelou uses the various tools of thematic advance unique to fiction. Angelou utilizes her autobiographical work to navigate and explore subjects such as identity, literacy rape, and racism. What she also concentrates on is the life of a woman in a male-dominated society. Due to the autobiographical nature of the book, she is deemed as a, “symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America”. She has written this work of art, solely due to the fact that the usage and presence f literature in her life, helps her cope with her bewildering and violent world, and it tends to work in the process of healing her through the trauma.

Feminist scholar Maria Lauret notices that the idea of "formation of female cultural identity" is woven into the progressing book's narrative, invariable setting her up as "a role model for Black women". As a displaced girl, Angelou’s pain is made worse by an awareness of her displacement. She is "the forgotten child".



Throughout the narrative, however acceptable it is deemed to be there is a sense of displacement and inequality. The only reason she seems to have an idea on who she is, is dude the binding nature of a piece of literature. She presents an overall hybridity of unhappiness. She talks about the hierarchy that is evolved from the notion of white/black, and the juxtaposition of the manifestation of these binaries in herself. This colonial dialectic, presents the sufferings mutually endured, by her and her nation.

OCTAVIO PAZ

   Octavio Paz, who seeks for the identity of Mexicans in his study entitled “El laberinto de la soledad”, does not need to look for his own identity as one of the prominent Latin American poets and essayists in the twentieth century. Octavio Paz was born in 1914 and died in 1998 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was an unmistakable liberal erudite and one of the first writers to compose a novel with an explicitly Indian topic. Because of his grandfather's broad library, Paz came into ahead of schedule contact with writing. Like his grandfather, his father likewise was a dynamic political writer who, together with other dynamic scholars, joined the agrarian uprisings headed by Emiliano Zapata.

    His administration as a Mexican negotiator took him to France where he composed eminent paper, “El Laberinto De La Soledad”, examining the Mexican individuals by method for their society and history. He likewise served as Mexican minister to India from 1962-1968, where he composed The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope, two critical works in his vocation. He surrendered from Mexico's discretion in 1968 in light of the fact that he restricted the administration severely stifling an understudy exhibit at the Olympic Gamed in Tlateloco. After the 1968 disaster, Paz changed his perspectives about Mexico and added the Posdata to El laberinto de la soledad.

    A noteworthy exposition beautician, Paz has composed a productive group of articles, including a few book-length studies, in poetics, artistic and workmanship feedback, and on Mexican history, legislative issues and society.

 ‘’El Laberinto De La Soledad’’ - 1950

      Octavio Paz accepts that the Mexican society, termed "mexicanidad," glides buzzing around in America  "porque no se mezcla ni se funde con el otro mundo… no acaba de ser, no acaba de desaparecer" (Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 34). The purpose of his collection of prose expositions entitled El laberinto de la soledad is to discover a character for the Mexican individuals so they will no more buoy in limbo pondering who they are. Paz tries to answer the repeating inquiry that still frequents Mexicans today in the quest for personality by method for an extreme social and sociological investigation, an examination of Mexican and North American disposition, lastly, with the contention that the occasions in Mexico's history have had critical impact on the sentiments of isolation and mediocrity that portray the Mexican individuals.

     Solitude is the reason the Mexican people have suffered as a result of losing contact with the rest of the world, and most importantly, with themselves and their past.  A central theme in “El laberinto de la soledad” is the comparison of the closed culture of Mexico to the open culture of North America."Máscaras Mexicanas," the title of section II, further shows this want to remain hidden from the world.  By residing behind a metaphorical mask, the Mexicans become separated from their own identity and become distant.  The more distant they become, the more solitude bestows upon the Mexicans.

      Paz looks at Mexican and North American mentality on specific issues to show why Mexico may feel so separated from the outside world. Mexicans see authenticity in America as cynicism and depend on dream rather than reality and legends instead of verifiable records. They take joy in telling lies in light that it creates a fantasy.

     Paz felt his distinctness as a young child just as the pachucos in America today represent the segment of Mexico’s population so fed up with the solitude and separation from the world that they cut off all ties of Mexican heritage and in an outward expression of discontent, strive to create a new culture.  Ironically, in attempting to distinguish themselves from Mexican culture, the pachucos have come to represent many Americans’ perceptions of who Mexico’s people are.

      Paz utilizes the term hermetismo to characterize the way Mexicans close off the outer world, contending that Mexicans bring their isolation upon themselves and become loners, metaphorically and actually. Mimetismo is an alternate impact of the isolation, coming about as the great manifestation of "disimularse" or concealing oneself. Mexicans endeavoring to copy parts of different societies, for example, occasion festivals, apparel, and general lifestyle, including the pachucos, represent the social idea of mimetismo. Paz expects that mimetismo will in the end eradicate Mexican society and custom.  Solitude has captured the Mexican people, and it seems that they are trapped within this labyrinth.  Any attempts at breaking away from the solitude, such as the pachuco, or opening up to external society with mimetismo, only sever connections to the cultural past and take Mexico further away from its goal of finding its identity.

       Paz concurs that one of the reason for the isolation of Mexico is the smothered feeling of mediocrity Mexicans immediate at the United States. On the other hand, he contends all through the article that the topic of sub-par quality is less determined in examination to their northern neighbors, to the extent that it is a result of two thousand years of historical events.

      Although present-day Mexico may not understand it, their mediocrity originates from two centuries of history, not just from the current circumstance. Paz tries to clear this up to pursuers all through “El laberinto de la soledad”.

      With a history of command and intercession by a large number of societies, it is not abnormal that the Mexicans think that it hard to characterize their birthplaces. Mexico accuses the Spanish for their absence of character, however Paz accentuates in ''El laberinto de la soledad'' that it is natural that the populace of Mexico see the majority of the critical chronicled occasions of their past so they will come to comprehend their present. As he states in his speech about searching for the present, “the feeling of separation is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans…this never-healing wound is the unfathomable depth of every man.  All our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow beings” .
       In this exposition, Paz faultlessly exhibits that Mexicans are experiencing a character emergency and how their issue with personality just builds their isolation and second rate quality to the outer world. Mexicans who subscribe to mimetismo and attempt to duplicate different societies not just demonstrate their sentiments of mediocrity around the United States, additionally evacuate any plausibility of sparing their Mexican legacy. The populace of Mexico must  know and comprehend their history with the goal that they will know and comprehend their present; else, they will fall further into isolation and second rate quality.