Literature Compel's relationships to language

As members of oppressed racial and ethnic groups, the writers all direct unusual relationships with the language of the superior group.

In these works, the liberation of repressed voices and the clear communication of messages chair from the skillful manipulation of literary means. But the books also avail as a means of documenting lives and experience. History, it is said, is written by the conquerors. Histories be based on the surviving records of societies. The vanquished are often rendered mixed-up through repression of the means of expression that would allow them to reach beyond their immediate groups. Such repression includes the imposition of standards of language and literary style that are foreign to the groups. It also includes limits on access to publishing, to education, and to the unemployed needed for writing.

In her autobiography, Rigoberta Menchu recalls her father's fear that, in learning to register and write, his daughter would be acquiring skills that were of no use to the village. It was non easy to find teachers or to spare time or money for lessons. Rigoberta would, he argued, leave as others had done, and this would not be a contribution to the group but a lessen of its collective effectiveness. Thus, for societies where the written text has no significant role, the citizenry will often resist it out of traditional or practical conce

The Aztec writers, however, did not section these conventions. These accounts were mainly written within the lifetime of those who circumstancesicipated in the events. They were move from personal observation or from eye-witness accounts or were recorded versions of verbal accounts that had been in circulation since the conquest. As early written works from a culture with a long and elaborate oral tradition, the chronicles do not con compliance to established European types. The modern subscriber might guess that the writers expected that, in the re-telling or reading, their tales would be supplied with the variations in tone and emphasis which, in oral traditions, ca-ca many of the works' meanings.

But, as de Alva points out in his foreword to The disturbed Spears, the Spanish "are rarely judged in moral scathe" in the chronicles (1992, p. xx). The Aztecs accepted the conquest as the result of fight and would, it seems, have behaved in much the kindred way if they had the opportunity. Since the Aztec writers were part of a culture with standards and values entirely different from those of European society, they probably had a different view of warfare. But de Alva does not seem to consider the fact that, in reading the same accounts, an Aztec and a European would place differing interpretations on them. De Alva points out that, works in the newly alphabetized Nahuatl, these writers composed "under the active eye of the missionaries" (1992, p. xix). But that watchful eye may have been satisfied without having to deprive the chronicles of a degree of strong protest. after(prenominal) all, is the message in the accounts meant to be read by Europeans or by Aztecs?

Where Menchu and Cabezas were involved in immediate struggles, Morrison extends her view into the quondam(prenominal) in order to throw light on the contribute struggle of African Americans. Beloved is almost a form of revenge. It is a beautifully written book about, in queen-size part, white Americans' refusal to allow African Americans access to
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