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RESPONSES TO SUFFERING
In their stories, both Alice Walker and James Baldwin undertake the question of national and cultural identity through usage of characters and those characters' responses to their socially constructed identities. Both in ''Everyday Use'' and ''Sonny's Blues'', characters are from colonized countries, not only the land but also the culture of whose is in danger of occupancy. Both Sonny and Dee respond to their heritage but in very different ways. Whereas Sonny actually assumes his own cultural identity and struggles in it, Dee seems to assume, without noticing, the cultural identity that is created for her by the culture which tried to assimilate it in the first place.

Dee lives with her mother, Mrs. Johnson, in their poor house and her father is not mentioned. As he was not there when their house burnt, apparently he was not living with them. Dee's relation to her culture seems to be constructed in school, there is no narration about her life before the burning of their house about which she seems so happy as to make her mother want to ask her ''Why don't you do a dance around the ashes?'' (Walker 518) The house in which they live is a proof of what African-Americans go through, and she, even then, seems to be not empathizing with it. Her later relationship with her national identity is shaped through her yearning for another life. From school she brings ''other folks' habits, whole lives’’ (Walker 519) to impose on her family and patronizes them with her knowledge, emphasizing their being ignorant. She does not see that her family's being uneducated is not a choice but it is rather imposed upon them because they are Afro-Americans.

As she turns back home that she thinks her mother and sister ‘‘[chose] to live’’ in, she is not Dee anymore. She seems to have assumed a pretentious Native African identity with her new name, Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, and a new style of greeting that is again a Native...