Country Lovers Essay

465 Words2 Pages
Nadine Gordimer's, Country Lovers and Patricia Smith's What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren't) are powerful and unique reflections of racism at its highest. The most prominent things portrayed in both stories are the black race, racism, and the cultural background or setting. In a sense, the authors show that racism comes in many forms and can breathe inferiority into young lives. Country Lovers main character, Thebedi, is nothing like the little black girl in What It's Like to be a Black Girl, but their similarities are present for readers to see. Though racism is more or less on the back burners today; we still are still living in a society where some people are still pressured to be racist, and some are still profoundly racist. Literary Analysis The story Country Lovers by Gordimer is about the relationship between two children who grow up together; a black girl whose name was Thebedi, a white boy whose name was Paulus Eysendyck and the tragedy of their love child, during an era of apartheid. Even in the mention of their names one can conjure up who they were, Thebedi's last name was not mentioned, while Paulus' last name, Eysendyck was mentioned (Clugston, 2010b). It is a story set in an era where white people were wealthy and the blacks were slaves or worked for white people in South Africa. Paulus' father owned the farm and Thebedi's father was a worker on that farm. They both knew they could not be together publicly; though this was not mentioned in the story, in reading one could understand that whites were deemed socially, intellectually and financially better off than blacks, in a period where blacks were slaves or worked for whites (Clugston, 2010b). Development of bond between children was strong enough to be carried through to adulthood, though nothing could materialize of it. She told her father the missus had given
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