Sandra Cisneros 'Woman Hollering Creek'

During a time where African American literature was fueled with racial segregation and pride in ones race during the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston offers a different and controversial approach with her literary work “How it feels to be colored me”.(13) In the works Hurston uses several colloquialisms, anecdotes, imagery and figurative expression to invite the reader on an adventure filled with pleasure. The poem takes the reader from the beginning of the Hurston’s childhood back in Eatonville, Florida into adulthood in Orlando, Florida. Hurston proves that overcoming racism can be accomplished by uniting the public and ignoring the visual difference in a person’s outer appearance. Hurston’s strength, individuality and resilience scream

Thesis: In the short story “Woman Hollering Creek,” Sandra Cisneros emphasizes the importance of having a female figure to look up to in order to overcome the oppression women are subjected to in a patriarchal society.

Paragraph: Published in during the 1900s, at a time when being colored was considered unbeneficial, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” depicts Hurston’s audacious (for the time) pride in being an African-American woman. In order to emphasize her thesis, she employs pathos and figurative

In the story “Woman Hollering Creek” Sandra Cisneros explains the journey Cleofilas takes to escape her abusive husband, physically and emotionally. At the beginning of the story Cleofilas thought life was about finding your true love and living happily ever after. Then when she moved away, and her husband started beating her she realized life was more than living like this. The theme of the story is the feeling of disaffection or self-displacement. Cisneros uses the character Cleofilas to heighten the theme of the story. Cleofilas struggles to leave her husband, Juan because she feels that her father wouldn’t allow her to come back. At the end of the story she gets tired of the abuse and plans to

Zora Neale Hurston is unequivocally open about her race and identity in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” As Hurston shares her life story, the reader is exposed to Hurston’s self-realization journey about how she “became colored.” Hurston utilizes her autobiographical short story as a vehicle to describe the “very day she became colored.” Race is particularly vital in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” as she deals with the social construct of race, racism, and sustaining one’s cultural identity.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, her racial identity varies based on her location. Towards the beginning of her life when Zora was in her own community she could be a lighthearted, carefree spirit. However, when she was forced to leave her community, Zora’s identity became linked to her race. In this essay I will demonstrate how Zora’s blackness is both a sanctuary and completely worthless.

The memoir “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, was first published in 1928, and recounts the situation of racial discrimination and prejudice at the time in the United States. The author was born into an all-black community, but was later sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, where she experienced “race” for the first time. Hurston not only informs the reader how she managed to stay true to herself and her race, but also inspires the reader to abandon any form of racism in their life. Especially by including Humor, Imagery, and Metaphors, the author makes her message very clear: Everyone is equal.

Even though both Hurston and Hughes grew up around the same time period, they had very different ideals regarding their experience as African American’s as well as a different voice used within their works to convey their ideals. Hurston in her 1928 essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me” describes her childhood and coming of age with a delightful zest that cannot be contained. Although the essay does contain some dark moments such as when she describes her experience with her friend at the jazz club and the sudden realization of the racial difference between her and the other patrons, for the most part the work exudes her keen sense of dignity despite the popular opinion of the masses during that period. Lines in her essay such as “But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes…I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it” (Abcarian, Klotz, and Cohen 812) beautifully express her sense of self dignity and refusal to give in to the negative energies surrounding her race. Despite the many hardships that the color of her skin caused her she was proud and determined to never let that stand in her way of

One of Hurston’s stories, How it Feels to Be Colored Me, reflects the author’s perspective of the colored race (specifically herself). According to the story, when Hurston reached the age of thirteen, she truly “became colored” (1040). The protagonist was raised in Eatonville, Florida, which was mainly inhabited by the colored race. She noted no difference between herself and the white community except that they never lived in her hometown. Nevertheless, upon leaving Eatonville, the protagonist began losing her identity as “Zora,” instead, she was recognized as only being “a little colored girl” (1041). Hurston’s nickname “Zora” represents her individuality and significance; whereas, the name “a little colored girl” was created by a white society to belittle her race and gender (1041).

A life in the city of Seguin, Texas was not as easy as Cleofilas, the protagonist of the story thought it would be. The author, Cisneros describes the life women went through as a Latino wife through Cleofilas. Luckily, Cisneros is a Mexican-American herself and had provided the opportunity to see what life is like from two window of the different cultures. Also, it allowed her to write the story from a woman’s point of view, painting a vision of the types of problems many women went through as a Latino housewife. This allows readers to analyze the characters and events using a feminist critical view. In the short story “Women Hollering Creek” Sandra Cineros portrays the theme of expectation versus reality not only through cleofilas’s thoughts but also through her marriage and television in order to display how the hardship of women in a patriarchal society can destroy a woman’s life.

Hurston prides herself on who she is because of her background. Her identity of being a black woman in a world

At the beginning of the essay Hurston opens up with the statement that she is colored and that she offers no extenuating circumstances to the fact except that she is the only Negro in the U.S. whose grandfather was not an Indian chief. She presents a striking notion that she was not born colored, but that she later became colored during her life. Hurston then delves into her childhood in Eatonville, Florida an exclusively colored town where she did not realize her color then. Through anecdotes describing moments when she greeted neighbors, sang and danced in the streets, and viewed her surroundings from a comfortable spot on her porch, she just liked the white tourists going through the town. Back then, she was “everybody’s Zora” (p. 903), free from the alienating feeling of difference. However, when her mother passed away she had to leave home and

As Carmen Rivera states in Border Crossings and Beyond, “The predominant image of docile, submissive, nurturing, and effacing women who relegate their own needs and personal desires to tend to needs of others, particularly the men and children in their families, gives way to literary representations of assertive, self-supporting, tenacious, and strong- willed women who assume control of their lives and circumstances” (Rivera, “Border Crossings and Beyond”). In the short story Woman Hollering Creek, Cleófilas is defenseless in an abusive marriage. By writing about voiceless woman like Cleófilas, Cisneros paves the way for the woman like the narrator in “His Story” who doesn't give into culturally inscribed gender roles. It's important to write

Racism is widespread amongst America today, it affects the way one thinks about others. Zora Hurston was different from many black authors during the Harlem Renaissance period. She did not portray African American as victims of oppression and racist attitudes held by the white society. Blacks were instead represented as self- governing human beings, proud of the way in which they lived their folk culture. Hurston learned that there were many opportunities that were granted to the community in which she resided in.

In the piece of literature named “Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros, one of the major types of literary conflicts is person vs. society regarding the main protagonist and society’s expectations of her. To elaborate, the protagonist Cleofilas Hernandez, does not have a strong female role model in her life and is living in a patriarchal society that leaves her and other woman like her unaware of their potential. An example of this unawareness caused by society is when Cleofilas is saved from her abusive relationship by a strong, independent woman named Felice who gave Cleofilas a glimpse of the life that she may achieve one day. A quotation by the narrator states, “Everything about this woman, this Felice, amazed Cleofilas. The fact that she drove a pickup. A pick up, mind you, but when Cleofilas asked if it was her husbands, she said she didn't have a husband” (220 Cisneros). An analysis this quote clearly illustrates to the reader that Cleofilas obviously did not have any knowledge of a woman being able to have her own car, inevitably leading the reader into wondering what else society does not want her to know. Furthermore, this quotation suggests that this society does not have independent women due to Cleofilas surprising reaction to just the simple thought of a woman having a car. This proves that the literary conflict of person vs society is evidently present in this short story because Cleofilas is unmistakably placed in a society who did not support or have empowering women figures like Felice. Ultimately, with Cleofilas not knowing her self worth or having a female role model in her life, it leads to her forgiving her husband for his abusive nature. With this visible fact, a major theme within the boundaries of societal expectation and discrimination of women in “Woman Hollering Creek” is domestic abuse. In the short story, Cleofilas is involved in an abusive marriage in which her husband emotionally and physically attacks her daily because she has no means to protect