Within the Invisible Man themes of identity, and power of race, are prevalent.  It’s demonstrated through struggle with invisibility and hypervisibility, how these effects ones identity.

The book Citizen published in 2014 deals with racism, sexism and other pressing societal issue of the 21st century in America. She uses visual images and prose to display African American experience. The novel begins from the second person view point, and makes the reader in a way (metaphorically) be present in the story. Author Claudia Rankine, employs the concept of “microaggression” in the begging of her novel, and she ties it to the everyday racist actions that go unnoticed to those who aren’t directly effected. I remember in one of my classes a student explained to me what microaggression is, because at that time I did not understand and was frustrated why people are always upset by small actions. I was told that to a black individual, walking into a store, means having everyone look at you, or having store clerks follow you, that is a form of a micro aggression, that the store clerk wouldn’t understand because he isn’t effected by those actions, nor does he understand that his actions causes an unnecessary discomfort for the individual.

IN the novel microaggression is act but can also be greatly expressed in words, as the author demonstrated in the novel, and words can truly shape someones reality, and in many cases limit it. For Rankine, racist acts and words add to her shell “puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in towards your rib cage” (pg 5) and she is in constant fight with it, desiring to be a “power wash” that is able to cleanse that pain that comes daily with microaggression

The novel “The Bluest Eye” is a spectacular read, invoking emotion and gives a glimpse of struggles people face due to their life style and emotional suffering they face. The end of the novel we concentrate on the character Pecola who endured life hard times, her father seems to be the main hardship, he drinks and the constant fights with her mother, further the father even tried burning down the house. From all that, Pecola develops her emotional burdens. She has an imaginary friend, and she feels distant from her new community. The concept of the imaginary friend is strong, some say that imaginary friend is your own extension that you build to deal with hard times. Further Pecola has a fascination with blue eyes, she even believes her life would be better if she has the “bluest eyes”, and at some point she even turns on her imaginary friend accusing that she hates her because of her eyes, and that the community is distant from her because they are jealous of her. This enormous traumas were caused to Pecola because she experienced rape and it caused her a mental breakdown, only making her life harder.

One thing that is hard to see in this novel is the concept of “love” it’s simply missing. Pecola endures no love from family nor herself. As a black girl she is constantly surrounded by the while ideals of beauty and love, and she has none of that. Due to that she in a way feels “invisible” and that could be related to the main concept of Ralph Ellison’s book “invisible man”.  But one thing that important to have in a hard bearing world is a person who cares and tries to show you that life is worth it. For Pecola it was Claudia, she loves Pecola and admires her beauty, and they shares the experience of rape. Using metaphors of earth and flowers Claudia tries to teach compassion, explaining that racism is part of this world but its what makes Pecola stronger because unlike Claudia she faces that which adds to her already hard life.

The novel is spectacular, showing different perspectives, and today with rape being a big issue its an important read, it gives an insight of what people deal with after rape, and how rape is never a form of love, and neither is violence. Compassion and strength and willingness to live makes characters of the book persevere.

The amount of metaphors, symbolism and imagery used in Chapter 11 in the novel “Invisible Man” when the protagonist ends up in the hospital, it’s intense. We don’t know why he is in the hospital, but the description of what he goes through and what he feels, can be interpreted in different ways as well as be connected to the idea of double consciousness and loosing your identity. The doctors of the hospital preformed electric shock therapy on the protagonist “I was pounded between crushing electrical pressures”, but in the pain and unconsciousness the protagonist mistaken them for saviors “They would care for me. It was all geared toward the easing of pain. I felt thankful”. Such a turn in his thought made me stop, and think back to history moments where groups of people were put in daze and taken advantage of. Further more his later imagery of not having enough room, and feeling cramped, and latter ever forgetting his name can be figurative language for the type of things oppressed groups have experienced. Chapter 11 “I found myself back in the clinging white mist and my name just beyond my fingertips” is another strong metaphor for the constant struggle and efforts to maintain your identity in a society that tried to prevent that.

Another strong metaphor can be seen in “A pair of eyes peered down through lenses as thick as the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle, eyes protruding, luminous and veined, like an old biology specimen preserved in alcohol”, the presence of symbolism of the “Coca-Cola, eyes protruding, luminous and veined, like an old biology specimen preserved in alcohol “I don’t have enough room” the feeling of being trapped the protagonist feels, can be a metaphor for the coke epidemic that effect minority communities in a negative revolving door of abuse and instability.

Overall the chapter shows how blindness and the loss of your identity can happen and what it can result in. Thankfully at the end of the chapter we learn that despite loosing parts of identity, not being heard, the narrator overcomes his efforts to obeying an ideology he followed (referring to devotion to college and its ideologies). I was relieved that despite such experience, he was able to over come certain fears and in a way become free.

The piece “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” begins with the author speaking of her hometown and who she was there, surrounded by people just like her (being a black community), what I found most interesting is the phrase ” I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl” to a black person in America that says a lot. She later demonstrates that her skin color was something that defined her to the outside world, nevertheless she did not allow that to tare her down “I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife”, phrase after phrase the author establishes her self as an individual who stood to the world that made all efforts to bring her down.

What I found most powerful and admirable in this work is the the authors passion to establish herself “At certain times I have no race, I am me”. It’s because black people have a lot of their own culture that they should embrace it, their effort to put themselves at the center of stage as they deserve, rather then be taken advantage of and having their culture be appropriated. What drives this possibility of stage presence is disconnecting oneself from race, and simply state that you are who you are due to your ambition and your drive to empower yourself and others like you, and simultaneously teach those who “deny themselves the pleasure of my company” how wrong they are and what they are mission out on. This was the message I got from reading this piece by Zora Neale, but then I read another work by Franz Fanon “The fact of Blackness”. A black protagonist in the world that beats him down for who he is due the color of his skin. The author enlightened me to an interesting concept, -the notion of third person “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors” (pg 259), this is interesting because through history we have thought of black individuals as one thing that consists of their race, their behavior and their history, but all of that was composed by the white man “Negro is an animal, Negro is bad, the Negro is mean…”. Only till around 1980’s no one asked black people who they truly are, we see them as a false image created centuries ago. Further for a black person its difficult to hide away, as the author compares visibility among people between Jews and blacks “the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness” (pg 260), while a black person tends to stand out weather he be in the majority or minority of the group, because in the eyes of society a black person’s image has already been “fixed” (pg 261).

The two works both written by black writers seem so different in message but both have powerful messages that cant be missed, illustrating how powerful black people can be despite the already “fixed” image the world has of them, how they fight and establish themselves in societies because yes they do belong.