A Gathering Of Old Men Analysis

If you want something you need to work for it. If you’re not struggling for what you want then you aren’t working hard enough. The word struggle is something that a lot of people take for granted because of things like technology making it easier for everyday life while simultaneously making us lazier. Susan Muaddi Darraj in her book The Inheritance of Exile will perpetuate the struggles that the immigrant Palestinian women went through in arriving to the Americas after escaping the wars and difficulty in Palestine, Jerusalem. In correlation with these stories from South Philly, we will be able to connect them to the struggles of the old men in A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines as they recollect their memories that augment

According to her past and experiences she is an independent strong and do what it takes to survive kind of individual. Huda’s explanation of “When you grow up in the camps and you see what I used to see” (191) demonstrates her bottled up emotions for either showing how proud or envious she is for the next generation of her people, in hopes that they never go through seeing friends and family killed as a result of warfare. Her bottled up emotions reflect the same bottled up emotions that every old men at Marshalls endured when Johnny Paul begins his epiphany of how Mapes “still don’t see. Yes, sir, what you see is the weeds, but you don’t see what we don’t see” (89). After numerous attempts of trying understanding what in the world the old men were talking about “seeing” and “not seeing”, Mapes is contrived to listen to their reason for their retaliation. Both stories embrace Baker’s idea of how “memory and place are woven into the fabric of everyday life in that while personal memory makes place out of space, collective memory contributes to peoples’ material and symbolic understanding of place through shared knowledges” (27). Huda’s personal memory demonstrated what kind of place Haifa was turning into and she did whatever it took to become a survivor. Therefore making it difficult to transition from a warzone lifestyle into a world where Huda thought people viewed survival as a