Layla and Naomi in “Gyroscopes” and “Gate A-4”
In the world today, people are sometimes treated differently because of their race. What if you were treated differently just because of the way you looked? What would you do? In the short story, “Gyroscopes”, written by Susan Mauddi Darraj, an Arabic girl, named Layla, faces racism and diversity. Layla is in a play she thinks is racist, but nobody listens to her. In the poem, Gate A-4 written by Naomi Shihab Nye, the Arabic girl, Naomi, helps comfort an elderly Arabic woman in distress. She calmed the lady down and everyone at the gate felt like family. Throughout these texts, the main characters make adjustments to their lives in times of racism. In both of these texts, the main characters
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For example, Layla in “Gyroscopes” is in the play Aladdin. But she thinks that the play is racist and has Arabic stereotypes. She wants to change the play to something else. When she confronts the play director, D, to ask to change it, he seems not to care at all. Almost like it doesn’t matter what she says, “D is gazing down at me, his face attentive. But you know how you can tell when an adult is humoring you? Like, they’re going to let you say your thing, and then they’ll pretend to think about it? He’s definitely doing that to me” (Darraj). This explains how D doesn’t care what Layla has to say, and Layla feels ignored. Differently in the poem “Gate A-4” the main character, Naomi, decides to help an older woman who is upset. The woman didn’t speak English and when her flight was delayed she thought the flight agent said it was canceled. The lady was very agitated so Naomi spoke to her in Arabic and calmed her down. The woman was calm and was giving cookies to people in the gate and Naomi felt like the whole gate was a family, “Not a single person in that / gate — once the crying of confusion stopped — seemed apprehensive about / any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too” (Nye). This shows that after everyone in the gate calmed down, nobody cared about race or anything, all they felt was love and support.