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Gloria Anzaldua Learning To Read And Write Analysis

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In Fredrick Douglass’s “Learning to Read and Write”, the reader experiences a brief portion of the life of a slave as he’s trying to learn to read and write. In the middle of the essay Fredrick Douglass writes about his experience with books on slavery,
“I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which frequently lashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance…. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out…. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness…. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every …show more content…
Through the essay Gloria Anzaldua talks about her experience with many kinds of borders and how they hinder of someone’s identity. Toward the end of Anzaldua’s essay she proclaims, “we become aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language that reflected that reality. Now we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together – who we are, what we were, how we evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become.” (Anzaldua, 43-44), in this passage she is speaking about herself and her fellow Chicanos being recognized as a people through their language, this passage however can be used in more broad of terms as well, as to apply it to all of humanity. A few paragraphs before this she states that “Identity is the essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the self-inside.” (Anzaldua, 42), Anzaldua is absolutely right in her observation; to know our worlds better we must first look inside

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