Diabetes

The way someone is brought up, the things they say and do day to day help determine who they will be in the future. Each individual person had unique characteristics that make up their personality, and with each person comes a background, somewhere they’ve come from and memories they’ve had and experienced.

In The Girl With The Red Dot, the writer speaks of growing up in Bombay (Mumbai), India. Ranjani Nellore went to a Christian school and dressed like every other Christian girl there. Through out her story, she tells of her grandmother’s disappointment in her lack of compliance to proudly display her ethnicity through traditional ways of dressing, such as wearing bangles and Bindis, to convey a sense of her culture. Shortly before her grandmother’s death, Ranjani moves to America, goes to school, and begins a new life. After her move, she began to express her identity occasionally thorough a kurta, but always with a bindi; a small dot on her forehead in lieu of her marriage.

Another good example of the importance of memory to one’s self is represented in The Way To Rainy Mountain, by N. Scott Momaday. His story is of his grandmother and where she came from. She was apart of a tribe, the Kiowas, where she lived on their native soil in Oklahoma. Through his story, he speaks of many different things of this homeland and the things, such as Sun Dances, that represent the people. These dances consist of men looking to cleanse their spirits, by fasting, dance, pray, and even have their chests or backs pierced, which would later suspend them by their flesh to attain a trancelike state of purity. Unfortunately, these dances ended in about 1887, due to the control of the US Army, which banned these activities. When Momaday’s grandmother was just ten years old, her people came together for the last time as a living sun-dance culture. As apart of the culture, they made an ancient sacrifice, to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the Tai-me tree. By this time, her people could find no more buffalo. Instead, they used an old hide from the tree. Before the dance could begin, soldiers from Fort Sill came to disperse the tribe; this was on July 20, 1890. In short, Scott revisits his grandmother’s graves and sees things from their culture that he sees in himself day after day.

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