Example 2:Quote From Douglass's The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth, maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection.
Analysis of Passage: Douglass's description of the slaves on the trading block clearly shows the violation of the idea of all people being equal. Douglass uses a catalog to show how in The South people were seen as being no better than cattle when he writes, "horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children". The paragraph closes by emphasizing that the dehumanizing showed no pity based on age as "silvery-headed age and sprightly youth" are all treated as a product.
Contemporary Text: From Borzutky's The Performance of Being Human:[The refugees were processed through Austria or Germany or maybe Switzerland.Somehow they were discovered in some shit village in some shit country by European soldiers and taken to an embassy where they were promptly bathed, injected with vaccines, interrogated, etc.Their bodies were traded by country A in exchange for some valuable natural resource needed by country B (13-15). ](http://brooklynartspress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Daniel-Borzutzky-The-Performance-of-Becoming-Human-Brooklyn-Arts-Press-Excerpt.pdf) (click here)
Analysis of Contemporary Connection: Borzutzky's poetry shows how refugees are dehumanized in a similar way that slaves were in the 19th century. He writes, "their bodies were traded by country A in exchange for some valuable natural resource needed by country B." By making the countries and the nature of the trade generic and meaningless, he emphasizes how the bodies of real refugees are unimportant.