Identity ⭐
Appearance & Personality 👤
The Sun is Also a Star 🔥
The Book Thief 🖊
Our personality and appearance represent you and how people see you.
Sonnet 130 ❤
In TBT, identity is an essential topic. Jewish people or any person that doesn't have blond hair, blue eyes and white skin are grouped into one group: the "inferior people". Those who did have those traits were considered the "master race", and according to Nazi ideologies, they should rule the world.
Staying Quiet ✏
The Hate U Give ❌
One of the major themes in Sonnet 130 is Identity. Contrary to the proclamation of his love for her, Sonnet 130 paints a verbal portrait of the “dark lady” that is as unconventional and frank. By doing that, Shakespeare turns his back on poetic tradition and his time's beauty standards. Consequently, he describes a person who is a unique individual. The last two lines of the poem reveal the depth of his love for this special woman, whom he loves for her uniqueness and confidence.
Staying Quiet is connected to the theme of identity because in this poem, the poet himself was struggling with manipulation and he felt like he was being looked into and felt haunted because of the word "beautiful". We kind of see Hieu Minh Nguyen struggling with existential crisis when he said "Sometimes I don’t
believe I exist until someone calls me beautiful" (line 3-4).
Starr's identity affects her life, her family isn't privilege because they have colored skin. Starr was really sad and insecure about who she is and she felt like she didn't deserve to be treated unfairly. Later on, she stands up for herself and she feels proud of who she is.
This collectivism was not only dangerous to the "inferior people", but it also promotes stereotypes and prejudice. This essentially erases all unique identities of each individual in each group, and the individuals' worth were decided based on their appearance or background.
Oedipus ⚠
Identity should be decided by ourselves, not stereotypes created by society. There can always be groups of people. There are always African Americans, Asians, Africans, Americans, Southeast Asians, etc. but that doesn't mean each individual will have to completely abide to the stereotypes created for each group.
Appearance and personality have two sides to it, the good side is that people could recognize who you are and know what it's like to know you, the bad side is that
In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus's identity was kept hidden, so he had to find out the truth. When he was trying to find the killer, he slowly found out the unwanted truth. His wife is actually his mother, and he even killed his own father. Oedipus was lied to his whole life, but it was his hubris that led to his downfall.
TSIAAS focuses on the development/ coming of age of the two main characters: Daniel and Natasha. They both go through the struggles of doubting their own identities (that they've set for themselves, with Natasha relying on cold hard facts and Daniel being romantic and dreamy). They meet the exact opposite of themselves, and were forced to rethink their ways of life. In the end, they settled for the best of both sides. Identity is huge in TSIAAS due to the topics religion, race, country, family, assimilation vs. acculturation being directly intertwined with the characters.
Starr's "code-switching" starts when she's in an environment either dominated by white people or people of color. This confuses her when people from both worlds met each other, like Chris meeting her parents.
In the poem, Shakespeare also mocks other creatives for using only certain images or metaphors to describe the people they love. For example, beautiful women always have golden thread hair, ocean eyes, etc. When in reality not all women are like that
Born a Crime
Since Trevor Noah was born a colored person, or what people called it back then, a "crime", he struggled a lot with identity and who he is.