“On Coming Home” – Joan Didion
In this essay Joan Didion tried to compare and contrast life in the two separate places and realities she called home; The home of her birth and the home of her marriage which are totally different.
Didion’s style is mainly that of storytelling. In her attempt to connect her two lives and show how difficult it was to reconnect to the home of her childhood, Didion takes the reader through a roller coster of rhythms. Note how she omits the use of conjunctions between words or phrases to produce a hurried rhythm, at another instance she over used the conjunction “and” in quick succession making the words feel like they are bouncing off the walls, and quickly returns to standard sentence structure to slow the pace. Didion seems to pay attention to details and dates as she described the content of the cupboard she tried to clean out; a bathing suit she wore when she was seventeen, a letter of rejection, three teacups and the 1954 photograph.
Her tone mostly conveyed frustration. Frustration about losing and missing the home of her birth, her family, whose ways she had grown so use to; Frustration about the husband who is very much unlike them, unlike her. Frustration about the decay all around; physical and social. This frustration so real, she even spoke about them in the present tense. Interesting as it was, this essay left me totally exhausted and overwhelmed.
How It Feels to Be Colored Me – Zora Neale Hurston
What an overwhelming relief and exhilaration. I am glad I read this essay just after reading Didion. What a sharp contrast in style, and diction, and attitude, and tone, and outlook on life.
This essay simply was a joy to read. The reader is captivated right from the outset with the use of humor, metaphors, imagery and sometimes even self deprecation. The tone is mainly conversational and tells the story of self-pride, discovery and identity. Hurston describes her enchanted childhood in Eatonville as everyone’s Zora where self consciousness was a pain she didn’t have to endure to a bording school in Jacksonville where self consciounsness was a constant obsession. Hurston says she does not consider herself “tragically colored”, she is too busy “sharpening her oyster knife” to stop to think about the pain of discrimination. And as a “dark rock surged upon” she became stronger. These are some of the metaphors strung together she strung together that to project her self pride and resilience.
What is most notable about this essay, especially for those who can directly relate to her experiences, is that she takes you through this wonderful journey of hate and discrimination without feeling any of the negative emotions that usually follow such accounts. It is cathartic in a very hilarious way and yet very much on point in concluding, by the use of another very powerful metaphor – of the red, white, and yellow bags, that in the end or in the very final analysis we, all races are all more or less the same how the creator intended it to be.
Although Didion and Hurston wrote of two different realities, the difference in style and tone is stark. While Didion is storytelling, rhythmic, matter of factly and full of the use of vivid imagery, Hurston on the other hand is conversational, sassy, loaded with humors and metaphors and yet delivers a very powerful message that I am whom I am, dealt with it, and at the same time challenged the mind-set even of our time. In her own words; “The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.