Compare and Contrasting Two Literary Works

Compare and Contrasting Two Literary Works

This paper will layout the comparison and contract of the short story Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer and the poem "What it is Like to be a Black Girl" by Patricia Smith. The two writings focus on race in ethnicity among black females. The inequality, prejudice and unfair treatment mark the struggle for equalization. According to the Merrian-Webster online dictionary, inequality is the quality of being unequal or uneven: as lack of evenness, social disparity, disparity of distribution or opportunity, the condition of being variable and an instance of being unequal. Prejudice is an attitude of prejudging someone that is not based on reason or actual experience.This paper will give details as to why the two writings are being compared. Although the girls in the writings perceived their lives in one way, they were affected in different ways.

Background

The two authors share a remarkable background in literature writing. Nadine Gordimer was born in South Africa in 1923. She has written numerous of short stories and has many honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and University of Leuven Belgium just to name a few (Nobleprize.org, 2013). Patricia Smith was born in 1955 in Chicago Illinois. She is a writing teacher, former journalist, an American poet and a four-time individual National Poetry Slam champion. She was also inducted into the International Literacy Hall of Fame for Writing of African Descent (English.illinios.edu). Both of these writers have a very unique African background. This paper will give my thoughts and the contrast and comparisons on these two writings.

Country Lovers

The short story Country Lovers tell of a young black girl Thebedi, the daughter of a farm worker and Paulua, the son of a rich farm owner who both live in South Africa during the system of racial segregation led by the National Party Government. In the early 1900's an Afrikaner organization sought to strengthen racial separation, developing in two parallel, but separate cultural streams and to oppose British rule in South Africa (www.photius.com). This story lays out comparison of whites to blacks and how at this time there was no such thing of equality.

Very distinctly, blacks lacked education. Although most of the black children got some sort of schooling, they drop every year farther behind passed by the white children (Clugston, 2010). White children were educated and participating in inter-school sport matches. This was true for not only black children in South Africa, but also for children in the United States of America during slavery.

Although racial segregation and social economic status determined how you were treated this short story displayed lies, murder, inequality and a bi-racial relationship between Thebedi and