14 May, 2006

Identity

A while ago, I wrote a blog entry about how my children will, in the future, have to work out what aspects of their life, history, and memories define their identities.

This weekend I was browsing through the wonderful web program called Imagining Ourselves a Global Generation of Women, and you can imagine how thrilled I was to read that this month’s sub-theme is Identity. I spent an hour reading the articles/stories and looking at some of the films/artwork of women. I found the following stories or articles particularly inspiring:

Mira Veda from India, whose encounter with Immaculee Ilibagiza, a holocaust survivor of the Rwandan genocide, made her realise that her sense of identity was strongly connected to events or persons she identified with (paraphrasing here).

Rebecca Walker from the United States poses some poignant questions (e.g., What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we’ve inherited or devised?) and attempts to find her answers to them.

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