Being human is all about having the freedom and conscious mind to do what oneself wants to do. It is about having the power to express oneself through feelings and actions. Humans get to decide how they should act based on a state of learning about what is right and what is wrong. Humans don't act on instincts, they have a conscious mind that allows them to think about what to do. Humans have the freedom of mind and action that makes them different form other species.
In Sold, Lakshmi's freedom was stripped from her. She was oppressed, imprisoned, and forced into prostitution. She was drugged when she wouldn't obey, beaten when she did something wrong, and locked inside so long that she basically lost feeling. With her situation, in being trapped for years, she lost the critical element in dreaming. Why dream when horrible things are happening to you consistently and there is no chance in your dream turning into a reality. She lost most of her humanity because she had no ability to take action in what she felt, and lost her ability to imagine and to think. Things that make a human a human were taken from her, and she had little left.
Cade I really like how you talk about how being human is all about freedom and then you compare it in the second paragraph by saying how lakshmi's freedom is lost. you kind of compare it in a negative way on behalf of sold, which I don't see happen that often with writers our age.
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ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post because it made me think about how freedom and humanity relate, again. When i say 'again' i mean that when i was considering what to write about, i kept thinking about compassion and understanding of others as being a very prominant principle of humananity. However, i think i was looking for the word freedom as a more general word to cover this main idea in my post but i couldnt quite put my finger on it and i think you really did. It is part of the human's "freedom of mined" that i think allows humans to care for one another and i think that in Sold, because Lakshmi's freedom has been ripped away from her, she begins to loose her ability to really feel like she can care for others; "If the crying of a young girl is the same to me as the bleating of the horns in the street below, what have I become?" (231).
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