Claudine Uwera.

The essay:

“Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America” is a sentence known
because of what is about and the story behind it. My life is full of stories, some are bad while
others are good and memorable, some sources are story telling others are documents like
essays. Today I am going to share with you some stories about the essays I read from different
writers, some were professionals while others were just students like me.

First of all, essay is a good way for a writer to expose the ideas, whether they have facts or not,
whether are to be published or not. When I was in Primary school, level 5 (P5) I read a student
book containing about 14 essays written as stories, and the purpose was to teach students a
kind of critical thinking. In this book there was essay entitled “Friendship between Hyena and
Rabbit”. This essay was the most one in my memorable essays of all the time. May be it is
because I was a kid and I could believe in whatever it tells. The narrative was showing a mutual
help to one another, Hyena was powerful but with almost no knowledge while the Rabbit has
no strength but have enough knowledge to survive. The narrative give a challenge to the
readers of the essay, by confounding having knowledge and being clever; for instance while the
two friends were having a cow in common, with a schedule to look after the cow. But the
rabbit’s plan was to sell the meats of the cow. One day while rabbit was looking after the cow,
he killed it and sell all the meat except the head. He put the head in muddy marsh, and go
crying to bring hyena. When hyena came rabbit asked him to hold carefully the corns on head
carefully and pull out the cow. This was just a trap, the plan was to blame hyena of not being
careful to remove the cow from mud alive, not cutting of the head. And hyena believed that the
remaining part is still in the mud. That was the memorable essay of mine.

Secondly, in the book “Whiteness of a Different color” by the author Matthew Frye Jacobson on
the page 112, the narrator says: In 1944 a sixteen-year-old black student in Columbus, Ohio,
won an essay contest on the theme ‘What to do with Hitler after the War’ by submitting the
single sentence, “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.” When I
saw this back in 2015 I got surprised, and this was a questionable essay of mine.

In the first essay, narrative ended his story in different way I was expecting. He put the readers
in suspension and curiosity about the end, by asking a question: “Do you think this friendship
will last?” Yes or No, then support your answer! According to me, the writer of the essay was
professional and trough the narrative, he taught me that life is full of friends like rabbit.

For the second essay, my thoughts were based on three things: the type, the content and the
context. Stating with the type, the narrative called it “essay” while I was thinking it is not,
because to me it doesn’t look like essay; with the content, the narrative is not clear on how
essay can contain a single sentence, in other words, a single part while I was expecting three
parts, but because the narrator said, the writer was a student, I can understand that he was not
professional in writing essays. Finally, when I looked on the context, I think, people who said he
won were controlled by emotion as humans not professionalism as writers. But on the other
hand I think that writing essay needs also to be creative. That why I never judged a single-
sentence to be a full-essay or not, because if so, the student was creative too.

As a conclusion, there are different ways of writing essays, and through the narrative, the writer
shares the ideas to the readers and is able to coordinate them, with one purpose: to focus on
the message.