“The Ultimate Safari”

The Ultimate Safari is the story of a family from Mozambique that sets off on a long journey by foot in
search of refuge from war. The narrator is a young girl who, like the other characters in the story,
remains nameless. The girl has an older brother and a baby brother. The story begins on the night that
their mother ventures out of the house in search of cooking oil. She never returns home.

The children's father disappeared some time ago. He is a solider fighting the war against "bandits" who
have destroyed the country. The narrator worries that her mother might have come across some of the
bandits. When the bandits cross the paths of civilians, they always kill the civilians. The young girl
explains that the first two times the bandits came to their village, they stole everything. The third time
they...

The Ultimate Safari is a selection from Nadine Gordimer's Jump and Other Stories. The protagonist is a
young girl who sets out on a long journey along with her siblings and grandparents to seek refuge from a
war happening in their home country of Mozambique. The narrator and the other characters in the story
remain nameless. The anonymous characters foreshadow that the group of travelers are just a few of
many who flee from the violence of the bandits who have destroyed their country. This is vindicated
(justified) later on in the story when the family arrives at a refugee camp and finds out they among
hundreds of refugees who seek shelter.

Throughout the story, Gordimer juxtaposes animals with humans. The family travels through Kruger
Park to get to the country on the other side of the enormous park. The narrator is curious about seeing
the...

Apartheid
Between 1948 and 1992, the Republic of South Africa had an institutionalized system of racial
segregation known as "apartheid" the Afrikaner word meaning "separateness." Effectively stripping all
South African blacks, coloreds, and Indians of their citizenship rights, apartheid was instrumental in
helping whites to maintain power in the predominantly black country. As countries across Africa
regained their independence from Europeans, the South African government, fearing the liberating
influence of its recently liberated black neighbors on its own black population, financially and militarily
supported the efforts of rebel groups to destabilize neighboring governments. This desperate measure
to protect the apartheid system and the white control of the South African economic and political
structures resulted in the long-term displacement and deaths of millions of southern Africans over the
years. Nearly all of Gordimer's work addresses, in some way, the effects apartheid has had on whites
and blacks alike.

Diction

Throughout the telling of her story, the narrator of "The Ultimate Safari" employs a simple, colloquial
diction with sentences that are sparse and stripped of all ornamentation. In fact, the diction that
Gordimer has given the narrator contributes to the surprise readers may experience upon learning that
the narrator is a black Mozambique refugee. While the story she tells is consistent with a refugee's
experience, her diction hints at her being a young white English-speaking girl. There are no idiomatic
expressions, slang phrases, or sentence constructions that hint at the narrator's being black or
Mozambican. One effect the girl's diction has is to break down the barrier between the non-African
white readers and the narrator: by portraying the girl as being more like her largely white American and
European readers, Gordimer has succeeded in creating a more sympathetic character than would have
otherwise been possible.

http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-ultimatesafari/chapanal001.html#gsc.tab=0
“Pit Strike”

In “Pit Strike,” which was filmed for British Broadcasting Corporation Television, Sillitoe offers yet
another working-class hero, a champion of fairness and integrity. Joshua, a fifty-year-old Nottingham
miner, journeys to the South of England with a number of his friends to support a strike by fellow
colliers. In a well-organized program of action, the men race from one coal-powered generating station
to another to form picket lines and halt deliveries of coal. In a number of cases they are confronted by
police whose job it is to see that deliveries are uninterrupted. Clashes between the workers, who feel
they are being treated unjustly, and the police, representing the power of society as a whole, are
inevitable in such circumstances. Although Joshua acts to restrain his more belligerent(aggressive)
companions in these confrontations, he makes his own mark in a dramatic and courageous manner.
When a fully loaded coal truck is seen crawling up an incline away from a picketed power station to
make its delivery at another, Joshua daringly and at great personal risk runs after it and forces open the
rear gate safety catches, allowing tons of coal to fall on the highway. Although he narrowly escapes
death, the gesture seems worth making, and soon after this the strike is settled in the miners’ favor.

Like Joshua, the characters in Sillitoe’s other stories are usually agitators(dissenters), passionately and
defiantly reaffirming the value of the individual spirit in a world which too often encourages unthinking
conformity to social norms. Sillitoe’s audience may not always concur(agree) with the views his
characters express, nor wish to accept the methods they use to further their aims, but their stories
nevertheless touch the reader and stay persistently with him, disturbing, provoking, and making him
more aware of the imperfect world and of himself.

https://www.enotes.com/topics/alan-sillitoe/critical-essays
In Cuba I was a German Shepherd
Ana Menendez's story "In Cuba I was a
German Shepherd" introduces Maximo, an Maximo's revelation occurs when a tour group
exile from Cuba, who plays games with his visits the domino park. As he listens to the
friends in the domino park of Little Havana: a tour guide's demeaning description of the
"fenced rectangle of space that people missed men and Cuban culture, he feels "like an
on the way to their office jobs". The four men animal... [wanting] to growl and cast about
exchange jokes and stories while playing the behind the metal fence". Unable to contain his
familiar game each day beneath a banyan anger, Maximo "made a lunge at the fence...
tree. While their games seem to be a simple he could no longer sit where he was, accept
pass time spent between friends, Maximo things as they were". Maximo finally stops
harbors deep feelings of resentment that he is denying that his life in America has sufficed,
no longer able to deny once the story reaches and is fed up with being treated like a
its end.  spectacle by Americans.
Maximo's final joke gives Menendez's story its
As the men play dominoes, Maximo amuses title - he tells of a dog from Cuba that arrives
them with jokes that poke fun at American in America and notices an "elegant white
superiority and his feelings towards his poodle striding toward him" . The dog,
displacement from Cuba. Early on in the story, Juanito, professes his love for the poodle, who
Maximo's true feelings towards his life in quickly rejects him, calling him a "short,
America are suppressed - he jests about the insignificant mutt".Juanito replies, "here in
situation, eliciting laughter from his friends America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt,
Carlos, Antonio, and Raul, a fellow Cuban. but in Cuba I was a German shepherd”. As
Eventually, however, Maximo's memories Maximo finishes his joke, he is overcome with
from his life in Cuba are brought to light, and emotion.
the story loses its light-hearted tone. The correlation between Juanito and Maximo
In Cuba, Maximo was "a professor at the is clear - in Cuba Maximo mattered, but since
University", but in Miami, where Maximo coming to America, he feels like insignificant. 
moved with his wife and children, "his Spanish
and his University of Havana credentials
meant nothing" . Unable to procure a job as
stately as the former, he and his wife opened
a restaurant, dreaming of their life in Cuba. At
the story's present, Maximo has sold the
restaurant and Rosa has passed, but even "five
years after selling the place, Maximo couldn't
walk by it... he'd stood and stared into the
restaurant and had become lost and dizzy"
By now, Maximo's jokes about the Americans
and Cubans has taken on a darker undertone.
Even Carlos and Antonio, who were
Dominican, could not "understand all the
layers of hurt in the Cubans' jokes".

https://ethnic-literature.weebly.com/in-cuba-i-was-a-german-shepherd.html
Martha, Martha

https://www.literaryroadhouse.com/martha-martha-zadie-smith-lrh-ep-96/

Martha, Martha by Zadie Smith, a story which left everyone but Maya initially underwhelmed. While all
the hosts agreed that the prose and the characterizations deserved praise, the plot left some guests
wanting. However, it turned out that the story served up excellent fodder for discussion. Themes of
racism, immigration, and culture underscore every interaction in the short story, drawing a poignant
picture of what it means to arrive in America and strive.

http://blseh14.umwblogs.org/2016/04/18/shannon-f-s-key-passage-analysis-on-zadie-smiths-martha-
martha/

Zadie Smith’s short story “Martha, Martha” explores the budding relationship between a relator born
and raised in the United States and her client, a Nigerian girl born in England who has moved to
America. While the entire text delves into themes of self and cultural identity, the passage chosen above
explores the idea that one cannot change their past, but can instead learn from it and move on.

It is clear in this section of the text that Pam is much more comfortable and accepting of the theme of
learning from one’s past than Martha is. is the one who says that “you have to make things work for
you, work for you personally, because life is really too short, and if they don’t work, you just have to go
ahead and cut them loose” (2867). Martha is much less accepting of the idea of learning from one’s
past, because just as Pam is saying this she cuts her off and changes the topic to her friend who is the
lawyer. She also discuses how this friend is her “role model” (2868) because she didn’t get “caught up in
a lot of the things [one] can get caught up on” (2868) such as kids and families and other things of that
sort. Martha’s tone through the entire short story is quite stand-offish and just becomes even more so
as Pam starts talking about her past. Pam does lie about how she feels about her past, which is
important to note. However, she also realizes that she can’t change the way anything happened, so she
needs to move on with her life. Pam accepts that the past is unchangeable, so she doesn’t wallow in
what could have been.

Martha is very pessimistic compared to Pam and the two get into small tiffs throughout this passage and
the rest of the story. One of the issues the two women have is that Martha is continually opening the
windows and letting in the outside air, which drives Pam crazy. This could be seen as Martha feeling
emotionally suffocated by her past. Pam says that the “girl kept letting the outside in everywhere they
went” (2868), and more specifically this happens after Pam talks about the past and changing futures,
like she did in this section of text. two women have very different outlooks when it comes to looking
back into one’s past with Pam recognizing that one needs to move on in order to continue with life,
while Martha is much more stuck on how things were and not how they can be.