Rebecca Solnit: Global Issues Comparison

Extra Credit Assignment

Directions: After analyzing Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Silence and Powerlessness Go Hand in Hand,” examine TWO different global issues (at
least one must be from this essay, while the second may be from any of her works studied thus far) and compare them to one or more of the
following texts: Chronicle of a Death Foretold, A Doll’s House, or Persepolis. In order to receive full credit, your analysis of each authorial
choice must provide ample explanation of how it effectively supports the author’s main idea and how it directly influences the reader’s
understanding of the text.

Translated Text: English Text:

Field of Inquiry Global Issue Focus 1. Author’s Position on Issue 1. Author’s Position on Issue
(use concept frame) 2. Passage of Focus (up to 40 lines) 2. Passage of Focus (up to 40 lines)
3. Analysis of 3 Authorial Choices 3. Analysis of 3 Authorial Choices

Politics, Power, Justice The impact of power Persepolis
abuse on the 1. In this case, Satrapi is displaying that she
unenforced silence of is against power abuse. This is displayed
individuals. through the passages displayed below.
The police are beating innocent people
because they wanted to prove a point.
They wanted to show that those who do
not agree or surrender to them will be
beaten or killed. This is major around the
world and we still see this today. For
example, during the riots, some
policemen would use violence to get
them to stop rioting and to stop fighting
for the cause. Some are even beaten just
because of their race. Police Brutality is
seen in almost every place. There are
many that use their authority to get what
they want or even get away with breaking
the laws.
1. In the poignant essay, “Silence and
Powerlessness,” Rebeccas Solnit
denounces the silencing of individuals
with the use of power to create fear of
speaking out and in turn supports having
a voice.
5. Being unable to tell your story is a living
death, and sometimes a literal one. If no one
listens when you say your ex-husband is trying to
kill you, if no one believes you when you say you
are in pain, if no one hears you when you say
help, if you don’t dare say help, if you have been
trained not to bother people by saying help. If
you are considered to be out of line when you
speak up in a meeting, are not admitted into an
institution of power, are subject to irrelevant
criticism whose subtext is that women should not
be here or heard.
 6. Stories save your life. And stories are your
life. We are our stories; stories that can be both
prison and the crowbar to break open the door of
that prison. We make stories to save ourselves or
to trap ourselves or others – stories that lift us up
or smash us against the stone wall of our own
limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a
storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking
silences, making new stories. A free person tells
her own story. A valued person lives in a society
in which her story has a place.

7. Violence against women is often against our

voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our
voices, and of what a voice means: the right to
self-determination, to participation, to consent or
dissent; to live and participate, to interpret and
narrate.

8. A husband hits his wife to silence her. A date

rapist or acquaintance rapist refuses to let the
“no” of his victim mean what it should, that she
alone has jurisdiction over her body. Rape culture
asserts that women’s testimony is worthless,
untrustworthy. Anti-abortion activists also seek to
silence the self-determination of women. A
murderer silences forever.

9. These are assertions that the victim has no

rights, no value – is not an equal.

- Graphic Weight: In panel 1 graphic 10. Other silencing take place in smaller ways:
weight is utilized in order to emphasize the people harassed and badgered into silence
the police brutality that is occurring online, talked over and cut out in conversation,
during that time. The policemen are belittled, humiliated, dismissed.
 colored black which connotates evilness.
This symbolizes that the police are evil
and are seen as bad by Satrapi. She
believes that they are wrong. On the other
hand, the civilians are illustrated as white
which symbolizes innocence. This reveals
Satrapi’s Sympathetic tone. Also, it
shows how the evil is abusing the bad or
in other words how the policemen are
abusing the innocent civilians. This
thoroughly displays the abuse of power
and police brutality. Also, the author
narrates that they attacked them and the
graphic weight displays their angered
faces showing how they were attacking
them out of anger.
- Emanata: In panel 1 the emanata is used
to display the brutality of the police as
well. The emanata is toward the center of
the panel and is displayed alongside the
image of the civilian getting whacked
over the head with a baseball bat. The
emanata helps the reader to realize that
the policeman is hitting the civilian
extremely hard over the head. This can
allow them to make the assumption that
the civilian will be very injured and might
even have brain damage. The police are
abusing their power and beating innocent
civilians extremely hard. They are not
just disciplining them, they are actually
beating them and they have done nothing
wrong. Overall, the emanata displays
police brutality because it shows how
civilians are getting brutally beaten
11. Having a voice is crucial. It’s not all there is
to human rights, but it’s central to them, and so
you can consider the history of women’s rights
and lack of rights as a history of silence and
breaking silence. Speech, words, voices
sometimes change things in themselves when
they bring about inclusion, recognition: the
rehumanization that undoes dehumanization.
Sometimes they are only the preconditions to
changing rules, laws, regimes to bring about
justice and liberty.
12. Sometimes just being able to speak, to be
heard, to be believed, are crucial parts of
membership in a family, a community, a society.
Sometimes our voices break those things apart;
sometimes those things are prisons.
13. And then when words break through
unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society
sometimes becomes intolerable. Those not
impacted can fail to see or feel the impact of
segregation or police brutality or domestic
violence; stories bring home the trouble and
make it unavoidable.
14. By voice, I don’t mean only literal voice – the
sound produced by the vocal cords in the ears of
others – but the ability to speak up, to participate,
to experience oneself and be experienced as a
free person with rights. This includes the right
not to speak, whether it’s the right against being
tortured to confess, as political prisoners are, or
not to be expected to service strangers who
- Splash: The third panel is called a splash
panel also shows the global issue of
police brutality. We are given context
from the previous panel that the police
had locked the cinema from the outside.
Through the implementation of this
splash panel, the reader is able to get an
inside look at the cinema. Through this
inside point of view, the suffering of all
of the civilians is portrayed greatly.
Through the use of the ghost icon, the
reader can assume that many of the
people had died. Also, there are people
that are running to the exit, but the
readers know that the doors are locked
and that nobody will be able to escape.
Basically, because of the police, the
people are going to slowly get cooked
alive. The police were so brutal that they
let people burn and die. This also shows
the abuse of power because it the author
displays the police as having no remorse
and this is probably because they are
entitled.
approach you, as some men do to young women,
demanding attention and flattery and punishing
their absence.
“If no one listens when you say your ex-husband
is trying to kill you, if no one believes you when
you say you are in pain, if no one hears you when
you say help”
“if you don’t dare say help, if you have been
trained not to bother people by saying help.”
- Enumeration/triples/anaphora: Solnit
utilizes the enumeration triples and
anaphora in order to display how people
with power eventually silence all who
want to speak out against them. With the
enumeration, Solnit makes it so people
can relate through the hypothetical
situation. She emphasizes the fact that
even when claiming something that has to
do with a life or death situation, many
individuals will still not believe you
because you are not the one with the
power. She calls out those with power
through the fact that she reveals that
citizens in society have been trained not
to speak out if something happees to
them.
“A free person tells her own story. A valued
person lives in a society in which her story has a
place.”
- Antithesis: Solnit purpose in utilizing this
antithesis is to illuminate the fact that
individuals in society can be free, but that
does not mean that what they say will be
valid. Through this antithesis, Solnit
criticizes the use of power to silence
 society by revealing that those with
power make it seem as if you have the
ability to speak out, to have an opinion.
They make you feel as if your opinion
matters, when in fact you are speaking
and nobody is listening. By distinguishing
this difference Solnit emphasizes the fact
that people need to realizes that even
though they are speaking they are not
always valued. By bringing this to light
people are more aware and can better gain
credibility to make sure their opinions
and statements matter.
“the people harassed and badgered into silence
online, talked over and cut out in conversation,
belittled, humiliated, dismissed”
- Asyndeton/enumeration- Solnit utilizes
the asyndeton and enumeration in order to
list numerous ways that silencing can take
place in society. Helps to appeal to the
reader because many individuals have
probably experienced at least one of these
situations. It also displays how people
abuse their power in order to silence
others. Everybody’s words have power
and people can use this power to make
people fear speaking out or feel as if they
are not worthy enough to have a voice.
She emphasizes the fact that many people
may experience these feelings due to the
way that people use the power of their
voice to belittle people and make them
feel unworthy of having an opinion.
Culture, Identity, The impact of A Doll’s House
Community grotesque forms of 1. In the feminist play, “A Doll’s House,”
gendered violence on Henrik Ibsen criticizes the social
women. hierarchy and the belittlement of women,
displaying that men use their power over
women in order to control them.
2. 40 lines- page 63
Nora: “I was simply transferred from Papa's
hands into yours… I have existed merely to
perform tricks for you… It is your fault that I
have made nothing of my life” (Ibsen 63).
- Nora was raised to be the perfect little
wife. For her whole life she has basically
been a living doll that her father and
husband played with. They told her what
she could and could not do and when she
could do it. They would make all of her
decisions for her without taking into
account what she wanted. Her whole life
has been her doing what other people
thought she should do and not what she
has wanted to do, so she feels as if she
has wasted her life pleasing others and
has done nothing for herself.
Nora: “But our home has been nothing but a
playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at
home I was Papa's doll-child; and here the
children have been my dolls” (Ibsen 63).
- Nora notices the endless cycles of people
being treated like dolls and does not want
her kids to experience the same treatment
from her that she experienced from her
father and husband. This connects to the
idea in the play that parents pass down
1. In the enlightening essay, “Men Explain
Things To Me,” Rebecca Solnit criticizes
how arrogant men belittle women into
submission by using grotesque forms of
gendered violence through various
rhetorical devices.
Arrogance might have had something to do with
the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly
every woman faces every day, a war within
herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an
invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice
career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts
correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me.
After all, there was a moment there when I was
willing to let Mr. Important and his overweening
confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.
Don't forget that I've had a lot more confirmation
of my right to think and speak than most women,
and I've learned that a certain amount of
self-doubt is a good tool for correcting,
understanding, listening, and progressing --
though too much is paralyzing and total
self-confidence produces arrogant idiots, like the
ones who have governed us since 2001. There's a
happy medium between these poles to which the
genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial
belt of give and take where we should all meet.
More extreme versions of our situation exist in,
for example, those Middle Eastern countries
where women's testimony has no legal standing;
so that a woman can't testify that she was raped
without a male witness to counter the male
 their toxic traits to their children and
Nora is realizing this before it is too late
to make a change. It displays the fact that
since Nora was controlled, she feels
unable to properly raise her children.
Helmer, instead of showing sympathy,
tells her that it is her duty and blames her
for this fact. This related to the fact that
women’s testimonies are never seen as
credible. The men in their lives will
always gang up on them and this is a
display of gendered violence.
Helmer: “You blind, foolish woman” (Ibsen 63)
Helmer: “It’s shocking. This is how you would
neglect your most sacred duties” (Ibsen 63)
- Helmer belittles Nora and discredits her
opinion by telling her that her ‘most
sacred duties’ were to her children and
her husband. He acts as if what she wants
does not matter and treats her as if her
opinion does not matter. He utilizes
different forms of violence such as verbal
abuse and dehumanizing nicknames to
make her feel as if she has to stay with
him. Helmer constantly torments Nora
and at first, she does not realize this, but
when she finally does she breaks free but
not before being looked down upon by
helmer for one last time. He is unable to
support his wife and although his
violence may not be physical it is still
violence.
rapist. Which there rarely is.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was
very young and just beginning to get what
feminism was about and why it was necessary, I
had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear
physicist. One Christmas, he was telling -- as
though it were a light and amusing subject --
how a neighbor's wife in his suburban
bomb-making community had come running out
of her house naked in the middle of the night
screaming that her husband was trying to kill her.
How, I asked, did you know that he wasn't trying
to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they
were respectable middle-class-people.Therefore,
her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a
credible explanation for her fleeing the house
yelling that her husband was trying to kill her.
That she was crazy, on the other hand...
Even getting a restraining order -- a fairly new
legal tool -- requires acquiring the credibility to
convince the courts that some guy is a menace
and then getting the cops to enforce it.
Restraining orders often don't work anyway.
Violence is one way to silence people, to deny
their voice and their credibility, to assert your
right to control over their right to exist. About
three women a day are murdered by spouses or
ex-spouses in this country. It's one of the main
causes of death in pregnant women in the U.S.
At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give
rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence,
and workplace sexual harassment legal standing
as crimes has been the necessity of making
women credible and audible.

I tend to believe that women acquired the status

of human beings when these kinds of acts started
to be taken seriously, when the big things that
stop us and kill us were addressed legally from
the mid-1970s on; well after, that is, my birth.
And for anyone about to argue that workplace
sexual intimidation isn't a life or death issue,
remember that Marine Lance Corporal Maria
Lauterbach, age 20, was apparently killed by her
higher-ranking colleague last winter while she
was waiting to testify that he raped her. The
burned remains of her pregnant body were found
in the fire pit in his backyard in December.
- Asyndeton: Solnit utilizes the rhetorical
device of asyndeton in order to emphasize
the fact that women do not just have to
struggle with the belittling of men but
also with the belittling of themselves. She
uses the word syndrome to show how it
spreads and it is not something that they
are born with. The way they are treated
by society causes them to become this
way. She reveals that women also have to
fight the war within themselves because
many may succumb to this treatment
without even knowing it. Because of this
many women let uncertain men act as if
they are greater because they are too
uncertain with themselves. This treatment
causes even the most successful women
to question their abilities.
- Epistrophe: Solnit utilizes the rhetorical
device of epistrophes to help emphasize
 the grotesque forms of gendered violence
that women are subjected to. In this
specific passage Solnit reveals the
different characteristics self-doubt can
bring out in a person. Since men talk
down to women and belittle them this
creates a sense of self doubt in many of
them. Since women have this self doubt
different characteristics are brought out of
them which allows them to greater
understand and be able to treat people
better. Since many men to not have this
sense of self doubt they are unable to gain
these capabilities and therefore keep
treating women the same way they have
been treated… like they are less than
them.
- Pathos: Solnit utilizes the rhetorical
device of Pathos in order to tap into the
emotions of the audience. She wants them
to feel sympathy when they read the
passage. This use of Pathos accurately
illustrates the inhumane forms of
gendered violence that occur on women.
The fact that this woman had already
suffered through rape and just wanted to
get justice already stirs the emotion of
anger throughout the reader. However, by
implementing the idea that this woman
was killed and burned by her alleged
rapist, Solnit is able to stir even more
emotions within the reader and support
the fact that many grotesque forms of
violence happen to women.